Forged in centuries of custom and compromise, liberalism now stands on trial, accused of engineering its own destruction—a charge that echoes ever louder amid the thunder of political turmoil and the gloom of cultural doubt. Few deliver this verdict with more solemn conviction than Patrick Deneen, who claims the mantle of conservatism as his basis for doing it. Though he acknowledges liberalism’s historic gains—religious liberty, constitutionalism, prosperity—he ultimately insists that liberalism has not merely faltered, but triumphed so catastrophically that it has obliterated the very foundations it once sought to secure. Liberalism, Deneen contends in parallel to Karl Marx, contains intrinsic contradictions such that by succeeding, it upends itself and “has failed.”
Let there be no confusion about the mission of these words. This essay is a challenge hurled against Patrick Deneen’s indictment of liberalism—a declaration that he has gravely misunderstood the very soul of what liberalism is, wrongly condemned it as a failure, and stands revealed not as a conservative, but as a revolutionary whose creed is the antithesis of the tradition he claims to defend.
Deneen writes, “I consider myself a conservative. I believe in preserving goods that have been inherited.” Yet his vision, as I will argue, contradicts that very conservatism at its deepest roots.
For this is not an abstract dispute. The fate of liberalism determines whether millions will live in freedom or under the boot of tyranny. What is at stake is nothing less than the liberty, dignity, and safety of ordinary human beings.
I contend that liberalism is not dead. It lives on in the habits and moral instincts of ordinary people, even when elites betray it. Deneen conceives of liberalism as an abstract, universal ideology—a blueprint of rules and rights meant to yield freedom wherever imposed. And indeed, some liberal theorists have spoken in precisely such terms. But that is not the liberalism I defend.
What I defend is not liberalism as a purely rational scheme of rights and rules, but as a covenant—a moral inheritance passed down through habit, memory, and mutual obligation. It is this covenantal liberalism that Deneen misunderstands.
And it matters profoundly that we understand the difference.
Patrick Deneen presents his indictment of liberalism in two books: Why Liberalism Failed (2018) and Regime Change: Toward a Postliberal Future (2023). In these works, he argues that liberalism is a tower built upon fundamental internal contradictions, and that revolutionary “regime change” toward a post-liberal order is not merely necessary but inevitable—not because liberalism has failed, but because it has finally arrived at the destination toward which it was always destined. As he puts it: “I don’t want to violently overthrow the government. I want something far more revolutionary.”
Yet here we see Deneen’s first—and perhaps deepest—failure to grasp the true nature of liberalism. What he perceives as an internally contradictory doctrine doomed to destroy itself is, in truth, a living tradition: the unfolding of a vibrant and successful culture across centuries. The thinkers whom Deneen would impugn as architects of liberalism were not inventing it wholesale, but giving language to a tradition they rightly cherished.
That they did not capture every detail with perfect precision is largely beside the point. Liberalism is not a schematic doctrine to be imposed from above; it is a moral inheritance, shaped by lived experience and sustained by custom and character. It is easy for a doctrinaire mind to mistake this living tradition for mere ideological abstraction—but a mistake it remains in full.
Liberalism did not descend upon the world as a doctrine devised in pamphlets. It rose gradually and organically from the common life of the English-speaking peoples—from parish councils and local juries, from tradesmen who refused tyranny, from families who insisted that conscience stands higher than kings. By liberalism, I mean not a rigid ideological design, but a way of living: a delicate balance of mutual restraint and shared expectations, blending freedom with responsibility, individual rights with mutual respect, and law with moral obligation. It is the covenant of trust that binds individuals to one another and each to the shared rules that preserve freedom. What Deneen calls “our inherited civilized order” is not the victim of liberalism—it is liberalism’s cradle and wellspring.
This misunderstanding sits at the heart of Deneen’s indictment. He sees liberalism as a brittle abstraction, imposed upon societies from above, rather than as the organic fruit of cultural inheritance. He portrays liberalism not as a tradition growing from a people’s life, but as a scheme inevitably doomed to implode under the weight of the internal contradictions found in early attempts to articulate it that are fundamentally mistaken for organized doctrine.
