It’s difficult to decide whether Patrick Deneen’s Regime Change is to be faulted for being too ambitious or not ambitious enough.
On the one hand, he is too ambitious in his expectations for what traditional conservatives can hope to accomplish through politics. The title and basic premise reflect a failure to appreciate the limits of the human ability to fundamentally redirect historical development toward a predetermined end. All of recent Western history, as Deneen presents it, is the working out of ideas concocted by a cadre of liberal elites. And even though history has been marching systematically in their direction for at least four hundred years, he nevertheless believes we have it in our power to turn history on a dime with better ideas and “concerted political action.” Locke and Mill were able to impose their will on the world, so why can’t we?
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