Illiberalism is not the cure for neoliberalism.

Democrats should be reading Danielle Allen, not Deneen

Last week was all disagreement with Matt Yglesias’s defense of anti-anti-neoliberalism. This post takes up a different argument about neoliberalism altogether.

On Monday, James Pogue had a piece in the New York Times, laying out Senator Chris Murphy’s case against neoliberalism. There is a lot that is interesting in the piece - but it may persuade an unwary reader that only conservatives, including a couple of notably illiberal conservatives, really get what is wrong with neoliberalism. I believe, to the contrary, that the best arguments against neoliberalism come from within liberalism itself. Specifically, politicians like Murphy ought look to liberal philosophers of democracy such as Danielle Allen,* rather than anti-liberal ones such as Patrick Deneen. Instead of borrowing conservative formulations of the “common good”, they should be thinking about strengthening democracy.

At first it might seem surprising that Pogue’s article has so little to say about the Biden administration’s partial embrace of post-neoliberal ideas: there is a brief mention of the Hewlett program that Matt is so exercised about, and an odd sentence here and there talking about industrial policy and such. Dan Drezner (who is not a fan of the anti-neoliberal shift) and myself were chatting on Bluesky about the absence of any mention e.g. of Jennifer Harris.

But in fairness, the article is really less about policy measures than a theory of America’s deep problems. Pogue and Murphy suggest that America is plagued by a fundamental malaise, a “spiritual crisis” that is manifested in people’s feeling of emptiness and loss of control. We cannot live by bread alone - and if the Democrats do not look to rectify the vacuum of agency, they risk failure.

When Pogue started chatting with Murphy about this set of problems, he recommended Murphy read Graeber** and Wengrow, and Patrick Deneen’s Why Liberalism Failed. This spurred a broader set of conversations, in which Graeber and Wengrow seem to have disappeared in favor of a straightforwardly conservative group of thinkers and politicians. Murphy writes elsewhere that it is urgent for Democrats to learn from Republicans, and recover some sense of the “common good,” a notion that is central for Deneen, and that appears regularly in the speeches of the conservative politicians, like Marco Rubio and J.D. Vance, whom Deneen has influenced.

The resulting Pogue-Murphy thesis seems to be something like this. Neoliberalism rips out people’s sense that they have control of their lives, and this problem is better understood by right wing or right leaning intellectuals than left leaning ones. Without backing down on reproductive rights, immigration and similar rights, Democrats ought recognize that there is a “potentially massive, hidden alignment between Americans on both the right and left—an alignment that could potentially address the … spiritual problems.” If Democrats don’t wake up quickly, they risk being defeated by a ““postdemocracy” Republican Party that might rig the electoral system “in order to make sure Democrats never win again.””

I don’t buy this. To be absolutely clear: I’ve no objection whatsoever to conversation between the left and right around the problems of U.S. society and economy. I hardly could object, since I engage in them myself. By coincidence, Julius Krein, who gets a lot of mention in the piece, has just published my article on the Silicon Valley right and democracy in American Affairs. It’s explicitly framed around conversation with classical liberals.

But I think that the aspiration to left-right convergence on some notion of the “common good” is a misleading fantasy. Working with leaders of the postdemocracy Republican Party such as J.D. Vance, so as to beat back their antidemocratic program, poses some … interesting political challenges. The anti-liberal thought of Patrick Deneen provides dubious guidance for a political party that aspires to pluralism.

Where I think Pogue and Murphy go wrong is in their apparent belief that you need to engage with anti-liberals to find serious thinking about how neoliberalism strips meaning from people’s lives and how Democrats ought respond. For sure, people like Deneen and Vance like to assert that liberalism (the notion that people should have liberty to pursue their own values) and neoliberalism (see last week) are much the same thing. But they shouldn’t be taken seriously.