What Deneen presents therefore more resembles Karl Marx than Edmund Burke or John Selden, nevermind Jefferson or Madison. And this is not merely a theoretical resemblance; it is the intellectual DNA of revolution resurfacing beneath a conservative cloak.
Far from being a truly conservative critique, Deneen’s analysis closely mirrors, in structure if not in lineage, the arguments of the revolutionary Left. It echoes Marx’s conviction that every social order is merely an ideological façade concealing domination and resonates with the critical theory of Horkheimer and Adorno, who likewise insisted that liberal principles contain the seeds of their own destruction. Deneen sees in liberalism little more than the infamous “dialectic of Enlightenment.”
There’s an even deeper irony in the counsel of post-liberals like Patrick Deneen. For all his invocations of tradition and conservative pieties, he stands not merely adjacent to the radical Left—but firmly within its philosophical ranks. This is the first point where Deneen’s critique betrays its own revolutionary impulse. A truly conservative mind would not place such faith in reason to dissect an entire political order and declare it bankrupt. Conservatism begins with humility toward the limits of human understanding—and with gratitude and reverence for the imperfect inheritance that time has delivered to us. It recognises that the moral and social order is not a schematic to be redrawn, but a living inheritance too intricate for reason alone to command.
Though Deneen sometimes speaks of patient rebuilding through local community and cultural renewal, his diagnosis ultimately leads him to advocate for deep systemic change—a vision that, however gradual its method, imagines society can be fundamentally refounded once the old order is swept aside. In this, he commits the very error he condemns: believing that reason can design anew what time and custom once built. That is not conservatism. It is radicalism in conservative dress.
This revolutionary impulse is not new. It precisely mirrors earlier moments when intellectuals attempted to strip institutions of their living context and rebuild society from abstract principles. Thomas Paine loved much about England’s liberties but believed that reason could isolate their true essence, purify them, and erect an entirely new social order. Edmund Burke saw that impulse for what it was: a leap from reverence into revolution. To strip institutions of their inherited context and reduce them to abstract axioms is to sever them from the living soil that gave them meaning—and that is how admiration for tradition turns, inexorably, into zeal to replace it.
And history shows what follows: not merely shattered ideas, but shattered lives.
For Burke, true conservatism meant prescription: profound caution about razing longstanding institutions, even when they harboured deep flaws. He taught that an institution might be corrupted yet still remain the vessel of wisdom accumulated across generations—and that to destroy it entirely was to gamble with forces reason cannot foresee. To put the point in contemporary context, he would look upon Harvard today and see much to lament, yet still seek to save it, precisely because it embodies memory and continuity no revolutionary blueprint can replicate. To call for total demolition because reason imagines something purer is the same arrogance that drove the Jacobins to bloodshed. But Deneen goes further. He does not merely wish to reform or replace corrupted institutions—he pronounces the entire liberal order a failure. That is not caution. That is a radical call to tear up the very roots of the political and moral inheritance that has shaped the modern West. There is nothing conservative about declaring the whole edifice beyond repair.
Deneen’s radicalism brings his betrayal of Burke, and of conservatism, sharply into focus. If Burke could revere Britain in the eighteenth century—a nation then beset by poverty, faction, and foreign threats—precisely because its liberties and institutions had evolved prudently out of the public consciousness, how much more would he revere America today, a nation vastly wealthier, freer, and more powerful relative to its rivals than Britain ever was in his time? For both Britain and America, liberalism was a political project: an ongoing effort to secure freedom under law, to reconcile liberty with order, and to build institutions that reflect the character and habits of the people. It worked imperfectly for Britain then, amid all its hardships, and it works still—indeed, more perfectly—for America now, flawed though it remains. Burke did not love Britain for standing still, but for having changed in ways rooted in custom and the genius of its people. He called for reform, never revolution. Thus, if what Burke said was true for Britain then, it is truer still for America today. And in this light, Deneen’s call to replace liberalism wholesale stands as a betrayal of the very conservative tradition he claims to inherit.
Deneen has crossed the point of no return: from cautious reform to sweeping revolution, from conservative stewardship to reckless obliteration.
Let us not be fooled by the conservative trappings, then. Deneen is no heir to Burke, but a man echoing the logic of the Brazilian Integralists—a radical 1930s movement spun off from a Catholic doctrine that rejected liberal individualism and sought to remake society into an organic national community—as well as the Jacobin Left, though he has apparently discovered these ideas from first principles, despite his conservative loyalties. His is therefore a principled conservatism that got hijacked by despair.
