Has America Lost Its Appetite for the Common Good?

Patrick Deneen is a professor in the political science department at Notre Dame, the Catholic university in Indiana that was founded in 1842. But he is not a political scientist. He is quick to point this out, and he has a lot of practice pointing it out, because that’s what most people think he is. He calls himself a political theorist, or a political philosopher. Another thing he is not is a political operative — although that’s the impression you might have gotten if you read a recent Wall Street Journal article with this headline: “The Ideological Gurus Battling for the Soul of Trump World.” That’s certainly the impression I got. Here’s the sub-headline of the article: “Techno-libertarian Curtis Yarvin and Catholic conservative Patrick Deneen have just one thing in common: a desire to destroy the American establishment.” Here’s one line from that article, by Joshua Chaffin and Zusha Elinson: “On one side are tech bros racing to create a new future; on the other, a resurgent band of conservative Catholics who yearn for an imagined past.” Until I read that article, I had not heard of Patrick Deneen — which I’m a bit embarrassed to say, because he is a pretty big name in some of the circles I try to keep up on. He is best known for writing a widely read book called Why Liberalism Failed. It was published in 2018 — not by a commercial publisher, but by Yale University Press. Maybe that’s why it didn’t have a sexy subtitle — it was simply Why Liberalism Failed, like a hammer fist. If a commercial house had published it, there might have been a subtitle like: “A Soft-Spoken Political Scientist Reveals a Hidden Schism in the Soul of America.” The book’s foreword, which was written by a pair of Yale editors, argued that “Deneen’s book is disruptive not only for the way it links social maladies to liberalism’s first principles, but also because it is difficult to categorize along our conventional left-right spectrum.” Indeed, the book was praised by everyone from Barack Obama to Viktor Orbán, the autocratic prime minister of Hungary. One of the book’s most enthusiastic readers was J.D. Vance, who four years after its publication was elected to the Senate, and two years after that became Donald Trump’s vice president. This gets us back to that Wall Street Journal article. It implies that Patrick Deneen is one of the main intellectual forces behind the second Trump Administration — an “ideological guru,” as the Journal put it in the headline. Is that how Deneen sees himself?

Patrick DENEEN: I don’t view myself as an ideological guru, no. It’s been a very interesting period of my life. I consider myself really just a kind of scholarly academic who writes books. You’ll notice if you read that article, which you did, that there’s no actual direct quote from me. The consequence of now having had this very tendentious set of misrepresentations in the media has now led me to decline all requests for interviews.

Stephen DUBNER: So you were asked for an interview for that piece?

DENEEN: I was, and I declined. 

DUBNER: And what about the subhead, about your desire to “destroy the American establishment.” How accurate is that — do you want to destroy the American establishment, Patrick?

DENEEN: No. 

I was happy Deneen didn’t decline our request for an interview. And so, today on Freakonomics Radio, I ask Patrick Deneen a lot of questions — and he, being a well-trained Socratic professor, asks some questions of his own.

DENEEN: What would decrease the distance between the many and the few in our country? How is it that we’re going to get very good leaders if our assumption is that ordinary people are idiots? How do we generate a sense of civic common good and solidarity? 

You will notice that Deneen does not sound like most of the prominent academics you hear from these days.

DENEEN: I’ll admit to being sympathetic with the populist uprising in our country. I might be like one of three professors in America for whom that’s true.

His most recent book, by the way, is called Regime Change: Toward a Postliberal Future. So here’s one more question we’ll try to answer today: is that future already here?

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Patrick Deneen was born in 1964, and grew up outside of Hartford, Connecticut. His father was an insurance executive.

DENEEN: I was raised Catholic, and as a grandchild or great-grandchild of Irish and French Catholic immigrants, it deeply formed my worldview that, I’ll use Aquinas’s phrase, humans are, by nature, social and political animals. That aspect or feature of our humanity, nevertheless, needs cultivation. We have strong counter-tendencies, and those counter-tendencies are for self-aggrandizement, pride, individualism, the belief in our own autonomy.

Although Deneen was raised Catholic, he didn’t start reading deeply in Catholic philosophy until he was a college student, at Rutgers.

DENEEN: Yes, that’s right. I would attribute it to my first encounter with Alexis de Tocqueville, reading Democracy in America. He himself had a crisis of faith, but he was raised and educated as a Catholic. When I was a freshman, recognizing his praise of the small-town model of democracy, township democracy, that he witnessed in New England, it spoke to me because I felt like he’s talking about the town I grew up in, Windsor, Connecticut.

DUBNER: I always wondered if Tocqueville would have felt the same had he settled down and lived here. Because, you know, every time I go to a new place, I’m wowed by the things that they do differently that are better than we do at home. And then I think, Well, what if I moved here for a year? Would I realize that — Eh, nasty, brutish, and short all over again with a different accent?

DENEEN: I think the things that he valued about America he would still find of profound value. It shocked him to discover in America that when there was a problem — like, there was a pothole or a bridge fell down — that Americans didn’t necessarily wait for government to come out and solve it, that there was this spirit of entrepreneurial, like, We can do it, we will fix this. 

DUBNER: You’ve said that we need to get back to a time where more people do more things for themselves — fixing their cars with their own hands is one example you use. I mean no disrespect, Patrick, but I don’t want to live in that world. I, for one, have no idea how to fix my car or, you know, program a supercomputer or fly an airplane, any of those things. So I’m a big believer in the division of labor, and in opportunity cost, and in comparative advantage — these basic tenets of economic thinking. But I gather that you disagree with a lot of those tenets. Can you just talk for a moment about how you think that economic theory — going back to Adam Smith, let’s say — has been either abused or its merits exaggerated perhaps.

DENEEN: I’m certainly not an opponent of the idea of division of labor, which I think is a basic aspect of our human reality. We’re just born with different gifts and abilities — and I’m glad, for example, I’m not an auto mechanic by trade, because I’d probably be pretty bad at it. But that part of the argument in the book was really more about how we have institutionalized a kind of ignorance pertaining to our everyday life. The ability to manipulate and understand basic phenomena of whatever it might be. I’m a gardener. I actually have great tomato plants coming in right now. Many more people in an earlier time would grow some of their food. They would maybe have some livestock or some chickens or something. My grandmother had a little farm in an area now that’s been turned into developments. The ability to do basic things in your home, the ability to fix things. That doesn’t exclude the fact that we also have abilities, maybe in our professional lives or our volunteer lives, that do draw on our special gifts, those talents that mysteriously seem to be distributed widely.

