The MAGA New Right

Patrick Deneen

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Patrick Deneen

Postliberal; Professor at Notre Dame; author of Why Liberalism Failed (2018) and Regime Change (2023)

Who He Is

Patrick Deneen is a professor of political theory at the University of Notre Dame and the most influential intellectual founder of the Postliberal movement. His 2018 book Why Liberalism Failed helped launch the New Right’s serious intellectual anti-liberal turn. JD Vance has identified closely with the “postliberal right” and is an admirer of Deneen.

Biographical Formation (per Ward 2023)

The fullest available account of Deneen’s intellectual formation is Ian Ward’s Politico profile I Don’t Want to Violently Overthrow the Government (June 2023), occasioned by Regime Change’s publication.

  • Catholic upbringing in Windsor, Connecticut. Small-town localist sensibility from the start.
  • Rutgers undergraduate (early 1980s). Met Wilson Carey McWilliams, left-leaning communitarian author of The Idea of Fraternity in America (1973). McWilliams’s argument that there exists a non-liberal “counter-tradition” of fraternity, friendship, and community in American thought is the conceptual scaffold for everything Deneen later does. McWilliams’s daughter (Susan McWilliams Barndt, who later studied under Deneen at Princeton) describes Deneen as “more on the left than on the right” through graduate school.
  • Christopher Lasch (read in graduate school): another anti-liberal, populist-religious-tradition critic. Together with McWilliams, the formative influence.
  • Ph.D. at Rutgers under McWilliams (1995). Dissertation on interpretations of Homer’s Odyssey.
  • Speechwriter for Bill Clinton’s USIA director Joseph Duffey (1995–1997).
  • Princeton assistant professor (1997–2004). A Rawlsian environment that Deneen experienced as casually elitist behind a “shroud” of egalitarianism. Tenure denied 2004; Deneen later told Ward: “I was shown the door.” His friend Joseph Romance: this “may have reinforced and intensified [his] already strong dislike of liberalism.” McWilliams’s sudden death (March 2005) compounded the rupture: “When Carey died, he lost something that centered him.”
  • Georgetown (2005–2012). Founded the Tocqueville Forum (2006), inaugurated by Antonin Scalia. Wrote increasingly about peak oil theory (2007); 2008 financial crisis vindicated the broader “natural limits” critique. Co-founded Front Porch Republic (2008), the localist-environmentalist-communitarian publication. Increasingly drawn to Catholic intellectual tradition. Left Georgetown in 2012 over its (in his view) “faltering commitment to its Catholic roots.”
  • Notre Dame (2012–present). Why Liberalism Failed (January 2018). Met Viktor Orbán in Budapest, autumn 2019. Co-founded the Postliberal Order Substack with Adrian Vermeule, Gladden Pappin, and Chad Pecknold, November 2021.

The trajectory is significant for the wiki because Deneen’s commitments at age 25 — communitarian, suspicious of corporate/managerial elites, defensive of localism, instinctively left-of-center — are not the natural seedbed for a state-empowering postliberalism. The Princeton tenure denial, McWilliams’s death, the Georgetown Catholic turn, and the post-2008 vindication of his “natural limits” frame all worked together to push him toward an increasingly state-empowering anti-liberalism.

Core Argument (Why Liberalism Failed)

Deneen’s argument is neo-Tocquevillian: liberalism has been undone by its own success.

Two key claims:

  1. Liberal triumph: Liberalism has largely defeated its competitors (communism, fascism) and established an imperium across the Western world
  2. Liberal decay: Yet throughout this empire, liberalism is visibly decaying — populations are resentfully disenchanted, civil society has been hollowed out, culture has become conformist and stifling

The reconciliation: liberalism’s successes produced its failures. The relentless quest for individual liberation atomized the intermediate institutions (church, family, neighborhood) that gave people meaning and community. Liberalism undermined the very substrate it needed to sustain itself.

Liberalism as a “fighting faith”: Deneen (and more explicitly Adrian Vermeule in his response) argues that liberalism is best understood not as neutral proceduralism but as a world religion — with a soteriology, a clergy, sacraments (confession of privilege), and an eschatology. It enforces a comprehensive substantive theory of the good while claiming to be neutral.

Prescription (first version): Deneen called for localist communities — intentional communities that would practice a different way of life within the spaces liberalism allows. Rod Dreher’s “Benedict Option” is the most famous expression of this strategy.

Vermeule’s Critique and Deneen’s Radicalization

Adrian Vermeule, in Integration from Within (2018), attacked Deneen’s localism as strategically naive. Liberal agents will not ultimately allow nonliberal communities to survive; localism is perpetually exposed to liberal encroachment. What’s needed is not retreat but seizure of the state.