His arguments are not the measured cautions of a conservative mind; they resound with the same cries that fueled the French Revolution, the Bolsheviks, the Integralist Uprising, and the critical theorists of the Frankfurt School, which he has studied. He condemns liberalism not merely for its failures, but for what he sees as its very anthropological core: the vision of the human being as an unencumbered chooser, severed from tradition and community—a creed, he believes, so fatally flawed that it must ultimately be torn down to make way for something new.
By calling Deneen “revolutionary,” I do not mean he advocates mobs in the streets or immediate violent overthrow. He is, in fact, against such things. Rather, I mean it how he, himself, does. Namely, I mean that his intellectual project proposes a foundational break from the liberal anthropology and institutions that have sustained Western societies for centuries—a break that, whether gradual or sudden, is revolutionary in its nature and consequences. His vision of “regime change” is indeed “far more revolutionary” than violent overthrow, for it seeks a fundamental reconception of the entire Anglo-American tradition into something wholly new.
The Archimedian point of his error, though, is that he misunderstands what liberalism truly is and what threatens it. And it is precisely this misunderstanding—and how widely it is shared—that gives Deneen’s argument its dangerous power.
The philosophical systems Deneen critiques—many rightly deserving scrutiny for their excesses—did not emerge from nothing. They were efforts to give language to customs already shaping human hearts and laws long before theorists arrived to explain them. Liberalism’s great insight was not that history had ended, but that the duty and struggle to preserve liberty never ends—and that each generation must renew the moral habits that keep it alive.
This confusion finds a ready audience among contemporary conservatives who, too, have lost touch with the essence of their own living tradition. After decades of talk radio, television, and social media echo chambers repeating that the sins of the radical Left are the sins of “liberalism,” many now regard Deneen’s conflation as more truthful than any clear articulation of their own heritage. Though Deneen often attempts to distinguish between liberalism and radical Leftism, he nonetheless indicts what he calls “general liberalism” for the failures born of ideological extremism. Tragically, his devoted followers march with him into counter-radicalism, all the while believing themselves to be resisting it.
Deneen’s confusion deepens when he blames liberalism for the betrayals committed by those who abandon its principles as well as those who deliberately sought to subvert them. He writes:
“…such a political condition was ultimately untenable, and that the likely popular reaction to an increasingly oppressive liberal order might be forms of authoritarian illiberalism… For liberals, this would prove the need for tighter enforcement of a liberal regime, but they would be blind to how this crisis of legitimacy had been created by liberalism itself.”
And it is here that his critique grows most insistent—and most dangerous.
Here Deneen performs a rhetorical sleight of hand. He condemns as liberal those who act in ways he himself brands illiberal. He names the rebels as loyalists, the violators as guardians. But if their actions are illiberal, then they are not truly liberals at all, no matter what they call themselves.
This confusion is foundational for Deneen. As he writes, explaining his appearance on Bari Weiss’s Honestly podcast to discuss Why Liberalism Failed,
“For me, however, the most striking aspect of the debate was our respective differences in views about the wellspring of contemporary ‘wokeness.’ For Bret Stephens—and, I suspect, Bari Weiss—progressive wokeness is an aberration from good, old-fashioned liberalism. What I attempted to convey to both of them, and to her audience, was that the key elements of ‘wokeness’ arise not from some successor philosophy, such as ‘cultural Marxism,’ as most classical liberals wish to claim. Rather, I argued, it is the natural and even inevitable outgrowth of liberalism’s core feature of transgression.”
Deneen largely grounds this conclusion on a single point drawn from Herbert Marcuse’s notorious essay in critical theory, “Repressive Tolerance,” wherein Marcuse engages with John Stuart Mill on the limits of tolerance. Mill, however, was grappling with one of the most difficult tensions in any liberal system—not laying down a rigid liberal doctrine. Marcuse exploits this point of stress to advance his own illiberal arguments, just as Deneen, in turn, seizes upon Marcuse to support his own indictment. By portraying culturally Marxist illiberalism as the inevitable endpoint of liberalism itself, Deneen completes his dialectic and arrives at the conclusion he always sought: that liberalism is fatally flawed and irredeemable.