DUBNER: I guess what I would argue — if I wanted to channel someone from the field of positive psychology for a minute — is why not both/and instead of either/or? I mean, the very fact that you and I are able to have this conversation right now — you in South Bend, Indiana, in a studio, me in New York City in my studio — and it’s extraordinarily efficient and productive and convenient and I love that. On the other hand, all the value of doing things with your hands and knowing how things are made. I mean, those are also available to me. So I don’t see it as an either/or. When I read your work, I do feel that your embrace of the value of the real, let’s call it, does have a nostalgic tint to it. It feels to me a bit like a retreat. So I’m curious to know — you as a person, as a political thinker, as a husband and father and so on, do you feel that you were born in the wrong time perhaps?

DENEEN: No, because what you describe as a kind of nostalgia for a bygone era of things that are no longer recoverable, I view as permanent possibilities. For me, that’s the great advantage of my discipline, political philosophy, is we’re reading the wide swath of the greatest texts not as maybe an historian would to see, you know, what did Rousseau think in the 1700s that was the consequence of physical and contingent events that are never ever to be repeated, and therefore you read it merely as a kind of historical record. Whereas when a political philosopher reads Rousseau, I’m reading possibilities. When I read Aristotle, I am reading possibilities, live possibilities with the understanding that there are specific historical contexts, but nevertheless that humanity is still more or less the same between 400 B.C. and today. We’re driven by fundamentally similar desires, our natures are fundamentally recognizable. Division of labor is a very old concept. We find examples of it in the Bible. We know Cain and Abel get into a pretty bad argument with a bad outcome, maybe based in some ways on the different jobs that they have. But the division of labor has been understood since the most ancient of times. I’m a big fan of Plato’s Republic, and Plato’s Republic begins with a long discussion of division of labor and the role that it plays in the formation of human society. What Plato’s Socrates lays out in that beginning of that dialogue is that the division of labor can be understood as the source of solidarity or alternatively as the source of division, as the source of contestation or separation or distance. 

DUBNER: Sounds a little Marxist.

DENEEN: Well, Marx was, of course, very familiar with this tradition, as was Smith. We live in a world in which the latter understanding of division of labor predominates. We all get the advantages and benefits of everyone living in a kind of Smithian world in which we understand the division of labor as the thing that I do in which I don’t necessarily have to know, care, understand what you do. And we rely on this invisible hand to make it all work. But I think that conception, while it has certain advantages, it has profound disadvantages: fragmentation, ignorance of what other people do. We have all, in a sense, relieved ourselves of that obligation. And where do we see the evidence or the manifestation of how our work fits together? It’s typically in a community. It’s in a community of a scale or solidarity in which the banker can understand how the granting of mortgages will have a broader implication on the life and fabric of the community, versus what happens in 2008. If I have the Smithian understanding, I’m just putting heads on pins. I don’t know what the pin does. I don’t care what the pin does. If you’re a member of a community, you care about the pin. You care about its destination, and you care about its origin. So, how do we expand the understanding of our work to include some glimpse of that? We’re never going to have a comprehensive glimpse, but some glimpse that draws us out of the narrowness that I think is the cause of a lot of the pathologies of modern society, to be frank. 

DUBNER: Say a little bit more about that. How does that narrowness cause these pathologies? Is it the individual’s remove from the community per se? Because on the one hand, as you’re describing these problems, I wonder if part of the issue is simply scale, right? We’re at eight billion people now. And when Aristotle was doing his thinking, when Rousseau was doing his thinking — communities did still dominate in most places, correct?

DENEEN: Yes. And in fact, Aristotle’s quite clear that a polis or a political community, that is larger than the expanse or ability of the human senses to comprehend that community is now too big. We are now living at a scale that many political philosophers of earlier ages would have regarded as catastrophic in terms of the ability to form some form of human solidarity. And I think we dismiss those concerns at our peril.

DUBNER: So how much do you think that scale itself is the core of the problem — and if it is the core of the problem, what are we supposed to do about it? I assume you don’t want to say, Oh, let’s take the last seven billion people who were born and get rid of them and get back to a manageable size. 

DENEEN: No, I’m a Catholic, so no, that’s not my preferred solution.

DUBNER: So how can you amend the current scale-driven problem?

DENEEN: The challenge and problem of scale has been recognized well before there were even a billion people on the planet. It’s not a problem we’re facing necessarily because of population. It’s how we’ve organized ourselves, with the concept of division of labor being one of the problems. Politics and the nature of politics being another one. And here we could begin to touch on concepts, for example, of democracy. One of the innovations that’s very self-consciously an innovation on the part of our Founding Fathers was that the problem of scale could be overcome by a new form of representation. In Federalist 10, maybe the most famous of the Federalist Papers, James Madison makes an extraordinary argument that is essentially a frontal effort to dismiss and defeat the arguments of the likes of Aristotle, or even Montesquieu, for example, in which he argues that the way to solve the problem of faction in politics is not through what Aristotle and the classical tradition had believed, which is the cultivation of certain kinds of civic virtue and solidarity and common good. It was by actually expanding the orbit, enlarging the sphere, he says. Increasing the scale and size of the political order — in our case, the nation of America — so that, among other things, we would have difficulty communicating with each other, we would not be able to concert and scheme together. And he said it would increase the level of mistrust among the citizenry toward each other. Now, that’s an extraordinary argument, because what it’s essentially saying is that discord and mistrust and difficulty communicating will be the basis of what we now call democracy. Does that sound unfamiliar to listeners? In other words, we’ve achieved the ends, and yet many of us today are not terribly happy with that particular outcome. 

DUBNER: I don’t have the citation handy, but there’s something you wrote about how all political regimes, throughout history, have a sort of tension built into them — that democracy is a regime of the many, and that oligarchy is a regime of the few. And within that statement is the assertion that neither system is sufficient. Can you describe the tension between those two? And what I really want to get to is, which type of political regime you feel is most successful at promoting a common good?

