There's a crucial ambiguity here between market liberalism (derived ultimately from Locke) and democratic liberalism (derived from Mill). Deneen is exploiting critiques of market liberalism as corrosive of the social virtues, but his actual target is democratic liberalism. There's no reason to think that a "post-liberal" society wouldn't have big corporations, financial markets and weaker regulation than we've seen. OTOH, it's absolutely certain that the pwoer of the state would be used to enforce right thinking.
When did America become liberal? Because the USA’s Old Republic was a semi-populist, semi-economically decentralized, semi-politically decentralized, semi-culturally centralized, and semi-scientifically decentralized republic with democratic governance structures built around its former, and completely different than today’s, decentralized and publicly accessible mass-member Democratic and Republican parties of old. It had meaningful variability in policy WHILE deeply coordinating; for hundreds of years it successfully operated within a paradigm that simultaneously, and I really want to stress that it was at the same time, was deeply economically integrated WHILE also maintaining partial market fragmentations in law, goods, services, and capital.
The big move away from it in regards to economic structures happened between the latter 1970s and mid 1980s when the USA's economic structures shifted from being a diffused economy operating within a paradigm of mostly competitive market structures to a concentrated economy with private sector central planning. And we all but eliminated our democratic governance structures and hyper centralized. While this new system is certainly, simply because so many refer to it as such, capital "L" Liberal, is it really, at least in most people's conceptualization of the word, liberal?
There's a crucial ambiguity here between market liberalism (derived ultimately from Locke) and democratic liberalism (derived from Mill). Deneen is exploiting critiques of market liberalism as corrosive of the social virtues, but his actual target is democratic liberalism. There's no reason to think that a "post-liberal" society wouldn't have big corporations, financial markets and weaker regulation than we've seen. OTOH, it's absolutely certain that the pwoer of the state would be used to enforce right thinking.
We could just re-decentralize and re-democratize, that way we'd have far more "market" and democracy...
When did America become liberal? Because the USA’s Old Republic was a semi-populist, semi-economically decentralized, semi-politically decentralized, semi-culturally centralized, and semi-scientifically decentralized republic with democratic governance structures built around its former, and completely different than today’s, decentralized and publicly accessible mass-member Democratic and Republican parties of old. It had meaningful variability in policy WHILE deeply coordinating; for hundreds of years it successfully operated within a paradigm that simultaneously, and I really want to stress that it was at the same time, was deeply economically integrated WHILE also maintaining partial market fragmentations in law, goods, services, and capital.
The big move away from it in regards to economic structures happened between the latter 1970s and mid 1980s when the USA's economic structures shifted from being a diffused economy operating within a paradigm of mostly competitive market structures to a concentrated economy with private sector central planning. And we all but eliminated our democratic governance structures and hyper centralized. While this new system is certainly, simply because so many refer to it as such, capital "L" Liberal, is it really, at least in most people's conceptualization of the word, liberal?