There are much better and more helpful thinkers closer to home. In her recent book, Justice By Means of Democracy, Danielle Allen provides a program for resuscitating liberalism by broadening and deepening it to correct for the blind spots of neoliberalism (or “fused welfarism” as she calls it). She argues that the political economy ought be steered by collective democratic agency, providing people with a sense of collective control that they don’t have any more.

There is lots to argue with in Danielle’s alternative vision (if there weren’t, it would hardly be interesting), and much of the detail is only lightly sketched in. But what she offers is an important alternative way of thinking about the problems that America faces, and how we might solve them.

Neoliberalism looks at the world through the lens of market prices and efficiency, suggesting that material wellbeing is sufficient to provide for happiness. Common good conservatism looks at the world through the lens of natural law and shared moral commitments, and suggests that a godly life and happiness go hand-in-hand. Danielle’s liberalism looks at the world through pluralism and power relations, arguing that we find connection and fulfillment through participation in the democratic means that allow us to steer our collective fate. If you are a Democrat who urgently wants to return a sense of agency to people’s lives, the third option is the one you really ought to be starting with.

Danielle’s book argues we need to reinvent political economy along democratic lines. It is highly unusual for a book on liberal theories of justice to start with words such as “The Great Recession of 2008,” and to go on to complain about the economic style of thinking. But then, she maintains that economics and political theory are more closely connected than most believe: practical economists, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are in fact the slaves of some deceased political philosopher.

The need for a reinvented political economy has become only more pressing. Yet reinventing political economy actually requires stepping outside the domain of economics. Economists have, I think, been answering the questions set for them by political philosophers. If we wish for different answers, we have to devise different questions.

Specifically, they are answering the questions that have been set for them by John Rawls, whose Theory of Justice is the “book that really delivered the blind spot to late twentieth-century policy-making.” Rawls’ arguments, and associated ways of thinking drastically shrink down the realm of the political and our imaginative understanding of what democracy can and can’t do.

That is one of the chief reasons why we failed to see the democratic crises of the last decade in time.

The abstracting, universalizing features of the fused utilitarian/quasi-Rawlsian welfarism that dominated policy-making of the late twentieth century produced theories with a distinctive field of vision occluding society, politics, and political rights. They left us vulnerable to being surprised not only by 2008 but also by Brexit, Trump, Bolsonaro, Orban, the resurgence of a far right in Germany, and the aggressiveness of Russia.

This blind spot begins with the

effort to maximize aggregate utility … linked to preferences typically cast in terms of material goods … abstracted away from the contextual, social, psychological, and cultural particularities of individual economic actors. … The pursuit of utilitarian welfare maximization has typically focused on maximizing aggregate growth—in terms of income and wealth—and on using redistributive policies to spread the benefit of that growth.

Although Rawls sought to overturn utilitarianism, promoting rights instead of the general good, his work has become fused with it, because he cut off “consideration of basic rights from his treatment of social and economic spheres,” providing “support for the utilitarian focus on growth, so long as it was tethered to redistribution.”

By measuring everything in terms of material gain, this understanding of the world turns politics into a restricted exercise in applied technocracy,

flattening the particularities of preference that may in fact give meaning and shape to the life of any particular agent. The move to treat material gain, or money, as a proxy for utility permits universalization. … one of the things both of these intellectual paradigms do is turn our attention away from the underlying demographic and institutional arrangements of a society.

so that

Prices dominate our mental landscape at the expense of the protocols of organization and the tokens of authority and obligation (social capital) that structure human cooperation in contexts of political and social governance.”

Put more bluntly (perhaps too crudely), if you see the world in terms only of material gain, and indices thereof, much of the warp and woof of actual human social relations will necessarily escape you. Your vision of politics will filter out much of what people think is important about the societies that they live in.

That explains why Danielle’s ideas are relevant to the arguments over anti-anti-neoliberalism discussed last week. But her book is not a mere critique. The larger part of the text offers a positive case for democracy as a means of collective steering. In Danielle’s reading, Rawls tacitly downplays the importance of positive liberties - in this context, people’s ability to govern their collective fates through democratic means, in favor of negative liberties - their freedom to be left alone and to pursue their individual benefit. That discounts how humans “thrive on autonomy, the opportunity for self-creation and self-governance” in ways that make “democracy necessary to the achievement of human flourishing and justice.”