As a result of this misplaced blame, Deneen continues from his earlier remark:
“Nearly every one of the promises that were made by the architects and creators of liberalism has been shattered. The liberal state expands to control nearly every aspect of life while citizens regard government as a distant and uncontrollable power… The economy favors a new ‘meritocracy’ that perpetuates its advantages through generational succession…”
This pattern runs through Deneen’s entire critique: he mistakes the failures of people and institutions for the failures of the traditions themselves. The system becomes corrupted, and he blames liberalism as the culprit. But these maladies—the swelling of state power, the concentration of wealth, the invasion of privacy—are not the offspring of liberal traditions. They are their betrayal.
Liberalism was never an instruction manual for technocrats. It does not prescribe surveillance states, nor does it sanctify an elite hoarding privilege. Liberal traditions gave birth to constitutional limits, to freedom of speech, to independent courts, and to local governance. These are the very instruments designed to restrain precisely the abuses Deneen decries. To blame liberalism for the acts of those who violate its spirit is like saying steel is the cause of rust, condemning medicine for the crimes of quacks, or blaming bridges for those who dynamite them.
But the damage is not merely rhetorical. The collapse of liberalism would mean the silencing of dissent, the persecution of conscience, and the crushing of lives under regimes that know neither restraint nor mercy.
Deneen insists:
“Liberalism created the conditions, and the tools, for the ascent of its own worst nightmare, yet it lacks the self-knowledge to understand its own culpability.”
No, it did not. What is true—and what is a fair criticism—is that some liberals became cowardly, complacent, naively convinced that all ideas would abide by the rules of civility if merely granted space in a pluralistic society. They forgot Karl Popper’s warning—that tolerance must sometimes refuse entry to those who would annihilate it, lest open societies be devoured by totalitarians posing as mere dissenters. But that is not proof that liberalism inevitably devours itself. It is proof that liberty requires courage and vigilance.
To bolster this vision of inevitable collapse, he leans on a familiar intellectual crutch.
Deneen’s argument gathers momentum when he claims that liberalism’s triumph led inevitably to a kind of universal arrogance—a belief that history itself had ended, and that liberal democracy would henceforth march uncontested across the globe. Here, his critique leans on a single, oft-misunderstood text: Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man (1992). Yet Fukuyama’s thesis was never a hymn to perfection. It argued that with the collapse of communism and fascism, liberal democracy emerged as the most viable ideological framework—but with a cautionary note. He warned that citizens living in a purely materialist, rights-based order might experience spiritual restlessness and even seek new ideological certainties in forms of authoritarianism or populist fervor. In this sense, Fukuyama foreshadowed precisely the rise of thinkers like Deneen—men who mistake liberalism’s unfinished work for fatal failure and call for replacements that remain abstractions, because no real alternative stands ready to take liberalism’s place.
The tradition of political liberalism—from Burke to Tocqueville to Isaiah Berlin—has always been marked by tragic realism, not triumphal dogma. Deneen’s portrayal, then, is a misstep: it presents liberalism as if it proclaimed itself complete and eternal. But the real lesson of The End of History is the opposite: liberal democracy, by itself, is never enough and demands renewal through moral and cultural life.
To cast liberalism as a naïve creed of universal triumph is to fight a phantom. It is to burn down a scarecrow while the real inheritance of liberal societies stands weathered but still upright. The tragedy is not that liberalism imagined itself eternal and invincible. The tragedy is that too many forgot how hard-won and easily lost its blessings truly are—Deneen among them.
Those who would torch liberalism in a fit of despair ought to name the darkness they mean to unleash in its place.
Deneen writes:
“Citizens of advanced liberal democracies are in near revolt against their own governments, the ‘establishment,’ and the politicians they have themselves selected as their leaders and representatives…”
Here again, he finds only signs of collapse where there are also signs of life. He sees citizens restless and indignant and concludes that liberalism is breathing its last. Yet in truth, such discontent is not the death knell of liberal societies—it is proof that they still possess breath enough to protest, to debate, and to demand redress.