DENEEN: Well, that cite is from my most recent book, which is called Regime Change — not to be too uncontroversial, so I picked an anodyne title.

DUBNER: Well, it’s a little bit different if you write a book called Regime Change in America than if you write it in Iran or North Korea, just for the record. 

DENEEN: Right, well, but it is a book written primarily for the need for regime change in America, but in a very specific way. We have in some ways created a regime that has led us to the point where many of our fellow citizens will say, we’re too divided, we have no sense of what the common good is, there is no common good, there’s only individual interest, and the marketplace of ideas and the marketplace of our economy will resolve all of those tensions simply by a kind of magic. I think we may have reached a point where we’re recognizing the deficiencies of those assumptions. So what would be the way in which we could begin to redress what I think is the excesses or pathologies of the outcome of the modern liberal project? And here I proposed to revisit the classical example. What the great philosophers of the classical tradition pointed to is that every regime has this tension between the few who tend to be wealthy or have certain advantages, benefits, have certain status in a society, and the many who generally are not participants and aren’t beneficiaries of those particular set of privileges. It tends to be money, but it’s not necessarily only money. It can be education, it can be status, and so forth. And that every society will tend toward civil war or anarchy because of this tension. So the classical authors said, Well, what do we do? Their argument was that, Well, the best way to prevent that from happening is to mix them. The mixing will hopefully lead to the diminution of the worst aspects of each. And the classical tradition recognized that democracy had its disadvantages — certainly James Madison recognized — and it recognized that the aristocracy had its disadvantages.

DUBNER: How do you mix them in a practical way? I mean, you talk about aristopopulism, which is a very nice phrase. I’m a sucker for a good portmanteau — it’s a very good portmanteau. But how practically would that work? And I’m curious if your vision of that aristopopulism has been advanced a little bit by the second election of Trump.

DENEEN: The claim in that book is that we are now at a kind of advanced stage of what it was that the classical authors were worried about: the division between the many and the few. Our politics today is very much an echo of and a reflection of those concerns of the classical authors.

DUBNER: The good news there is that there are people like you around to decipher this and to propose the perfect solutions. That’s what you’re about to do, correct?

DENEEN: Well, it’s a solution. Here’s one reason why I’ll decline the title of political scientist, is, I don’t think there’s a perfect solution. But I think there are better and worse solutions, and solutions that are appropriate for particular times. My effort in that book was to say, Look, we have this whole treasury, this great repository of this wisdom. If we have the view of progressives, we sort of think, Okay, that’s all antiquated, why would we be interested in that, we’re now modern scientists? When in fact, they’re addressing exactly the political conditions that we’re experiencing these days. And so how would we begin to reinvent the idea of a mixed constitution in our contemporary times? And so I offer a number of what are probably impractical practical arguments with the invitation that people who at least buy part of my argument, and are much better at forging policy than I am, would begin to think about ways that we could decrease the distance between the many and the few, to use the great advantages of being an elite, to benefit the common good of the commons, while hopefully the commons themselves will act as a corrective against the tyrannical impulses of the few. 

DUBNER: I’d love to get into some specifics. These are policy ideas that you endorse in Regime Change, that you just said may sound a little bit out of date but I’m very taken with the notion that their out-of-dateness is actually what makes them valuable. One of these policy endorsements is to expand the House of Representatives to more than 1,000 members, possibly up to 6,000 — and, related, maybe, is including normal people on the Federal Reserve Board, like farmers and minimum-wage earners. What would those expansions do?

DENEEN: One of the great difficulties, going back to what Madison was arguing — he argued two things that would solve the problem of faction in this new republic. One of them was this new concept of representation that would reflect the ability especially to represent the views of a vast number of people in a very large sprawling nation, so that enlarging the sphere would make it difficult to form factions. But the second thing was that he believed that because you would have such a large nation and that the districts would be large, even the representatives would represent such a large number of people that only the most visible, successful and he hoped, wise, potentially statesmen would be selected by what was otherwise suspected to be a rabble. Madison hoped that the mechanisms of largeness would solve these problems. So the argument was that essentially, we would have a certain kind of an aristocracy that would arise from this mechanism. As he was writing this, he was looking across the room and seeing George Washington, and the panoply of demigods that drafted our Constitution.

DUBNER: This is what researchers might call confirmation bias. I’m looking for great people, and I’m sitting in a room full of —

DENEEN: He’s right there, he’s right there. Benjamin Franklin’s right there. There was a kind of confidence that even if the mass of people was crude and not terribly elevated, that nevertheless, the mechanism would give rise to this elite group of people who would act with wisdom and prudence and justice and would not necessarily reflect the views of the many, but to use Madison’s phrase, would refine and enlarge the views of the many. Now, when the country was relatively small and these districts were small, the distance between the representative and the people was not that large. But of course, over time, we now have districts that — I didn’t look at it recently, but at least half a million, if not 600, 700,000, in some cases more than that. So we’re talking about massive districts which are being represented by one person. It may be a surprise to your listeners, but one of the most debated questions and points that the Founding Fathers and the Federalist Papers in the time of the ratification debates that they fixed on was the size of the House of Representatives. The anti-Federalists, the opponents to the proposed constitution, were especially concerned about the creation of a new oligarchy or a new aristocracy in the bad sense of the word, a new sort of class that they thought they’d overthrown in the revolution.

DUBNER: But wouldn’t a greater number of representatives mitigate that?

DENEEN: So, the proposal in fact, when the Bill of Rights is proposed — it’s not just 10 amendments that are proposed, it’s several dozen, of which 10 are passed, and we think of them as the Bill of Rights. But one of those amendments that was proposed was precisely to limit the size of districts. 

DUBNER: Got it. So rather than limiting the number of people in Congress, limiting the size of the district, which would inevitably, obviously, increase the number to several thousand perhaps.

DENEEN: That amendment’s still open. We would need probably about 20 states to pass that amendment. And just imagine we were to pass it. I think we would have a house of about 6,000. It would be the Athenian Agora, basically. 