Democracy, then, gives people a sense of purpose. It enables citizens to participate in the collective steering of society, providing them with the means to shape their common destiny to some reasonable degree. It does not assume that citizens all share the same values and accepts that sometimes one party, group or faction will win out, and sometimes it will lose. The point is that under conditions of reasonable equality, each citizen can be a “co-author … a cocreator of a community’s agenda” with a grounded sense of their own agency.

This all contrasts sharply. with the conservative post-liberal diagnosis. People like Deneen argue that the fundamental problem of modern American society is that it doesn’t have some shared sense of the common good to guide it. These conservatives suggest that liberal pluralism needs to be replaced by some stronger collective agreement on what the good life is.

But there is an endemic risk associated with such arguments. “We must follow the common good” regularly becomes “we know what is good for the commoners.” Some influential conservative “integralists” flirt with theocracy. Others, like Deneen, just suggest that people need to be told what is good for them, and for the polity to enable it. In his words:***

It is not enough to ensure [ordinary people’s] freedom to pursue such goods; rather, it is the duty of the political order to positively guide them, and provide the conditions for the enjoyment of, the goods of human life. 

Danielle, in contrast, wants to reconstitute liberalism around a radical pluralism, providing a vision of collective agency and empowerment that does not entail any imposed notion of the common good. Instead, she and her co-author Rohini Somanathan propose what they call “difference without domination.” This would require not just equal access to decision making (something that the U.S. is obviously bad at), but fostering “dynamics in the social and economic realms that support rather than undermine political equality,” ensuring that no faction can dominate over others. That, in turn, entails a far far more extensive role for democracy than under the current Rawlsian vision, which is “too dependent on an expectation of social homogeneity that drives key features of political life into the background.” In a better society, we would

scrutinize our institutions to diagnose patterns of difference, work to ascertain whether they arise from or support domination, and, if they do, redesign the rules of governance through political institutions, the rules providing undergirding charters for the economy, the rules organizing the microinteractions of the economy, or the organizational protocols of civil society to remove or at least lessen the operating forces of domination.

Very obviously, that could be quite far reaching! Some social groups have far less social capital than others, lacking the “bridging ties” that they need to achieve their collective and individual goals and prosper. Under Danielle’s arguments, we ought evaluate how best to help decrease this inequality. People should

have the opportunity to choose their associates in order to realize their personal visions of the good life, but also find themselves routinely interacting with those whom they have not, so to speak, chosen, and routinely obliged to share power in a variety of contexts with those unchosen others.

We ought ask whether policies that involve land and space support or undermine basic liberties. More generally, rather than taking the distribution of material goods as our criterion of justice, we need to focus on political equality and egalitarian empowerment. And we need to implement this vision dynamically - Danielle’s vision of democracy is a Deweyan one of continual experimentation and adjustment, as we figure out what is making democracy less equal, try to come up with fixes, evaluate how well they work and whether they have unintended consequences, and revise accordingly in a perpetual flow.

This is a very different version of liberalism from Rawls, though it is very possibly compatible with certain flavors of classical liberalism: e.g. Popper.**** It is worth reading the book in conjunction with Gerald Gaus’s posthumously published The Open Society and Its Complexities - they disagree sharply on the extent to which democracy can be the master matrix of society, but they share much common ground in their understanding of what an attractive society would look like.

People might reasonably argue with much of Danielle’s vision. I suspect that Rawls was important, but not quite as central as all that outside political philosophy and theory. More importantly, actually existing democracy can be a massive timesuck (see e.g. Kevin Elliott’s recent book, Democracy for Busy People), rather than a source of collective agency and fulfillment. There is an enormous amount of work that would have to be done to increase the flexibility of democratic and policy making institutions and how they work for this vision to become practically feasible at scale. And without a strong notion of the common good, or a means to defuse contentious issues, democracy may regularly get stuck in stalemate. One of the reasons that neoliberalism was so attractive to policy makers is that it sometimes transformed horridly insoluble political problems into soluble technocratic ones.***** Expanding the ambit of democracy would bring back many such problems into the political sphere.