It is true that citizens of liberal democracies grow weary of distant elites, of unresponsive bureaucracies, and of systems that seem captured by privilege. But such anger is not evidence of liberalism’s demise. It is evidence that free societies remain awake. The very act of railing against corruption, of assembling in squares and speaking in defiance, is the lifeblood of the liberal tradition. It is the spirit of a people who have not yet surrendered to silence. Authoritarians see a protest and cry “collapse.” Liberals see the same crowd and think, “Tuesday.”
For the right to assemble, to speak, to demand justice is not merely theoretical—it is the shield behind which human beings keep their dignity and hope.
When Deneen describes citizens turning against establishment power, he is describing the deepest liberal instinct: to hold authority to account, to resist new aristocracies, to protect the rights of the many from the encroachments of the few. The tumult he laments is not chaos for its own sake—it is the righteous turbulence of a society that remembers it was born to speak freely and to correct its course when justice falters.
The crises Deneen describes are real. Liberal societies are in peril precisely because too many have forgotten the civic and moral foundations upon which liberty rests. Yet the presence of protest, of public indignation, of open dissent, is not proof that liberalism has collapsed. It is proof that the inheritance of a free people still breathes—and still remembers how to fight for itself.
Even in our weariness, liberal societies remain freer, safer, and more just than any order humanity has ever known. We could drift in decline for decades and still grant our peoples a life more humane than that offered by absolutist thrones, theocratic zeal, fascist banners, communist tyrannies, or the savage tumult of warlord rule. To cast aside our hard-won inheritance for some gleaming new ideological experiment is not prudence—it is reckless oblivion.
This, then, is covenantal liberalism—a tradition worth defending not merely for its ideas, but for the covenant of human dignity and freedom it sustains.
The kind of society Deneen longs for—a place of mutual care and inherited wisdom—is not some undiscovered country waiting beyond liberalism’s frontier. It is the very soil from which liberal societies once grew. Our task is not to abandon liberalism, but to remember how it was cultivated, why it flourished, and how to mend it where it has begun to split.
To be fair, Deneen’s longing is not for chaos but for a society more rooted in virtue, community, and shared moral horizons. Yet the question remains whether his path leads toward those goods—or toward new radicalism wearing traditional dress.
So I say this: If Patrick Deneen believes liberalism is doomed, let him—and those who agree—name the alternative that could match its moral inheritance, its record of human dignity, and its capacity for peaceful self-correction—preferably one that doesn’t involve powdered wigs, pitchforks, or radical ideological abstractions.
Because the most telling thing of all is that Deneen finds fatal flaws in a system that, for all its imperfections, has delivered more liberty, dignity, and peace than any other in human history—yet can offer only vague hints at alternatives. And in this, he joins a long line of radicals, from the English Puritans to the French Jacobins to the Russian Bolsheviks to the Brazilian Integralists, who condemned flawed orders as dead while offering no clear plan for what should replace them—only to discover that wreckage is easy, but building something better is hard.
Let us be clear: Deneen is not defending conservatism as it has long been understood. Though he names himself a conservative, he wields the intellectual tools of radical critique—tools that historically belonged to the revolutionary Left—to tear down the covenant he claims to revive. In so doing, he risks replacing a flawed order with a far more perilous void.
This is the very heart of my charge: that Deneen misunderstands liberalism, wrongly condemns it as a failure, and harbours a revolutionary impulse utterly alien to true conservatism.
It is true that liberalism must remember its moral culture to endure. But only liberalism offers the space, the freedom, and the humility necessary for that remembrance to occur without tyranny. History shows that lament is easy, and demolition easier still. Yet the patient work of reform belongs to those who remember that liberty and virtue need not be enemies.
This is covenantal liberalism—the tradition I stand for.
Until then, the call remains clear: let us repair, not raze—for the covenant endures, and the story of liberty still has more plot twists than any ambitious pamphlet by Patrick Deneen.
And let us remember why we make this stand. Because liberalism is not merely an idea—it is the hard-won inheritance that shields human beings from tyranny. Because it has not failed, and is not finished. Because those who condemn it as dead misunderstand what it is, misread its trials as its grave, and mistake their own radical fervour for wisdom. Let them name what they would build in its place. For in the absence of that answer, we stand with liberalism still—for the sake of those yet unborn who will one day judge whether we kept faith with freedom.