DUBNER: I’d love to hear what you think would be the benefits of that, and how it would work. But I’m also looking at another policy idea you propose in the same book, in Regime Change, which seems to go directly against it. So I need you to explain why it perhaps isn’t in conflict. You say that it would be a good idea to, quote, “break up Washington, D.C.,” and redistribute government departments across the U.S. So are you proposing both a very large federal representation in D.C. or elsewhere, and a decentralization of the centralized government’s power across the U.S.?

DENEEN: Increasing the House of Representatives is not a form of centralization. It’s actually a kind of decentralization. Smaller districts means those districts are likely to be a bit more homogenous. So today, a representative — of course, we know from what we call gerrymandering, but which is just, you know, you have to draw a line somehow — they contain such a vast multitude, a variety of interests. How can any representative represent that district? Genuinely represent it. 

DUBNER: Let’s follow that thought for a minute. And therefore what? What does that lead to that creates the larger problem?

DENEEN: So, all of these various proposals — some of which are, you know, pie in the sky — actually I think the Trump administration has actually proposed starting to move some of the agencies out of D.C. So somebody’s been reading my book. 

DUBNER: I think a lot of people have been reading your book.

DENEEN: It seems so. I wonder why. All of the arguments were efforts to think through what would decrease the distance, both figuratively as well as literally, between the many and the few in our country. The sense of resentment, that the ordinary person has nobody representing them. They are shut out of deliberations of economics, of what happens in their towns when the factory shuts down — based on policies that are supposed to be good for them. I mean, all of the things that have simmered to the point of boiling that suddenly people working in universities like mine is like, What happened, where did this come from? But of course, this had been simmering for decades and there was nobody really listening in either party.

DUBNER: Let’s just run through a few more of your policy suggestions in your book Regime Change. You’d like to create a universal national service requirement. You write about reforming elite universities to pursue genuine socioeconomic diversity, develop satellite campuses, make universities responsible for student debt. And, greater political oversight of universities. You’d like to restore manufacturing jobs, increase apprenticeship opportunities, support vital sectors in R&D and infrastructure, and enforce tariffs as a last resort, you write. I think anyone paying a little bit of attention to the news would say, Wow, that sounds like Project 2025. That sounds like Trump administration 2. So talk to me about the degree to which these proposals have been embraced in a functional level by fans of yours in government, and how you think the Trump administration is doing with these moves.

DENEEN: Some of these proposals, of course, have been in the air and were already being discussed well before they appeared in my book. And in many cases, I was trying to distill not just the policies, but what maybe held them together. And that logic is, to use the term that I coined, aristopopulism: attempting to generate a greater sense of connection and shared fate of the elites and the ordinary people in our society, in which the elites in particular would be moved and hopefully inspired to act on behalf of the good of ordinary working people in our country. So it’s not surprising to me to see many of these policies rolling out. Now, a number of policies that I suggested I know are not likely to be taken up. 

DUBNER: For instance?

DENEEN: Well, the universal service requirement. It’s interesting of course because this used to be something that alternatively the left and the right would occasionally support. William F. Buckley, the great conservative founder of the National Review, argued for a national service requirement. He was excoriated by his fellow conservatives for proposing that. Charles Rangel, who recently passed away, the representative from the city of New York, he had proposed this as a possibility during the lead-up to the war in Iraq. I think it was a somewhat cynical proposal, but it was based on something real, which is that if the children of the elites were likely to serve in the Iraq war, they would not have rushed to the conclusion that we should invade Iraq. Having some skin in that game would have changed how people would have viewed this.

DUBNER: Didn’t President Clinton propose some kind of national service?

DENEEN: He did, and in fact, he created a kind of halfway station.

DUBNER: The National and Community Service Trust Act, I remember it being called.

DENEEN: That’s right. And back in those days, I had a job in the Clinton Administration, as a speechwriter for the director of the United States Information Agency. I think Clinton’s Democratic party still had a lot of those concerns for, how do we generate a sense of civic common good and solidarity?

DUBNER: Were you a registered Democrat for a while?

DENEEN: Most of my life. 

DUBNER: And are you a registered Republican now? 

DENEEN: In the state of Indiana, you can vote in either party. You have to declare it at the primary. So I tend to be a little strategic. I see and I recognize the deficiencies, the deep deficiencies, of both parties as they’re currently constituted. But at the moment, I think the Republican party is the party that’s more likely to be willing to act left economically and act right socially. And that’s the space that I kind of occupy. I am a conservative of a kind, although many so-called conservatives think I’m a Marxist. But I’m a conservative of a certain kind who is religious. And I’ll admit to being sympathetic with the populist uprising in our country. I might be like one of three professors in America for whom that’s true, which makes me very much a heretic in the citadel. 

DUBNER: Even at Notre Dame.

DENEEN: Oh yeah, yeah, because Notre Dame aspires to be an elite, top-tier university, and so whatever Harvard does, we want to do — which I guess means being, you know, prosecuted by the federal government now.

Coming up after the break: I’m starting to get the sense that Patrick Deneen somewhat enjoys being a heretic in the citadel. Also, if those passing references to Adam Smith got you hungry for more, check out the three-part series we made on Smith a few years ago. It was called “In Search of the Real Adam Smith” — episodes 525, 526, and 527. You can find our entire archive on any podcast app, also at freakonomics.com, where we publish transcripts and show notes. I’m Stephen Dubner, this is Freakonomics Radio; we’ll be right back.

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Patrick Deneen, when he was an undergraduate at Rutgers, studied English literature. And he was a very good student: he graduated summa cum laude and he was the student speaker at his own graduation. He started work on his Ph.D. at the University of Chicago’s Committee on Social Thought, but he returned to Rutgers to finish it. His thesis was called “The Odyssey of Political Theory,” which he turned into his first book. It examined how Homer’s Odyssey spoke to issues like departure and return, and whether our contemporary culture wars are driven by reality or just what some people might call mood affiliation. His thesis advisor was Wilson Carey McWilliams, a well-regarded political scientist:

DENEEN: Wilson Carey McWilliams was a great and ardent New Deal Democrat. He was a profound influence in my life.

McWilliams was perhaps best known for studying morality in politics. And you can hear McWilliams’s voice in some of Patrick Deneen’s writing. Deneen’s journey through academia has been a bit of an odyssey itself. His first teaching job was at Princeton.