Finally, there is, as with any such blend of philosophy and empirics, a leap of faith. Danielle’s approach, the common good perspective, and, for that matter, neoliberalism, are all political bets on what constitutes the major problems of our times, and how best we ought address them. It is hard to test them a priori, and depending on your values and priors, the one bet will seem more attractive than the others.

But - and here we get back to the Pogue piece - the broad visions of the Republican and Democratic parties are uncertain political bets too, resting on radically different understandings of how politics ought work. The former - in its current formulation - is an anti-liberal bet that we ought to return to a more culturally homogenous past, where it is clear whose values ought dominate. At its further edges, this veers into una duce una voce. That is why many Republican politicians have taken up Deneen - he provides a justification for imposing a notion of the common good based on the values of a presumed conservative majority.

The Democratic bet - in its current formulation - is a small-l liberal bet on a political system in which a wide variety of diverse groups and voices argue it out through democratic means. That means that Danielle’s flavor of liberalism, and its close relations, are far better suited to the Democratic coalition, in which people have a wide variety of values and understandings of the good life, and this is seen as a good thing, and not an irredeemable flaw of modernity. Her kind of liberalism suggests that a stronger democracy would not just foster pluralism, but provides people with the sense of meaning and control that they lack, providing a different answer to the questions that Pogue and Murphy ask, about how to return people’s sense that they are in control of their lives.

Hence, it provides a more apt alternative for Democrats than conservative common good thinking. It is at best unclear that Democrats could copy conservatives’ arguments about the common good, while discarding their more antidemocratic and illiberal elements. If there are versions of the common good that might be attractive to Democrats, they are not likely to be discovered amidst the anti-democratic malignities of J.D. Vance Thought, or, for that matter, the anti-liberal claims of Deneen and his peers. Both are tied to long term programs for the long term domination of one faction over the rest of society, and cannot readily be disentangled. And there might not be such a version! Democrats are, after all, a highly heterogenous coalition.

Other critiques of neoliberalism than common good conservatism are much more readily compatible with democratic - and Democratic - pluralism. Danielle’s book provides a broad agenda for remaking liberalism and reshaping the political economy to provide people with democratic control and a sense of agency. It’s a book for political theorists, but the contours of a more popular argument are visible within it.

Neoliberalism inclines policy makers to see the public and its problems in terms of overall consumer welfare. Common good conservatism inclines them instead to focus on creating and enforcing a shared set of values. Danielle’s pluralistic liberalism suggests that they ought to ask something like the following question when they decide on measures: What policies will help build the conditions for shared democratic control, and ensure that people have the practical as well as the theoretical ability to participate equally in this control? I certainly don’t think that this approach contains all wisdom (no approach does), but I do think we could do with a lot more of it.

* Danielle is a friend and a co-author on a working paper that is only slightly related, to this post. I haven’t talked to her about what I say here, and may very possibly have botched some of her arguments: caveat lector.

** Don’t get me started on David Graeber.

*** It sometimes seems to me that Irish Americans like Deneen, and more obviously Michael Brendan Dougherty base their ideal society on some fantasy of 1950s Ireland where everyone accepted Catholic values and deferred to the priests, as was only proper. Having grown up amidst the decaying remnants of that mode of social organization, I have a more jaundiced view myself.

**** Popper’s fans do not talk much about the bits of The Open Society and Its Enemies that enthuse about collective experimentation, but they are most definitely in there.

***** See Elizabeth Popp Berman’s book Thinking Like an Economist for a left-leaning analysis of this feature of neoliberalism, or Harold James’ Making the European Monetary Union for a right leaning one.