By 2023 Deneen had radicalized significantly beyond Why Liberalism Failed. At an AEI event in April 2023 (“Religion’s Refusal to Die”), he debated Meir Soloveichik (Orthodox rabbi, Yeshiva University; former student of Robert P. George’s) on how conservative religious people should engage with liberal culture. Soloveichik argued for building “parallel” cultures. Deneen objected sharply: “you either have a culture or you don’t.” He said he could accept the idea of a “rival” culture — “because a rival wants to win.” He became more adamant: “I think we really have to adopt the mentality and the view that we have to win. We don’t just want to coexist. We have to win.”

Regime Change (2023) reflected this new militancy. JD Vance (then newly elected as US senator from Ohio) spoke at the book launch. Deneen joined Vermeule more explicitly in the constructive project of “integration from within.” He argued for “common-good conservatism” (his preferred name for his framework, distinct from NatCon and from Vermeule’s Common Good Constitutionalism; rejects nationalism, embraces local + Catholic-universal), which involves a revival of Aristotelian “mixed constitutionalism,” and something he called “Aristopopulism” — an alliance between postliberal elites and conservative populists (non-elites) such that the elites lead in the populists’ substantive interest. He repeatedly justified “Machiavellian means to achieve Aristotelian ends,” approvingly citing a Machiavelli passage about mobs in the senate and streets with “shops boarded up.” The final chapter was titled “Toward Integration.” Regime Change called for an overtly Christian state — with holy holidays and tax-funded religious public works.

Deneen’s binary recasting of the political conflict in Regime Change: not progressive left vs. conservative right but “Party of Order” (non-elites who want unions, anti-corporate checks, abortion limits, religion in the public sphere, an end to “wokeness”) vs. “Party of Progress” (liberal and conservative elites aligned around social and economic “progress”). The terminology is an unmarked borrowing from 19th-century French Saint-Simonian and Comtean vocabulary — the original Saint-Simonian “Party of Order” was the proto-authoritarian counter-party to revolutionary republicanism. Deneen does not flag the lineage.

Regime Change’s Transitional Policy List

Deneen’s Regime Change lists policies that would “dilute the power of the current ruling class” before regime change comes to pass: expand the U.S. House of Representatives; “break up” Washington by redistributing federal agencies around the country; strengthen labor unions; expand industrial policy; create a “Family Czar” to promote family formation; tax elite-college endowments; restrict or outright abolish pornography. Laura K. Field: “I have not seen a single policy put forward by [the postliberals] that wouldn’t be better pursued within the existing liberal democratic framework, so the idea of an overhaul of the actual regime seems really unnecessarily provocative and reckless."

"I Don’t Want to Violently Overthrow the Government. I Want Something Far More Revolutionary.”

The line — delivered to Deneen’s Catholic University audience in May 2023 — is the cleanest single statement of the postliberal pitch: more radical than January 6, not less; structural capture of state and cultural institutions rather than violent insurrection. When Ian Ward asked Deneen directly whether January 6 would qualify as acceptable Machiavellian tactics, Deneen replied: “For me, it wouldn’t be.” The personal disavowal does not extend to a categorical one. Field’s frame: “illiberal constitutionalism” — “a halfway house between liberal democracy and traditional authoritarianism that maintains the trappings of a liberal regime while dramatically expanding the power of the state.”

Field: Regime Change was “slightly fantastical in its Manichean embrace of hard populist dualities.” Becca Rothfeld’s review: “This facile taxonomy is not class analysis; it is astrology for the bow-tie set.” Crucially, Regime Change had nothing to say about the violence of January 6, 2021.

The Budapest Connection

In August 2022, Deneen and Gladden Pappin published a “Dispatch from Budapest” — “Notes on a Conversation with Hungary’s Viktor Orbán.” They wrote of Orbán’s “remarkable candor,” his “remarkable analytic and even philosophical depth,” claimed to have witnessed “a genuine tour de force of political analysis and vision, a quality almost wholly absent in today’s American political class,” and stated: “Without question, Hungary is a singular example of such success in recent years.” They praised Orbán’s turn away from “the liberal conception of freedom” and his return to a Christian framework.

Nowhere did they question the illiberal measures through which Orbán had gained and consolidated power.

Significance

Why Liberalism Failed was a serious academic book that crossed over into New Right circles because it provided the most intellectually substantial critique of liberalism available. It gave thinkers like Vermeule and politicians like Vance a diagnosis (liberalism as inherently self-destructive) that justified more radical prescriptions.

Field’s assessment: Deneen “proves beyond a reasonable doubt that liberalism claims to eschew comprehensive substantive theories of the good, yet inevitably embeds and enforces just such a comprehensive substantive theory.” His diagnosis is correct. His prescriptions have evolved toward the authoritarian.

Key Works

  • Why Liberalism Failed (2018) — the founding postliberal diagnostic text; liberals want to hear it but resist its conclusions
  • Regime Change (2023) — explicitly calls for political transformation, Aristopopulism, and integration from within; Vance at launch
  • “A Good That Is Common” (2022) — inaugural post for Postliberal Order Substack; emphasized working-class commonness over philosophical abstraction

Cross-References

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