DENEEN: As an assistant professor, we were assigned a large number of senior theses to advise, 15 to 20. Each of these were about 100 pages. In many cases, they weren’t students you’d worked with before, or had classes with you. 

That was the case with a Princeton undergraduate named Pete Hegseth, who today is the Secretary of Defense.

DENEEN: So I didn’t know him when he stepped into my office — other than the fact that I was a pretty ferocious Princeton basketball fan. I took our young sons to a lot of those games. It was a great team to watch because it was that old Pete Carril — his system, the Princeton system, a great offense to watch, really, really fun.

DUBNER: This was a system that went back to Bill Bradley, wasn’t it?

DENEEN: Oh yeah, and it was designed for a team that was maybe not as athletically talented as some of the other teams, no shade on Bill Bradley. But it worked because it really created a team that could overcome even other teams with great superstar college —

DUBNER: I’m sensing a parable here. I’m sensing that you saw something in that Princeton basketball team that you like for society.

DENEEN: My father would tell us that we should watch Princeton basketball whenever possible. My father is a basketball coach. But at any rate, I knew Pete from the basketball team. He was a bench player. He was a good player, but those starters were really — was really a tight, great group. He would come off the bench and knock down a couple threes, and suddenly the game would be tight. So I really admired Pete for that. I knew that he was in R.O.T.C., and this was after 2001. Any Princeton student who was in the Army was amazing to me before 2001. But any Princeton student who was in the military after 2001 was just a miraculous human. I mean this is a university that was producing scads and scads of finance bankers and people who were going to go on to very, very lucrative careers. 

DUBNER: Right, the elites that your books have described with some disdain. Disdain may be a bit strong — 

DENEEN: Might be strong, but deep worry about the way in which they’re impacting our country. When Pete came in to speak with me, we would talk about what it was to be someone in the military at Princeton as a student who intended to serve on the ground. So I had a lot of respect for Pete as a student. I still have a lot of respect for Pete based on that experience. And then after he finishes the thesis, he goes out, serves. I kind of followed him a bit. He published things. And then the next time I see him pop up, he’s on Fox News. And I was like, Wow, there’s Pete.

Hegseth’s thesis was called “Modern Presidential Rhetoric and the Cold War Context.” A recent investigation by The Daily Princetonian newspaper found, quote, “eight instances of uncredited material, sham paraphrasing, and verbatim copying” in Hegseth’s thesis; a Pentagon spokesperson said, “there was no plagiarism” and that the accusations were political. Whatever the case: Patrick Deneen taught for several years at Princeton, but wasn’t offered tenure, and he moved on to Georgetown, where he did get tenure; and at Georgetown he founded the Tocqueville Forum on the Roots of American Democracy. After several years at Georgetown, he moved to Notre Dame, in 2012. He felt that Notre Dame was, as he puts it, “engaged in a more robustly Catholic form of higher education,” and he wanted to raise his kids in a smaller town. His breakout book, Why Liberalism Failed, was published in 2018, two years into Donald Trump’s first term.

DENEEN: It was not a response to what was happening electorally. It wasn’t incognizant of what was happening electorally. But the content of that book —

DUBNER: You finished writing the book, if I recall correctly, just before Trump was elected, correct? 

DENEEN: Yeah, it was around the time of the election. But that said, every chapter in that book had been in some way, shape, or form drafted in the previous decade, if not the previous 20 years. And so it wasn’t a response to an immediate political situation and of course, it got picked up because the title certainly, but also I think the content, it captured a moment. It was for especially an intellectual class that had been blindsided and didn’t know what was happening. And then this professor writes this book that seems at some level to answer that question. The day that it appeared — it was a Tuesday in January of 2018 — David Brooks devoted his column to a discussion of the book, followed by a number of different columns in the New York Times, Washington Post. It kind of just took off, and became a very surprising bestseller, especially to me. But that book was really everything we’ve been talking about — long readings of Tocqueville and the Federalist Papers and Aristotle and Rousseau and Montesquieu, and distilling them as they touch our contemporary lives today. And then, of course, I’m invited to countless interviews and then the book gets translated — that shocked me — into 25 languages now. The entire time, I’m sort of assuming, okay, this is all kind of scholarly and intellectual. But before I know it, it’s getting picked up and discussed by various political figures. Among them, of course, most famously today, J.D. Vance, who was not yet a senator but had read it. And he began reaching out to me to talk about some of its ideas. And I was thrilled to do so. 

DUBNER: He was interested in part because he was considering converting to Catholicism at the time? 

DENEEN: That’s right, and we talked quite a bit about his being drawn to Catholicism, Catholic social teaching. 

DUBNER: We should say he did convert, ultimately. I didn’t want to leave that hanging.

DENEEN: He did. He did enter the church. Then the journalists start sniffing this out, and they think, Oh, here’s the puppet master. It’s an absurd claim. But there’s always this desire to say, Who’s the power, or who’s the brain behind it? I mean, J.D.’s got his own mind and he’s — 

DUBNER: Well, what’s it been like for you to get brought into these political circles and debates, whether directly or indirectly? 

DENEEN: It’s a thing of ambivalence and confusion for me, because I think of myself, first and foremost, as someone who’s just trying to parse through ideas, think through the nature of politics and how does that reflect on our contemporary moment? 

DUBNER: And that’s satisfying for you? That’s satisfying enough?

DENEEN: That’s always been satisfying enough. On the other hand, I’ve always felt that part of my calling as a faculty member, as a scholar, is to, when asked, to try to offer, as best I can, an explanation for the views as I’ve been able to come to them, the conclusions I’ve been able to reach, to be engaged in conversations and debates. It’s a different thing when that gets caught up into politics. Now it’s related to power. What’s the utility? 

DUBNER: There’s one team versus the other. 

DENEEN: Right. On the one hand, it’s gratifying to have the interest of political figures from around the world who want to talk about ideas.

DUBNER: Viktor Orbán, for instance. 

DENEEN: Yeah. I mean, why wouldn’t one want to talk to a prime minister of a major European country about one’s ideas? But it turns out that’s tantamount to academic heresy. 

DUBNER: Say a bit more about that. Have you been penalized within the community for becoming a political figure, a politically associated figure?

DENEEN: There’s absolutely no doubt.

DUBNER: So what happens when you walk down a sidewalk on Notre Dame campus now?

DENEEN: They all cross the street — no. I would say that any trajectory of my academic career has been more or less arrested, in terms of academic status and accolades.

DUBNER: What more are you looking for, though? You’re a tenured professor, I assume, at Notre Dame. 

DENEEN: Of course. Of course. Well, there comes a point in your life where you’ve maybe reached a certain level of understanding and you’ve developed an academic worldview, and people want to hear from it. Then you begin to get invited to give lectures, maybe some of the big lectures at the big universities. It’s the kind of thing where, as you reach the end of your career, to make the circuit, and that is not forthcoming. 

DUBNER: It sounds as if you feel, well, disappointed for sure, but maybe a bit aggrieved that your work is being misread because of people who are reading it and putting it to political purpose. Is that right?

DENEEN: It’s an interesting consequence that on the one hand, the person in charge of Notre Dame’s communications office was absolutely thrilled that I’m being interviewed by you, and will appear on Freakonomics. Of course universities always want to crow about the successes, and the public prominence, of their faculty. At the same time, if that prominence is because it’s in some ways now associated with a political set of figures and positions that —

DUBNER: The Trump administration, let’s just say, right? 

DENEEN: Yes — and populism, that within academia is regarded as tantamount to fascism. It turns out that having now achieved one thing that universities appreciate and often crow about in terms of their faculty, it turns out it has the opposite effect. If I had just been working in the coal mines of academia and never appeared above the surface, that would have been perfectly fine. But it’s the nature of the prominence now. So it’s puzzling to me, on the one hand, okay, so I’ve written these things, it turns out they’ve gotten a lot of play, not necessarily with the direct intention of influencing this, that, or the other figure. And as a result, academically, it’s redounded negatively.

DUBNER: Do you feel like a persona non grata on campus at Notre Dame?

DENEEN: That’s a good question. No, I don’t feel like persona non grata, but I feel — I don’t think I can answer this. Sorry, Stephen. 

DUBNER: Well, let me go back — you mentioned the comms department. Has anyone from Notre Dame tried to dissuade you from doing interviews, including this one? 

DENEEN: No, not at all. 

DUBNER: Do you have to get clearance? 

DENEEN: No.

DUBNER: If you did, it might not be forthcoming, it sounds like you’re saying.

DENEEN: No. I would say, leaving aside the question of Notre Dame, one of the consequences of feeling this obligation when asked by journalists or by podcasters and so forth, when asked to talk about my worldview and arguments I’ve made, what I began to discover, having agreed to most of these requests over the past several years, especially as we approached election seasons in 2020 and then 2024, these were not honest brokers. These would often be very prominent journalists at, you know, some pretty major news outlets.

DUBNER: You and I discussed one of these in private, which we don’t need to repeat, but the institution may rhyme with shmoo shmork shmimes, yes? 

DENEEN: That’s one of them, but there are many. 

DUBNER: When you say they’re not honest brokers, though, Patrick, if you could explain that, I think, would be really appreciated by people who listen because, you know, I personally love journalism. I think journalism is a phenomenally valuable institution within a civic society — 

DENEEN: I agree, I agree.

DUBNER: — when done well. Like any institution, when done well. 

DENEEN: When done well.

DUBNER: Print journalists like myself, we always used to make fun of TV. They’d say, “They call it a medium because it’s neither rare nor well done.” And we clung to our belief that, you know, old-fashioned reporting, interviewing people, getting out the truth etc., etc. was an incredibly valuable thing if done well. And so when I hear from someone like you, who’s been interviewed by people, whether they’re presenting themselves as legitimate mainstream journalists or not, as you know, not honest brokers, it pains me. Because it hurts everyone and it hurts me, hurts what I do, but it hurts society, I think. So if you could give an example. I’m not asking you to name names. If you’re dying to name a name, go for it. But how this would work — what that conversation would be presented to you as, and what the actual conversation would be, and then what the publication of it would be?

DENEEN: Typically, it would be some form of email, a phone call from a journalist saying, I’m writing this story on such-and-such leading up to the election, or about this political figure or that, and we’d really like to understand from you, who seem to have written in this area. As an academic and something of a, I guess, public intellectual, I would generally agree to be interviewed. We would set up a time, we’d do a Zoom, or it’d be a phone interview. Sometimes I would ask to do written responses. And it wasn’t in terms of what I had to say or even the hostility of the questions, that’s part of the game. It was how it would be framed, how the article would be written and then the way in which the quotes would appear from me. It would say, you know, “Reflecting this tendency toward fascism,” comma, “Deneen” — something like that. Really trying to frame everything in the most negative light. Journalism, as we all know, reflects a particular progressive worldview today. Many of the journalists working today believe that it’s not enough just to report as objectively and as clearly as possible, in this case, what the responses of this particular person were. They have to frame it in such a way that you know what I think, and I’m going to make sure that you know what should be thought. 

DUBNER: Where do you think that instinct comes from? And I would just caveat that by saying that you’re attributing that to the individual journalist, but I think often that’s driven by the institution itself.

DENEEN: Well, sure, they’re being hired by these places. It goes back to some things we were talking about earlier, which is that these elite institutions really are now defending a very specific worldview that reflects the benefits and advantages of people in that strata of society. The divide between the classes or strata of our society now reflects a ferocious effort to tear down the other side. And so the institutions that are supposed to be in some ways broadly representative of the constitutive elements of all parts of our society have been really winnowed down to a very narrow perspective, largely unaware to those people working in that profession because it’s such an echo chamber.

DUBNER: It’s the water you’re swimming in. 

DENEEN: Yes, a very narrow ideological spectrum.

DUBNER: So you’re talking about journalism, or were at least, but it sounds like you could just as easily be talking about university life.

DENEEN: Of course. 

DUBNER: What is your view of the Trump administration’s approach to disciplining universities — Columbia, Harvard, etc., etc.? George Mason University, most recently. I’d love you to just assess that project of the Trump administration, whether you think it’s ill-advised, well-advised, but especially what you think it’s going to lead to.

DENEEN: I should state at the outset, some of your listeners may now assume I’m the puppet master. I have had no input.

DUBNER: Hey, you’re the one that keeps using that word, by the way. I’ve not said, “puppet master.”

DENEEN: No, I know you haven’t, but I think it’s, you know, the “ideological guru.”

DUBNER: Again, I was just quoting the Wall Street Journal.

DENEEN: I know. So to answer the specific question, I do think that the universities need to be disciplined politically. These are institutions, of course, that receive a significant amount of money from the federal government. And that money is to the end purpose of supporting and advancing the common good. I don’t think they’ve been very good trustees of that responsibility over the last number of years. They’ve become very tendentiously narrow ideologically. They have very often been places that have a kind of condescension or derision toward ordinary people who don’t typically walk through the gates of those institutions. And there has been a, I think, a concerted effort to narrow the ideological perspectives that are on offer in those institutions — you know, the cancellation, the lack of any variety of conservative voices on campus, certainly on faculties and staff and so forth. So I think they do need to be disciplined politically. But to correct that Wall Street Journal article, this does not mean that I, for one, want to see the destruction of the universities. 

DUBNER: What do you mean by “disciplined politically,” then? 

DENEEN: Discipline politically where these institutions are acting illegally when it comes to hiring practices. I think we have some pretty good idea that many of them have been, in terms of acting contrary to laws of equal opportunity and colorblindness on race, sex, gender, etc. I’ve certainly seen my fair share of those, what are probably not legal forms of hiring practices. But beyond that, to put political pressure on these institutions to do better at supporting and advancing the common good — which would include, among other things, the capacity to be more cognizant of the sources of discontent of those people who tend not to be in the university orbit today. The mixing of the classes that I spoke about earlier, the kind of mixed constitution. And I think to that extent, the administration has done some things that have at least begun to push in that direction. My great worry is that a lot of these efforts are being driven by a kind of hostility and effort to disassemble. What I would really like to see are some visions expressed for what a university is and should be, and that we collectively — politically, socially, and otherwise — would begin to articulate what that is. So that it’s not just a process of deconstruction, but hopefully a vision of what a great university would look like. 

DUBNER: So I’d love to know what you think the great university would look like. Pick a university from a particular point in time that you think served that function well. What would it be?

DENEEN: A university that I would pick that I think still does somewhat of a reasonably good job would be a place like the University of Chicago, which you know well. 

DUBNER: And why?

DENEEN: Because I think it is a place where, in the effort and pursuit of seeking truth, any and all perspectives were explored and it was understood that one needed to test one’s assumptions constantly.

DUBNER: Let’s bring it back into politics now. So whether we call you a religious conservative per se — let’s use that phrase for a community in the country right now — explain to me how so many religious conservatives across a variety of spectrums are able and willing and enthusiastic to reconcile President Trump’s many un-Christian attributes. His overt cruelty; his belittling rivals and enemies, including the powerless; sexual mores that I know you — you write about sexual mores at length, and I can’t imagine you approve of the President’s; his appetite for cronyism and corruption. Does one just put aside those attributes in a belief that the greater good is what’s worth pursuing, or is there a more delicate calculus than I’m aware of?

DENEEN: So I’ll put on my political science hat here. I’m not going to speak of my own personal views on this, but I think the way to understand the religious right’s relationship to Donald Trump is borne of the experience of — whether we think this is empirically true or not, and I’m sure many of your listeners will disagree with this assessment — but I think this is the felt sense among that community of constant and continual loss, of constant and continual political weakening of their position, regardless of whether they elected a Republican or whether a Democrat was elected to office. When the word RINO is invented, it’s been invented in part to express this, “Republican in name only,” that the party that the religious right supported, of course since Ronald Reagan, maybe Barry Goldwater, continued to fail to support and advance those positions that were most of importance to people on the religious right. This is especially of course in the social domain, family values and so forth, policies and court decisions and Supreme Court justices that ended up betraying what they thought they were getting, ended up leading, I think, people in this part of the political coalition to say, You know what? It’s not enough just to vote nice people who wear ties and say nice words, and they’re just Chamber of Commerce Republicans that always vote to send factories overseas. We want somebody who’s going to fight. We’re not looking for the nice guy anymore. We’re not looking for the Paul Ryans. We’re looking for somebody who is ready to take down this system. The problem isn’t just individual politicians anymore, it’s systemic. And so I think they basically said, we need somebody who’s going to break things. And I think they were willing to overlook all of the personal peccadilloes and everything you described — which, I will state, those are not aspects of President Trump that I’m especially fond of. But the idea that he would fight and he would take on the system, and he had no compunction about it. He wasn’t afraid of the New York Times being critical of him. I think that explains the view of the religious right in that respect.

Coming up, after the break: Patrick Deneen on the fate of some other institutions under the second Trump administration. I’m Stephen Dubner, this is Freakonomics Radio; we’ll be right back.

*      *      *

DUBNER: I want to go back to something in the Wall Street Journal article that I brought up before, it was talking about your 2023 book Regime Change. The Journal article calls it “a preview of the Trump administration’s intention to breathe fire on America’s cultural institutions.” When I read that, I thought about how the Trump administration has come after a variety of cultural institutions. There have been the universities, which we’ve talked about. There’s the Kennedy Center, that Trump has commandeered for himself. And the Smithsonian. There have been the media outlets that President Trump is routinely suing. I’m curious what you think of that type of activity, how well or poorly you think the administration is following if not what you prescribe, but what at least you described as shortcomings in those institutions.

DENEEN: I guess I should preface that question by saying that there’s no administration or there’s no political order that hasn’t sought to influence, broadly speaking, social and cultural institutions. Having said that, yes, it’s quite clear that it’s a much more visibly frontal assault on a number of these institutions. And I think that’s why he was elected. The religious right wanted a fighter and they wanted someone who would take on institutions that have become, or seen themselves less acting as the tastemakers of our society, often contrary and hostile to a wide swath of our fellow citizens. I don’t necessarily agree with every form it takes. Again, nobody’s asking me. But I sympathize with the reason for it, and I think to the extent that we are beginning to see simply by the force of a kind of political pressure, shifts in how — for example, we’ve been seeing changes in the Washington Post newsroom, some of which might be Jeff Bezos, but I think some of which might be political pressure. I’m not saying it should become a different monoculture, but what I want to underscore is that the capacity to be more broadly in touch with the American population, I think would be a beneficial and desirable outcome of this. Whether that’s the case, it’s a kind of crude mechanism, but I’m sympathetic with the reasons behind it.

DUBNER: When I hear you talk about the reasons that Donald Trump was elected twice now, and what people want from him, I do think about Thomas Carlyle, the Scottish philosopher, most famous to me at least for his Great Man theory of history — which I’m happy to summarize, but you could probably summarize it better than I can. I’m curious to know whether you think Carlyle would have identified Trump as one of his rare Great Men.

DENEEN: It seems to me the Great Man theory is not necessarily that the great man is necessarily a good man, or the outcomes are all good, but a Great Man is someone who fundamentally shifts the trajectory of history. I suspect in 20 years or 50 years that people will be looking back, historians and political commentators and so forth, will look back and say that was one of the more important figures in American history. The non-consecutive terms, what happened leading up to and then during those terms, and of course we had things like Covid intervening, and a massive number of social dislocations, the George Floyd summer, and then now this much more vigorous exercise of political authority during the second term. I’m a political theorist, not a political scientist, so I don’t know what things will look like in some number of years. But I would suspect if nothing else, we will see a fairly long-term shift in the political alliance, and broadly the realignment of American politics. It might have happened without Trump, but it’s hard to imagine it would have happened in the way and with the rapidity with which it happened. 

DUBNER: You just mentioned that predicting the future is hard, with which I would very much agree. But I’ve been reading a lot of you over the past few weeks and I’ve seen some predictions of yours. You wrote a piece about peak oil in which you acknowledged that that was a legitimate prediction. It just turned out to be mostly wrong. But then more recently, here’s something you wrote, this was in April of this year, you wrote that the MAGA-DOGE coalition will hold, that it will, “persist in relative comity at least until the start of the next campaign cycle,” meaning the 2026 midterms. How are you feeling about that prediction at the moment?

DENEEN: I actually think both predictions are pretty on mark.

DUBNER: Oh, you’re sticking to them.

DENEEN: Well, the peak oil was not that we’re running out of oil. It’s that the easy oil has been gotten, that we are now living in a society where energy is more difficult. Obviously, technology has made it easier to get to certain other kinds of oil. But one of the things that certainly is true is that it makes us more susceptible — by “us” I’ll say the United States and broadly the West — more susceptible and subject to very inhospitable regimes where we have to turn to fill in what we no longer can produce ourselves. When we think about the massive U.S. involvement in the Middle East, that remains a constant ongoing source of political difficulty in our country down to what’s happening in our campuses. I would say that’s evidence of — maybe the word “peak oil” is something we don’t want to use but of hard oil, difficult oil. So, I’ll stick with some aspects of that. But the MAGA-DOGE — again, people can mock me if they want for saying this — what hasn’t lasted is the odd relationship between Trump and Musk. In fact, between friends I said, those guys aren’t going to get along that long. They’re two massive egos, that’s not going to last. What has lasted is the desire to combine two things that don’t go easily together. And that’s really what that article was about. MAGA, which is an economic set of policies and commitments that are not libertarian. They are not classical liberal: tariffs, and limiting immigration, deporting illegal immigrants, picking winners and losers, as classical liberals would say, in economics, attempting to support certain kinds of industries. That’s MAGA, at least in the economic domain. DOGE is cutting government, decreasing inefficiencies, going after wasteful spending. And if you look at the One Big, Beautiful Bill, that was kind of MAGA-DOGE. It’s kind of combination of both of those things. While you still have the MAGA economic policies rolling out, you also still have the desire to reduce regulation and reduce taxation. So these two things are combined. And I say this because what does the Republican coalition look like after Trump? It’s going to be probably in the person of J.D. Vance, and that article was really saying, J.D. is that effort to keep those two things together. So, I’ll stick with that as well.

DUBNER: Let me just address, though, what you just said about the accomplishments or the aims of the Big, Beautiful Bill. While trying to accomplish the goals that you just stated, there’s also a massive increase to the federal debt and federal deficit, which I can’t find anyone in any government over the past 50 years who thinks that’s a great idea. And there’s also, I don’t want to call it an abandonment, but a great diminishment in funding for the care and coverage of the most vulnerable people in our society. When I look at the Trump administration and President Trump himself, it’s an administration whose leader is demonstrably enthusiastic about acquiring wealth and power for himself and his allies, while at the same time reducing help for what we used to call the needy. You’re a serious Catholic teaching at a Catholic university. The appetite for wealth and power is not very Jesus-like, nor is turning a blind eye on the needy. 

DENEEN: I’m not advancing Donald Trump as a moral exemplar by any stretch.

DUBNER: I’m not asking for moral. I could care less about moral at the moment. But I don’t understand why the menu of items that the Trump administration has been pursuing is so widely embraced by all the Republicans, all the conservatives, when prima facie, some of them go against everything that they’ve stood for. I understand that there’s a pursuit of a larger good, but it’s hard for me to understand why those particulars are embraced when they seem to have such evidence against their virtue and value.

DENEEN: I’m a little bit uncertain whether you’re asking me what I personally think as a Catholic about these phenomena, or put on my political theorist hat as you asked me to do, how I would explain these. 

DUBNER: I’ll take either.

DENEEN: I think I try to offer some explanation for why we see not just this administration, but so many administrations increasing the debt, and what would be necessary to begin to genuinely try to pay that down, we would have to really as a society develop the capacity to think generationally. A liberal order based on what I think of as this notional idea of the social contract tends to be very presentist, tends to be about satisfying ourselves in a more immediate way and not thinking, not only in terms of solidarity with others whom we happen to live with and near, but thinking in solidarity intergenerationally. Without that, I don’t see any prospect of really reducing the debt. On the question of how I think it’s at all possible that, as far as I understand them, the Medicare provisions of that bill, how they could possibly have been supported by Trump and the MAGA world, here I think you probably have long-standing Republican/classical liberal desire to reform entitlements. And this was one mechanism by which you could satisfy that, or scratch that particular itch. Do I think this was personally well done and desirable? No, I do not. Maybe nobody’s going to touch Social Security, but you know, increasing the age and increasing the level at which you tax for Social Security would be a sensible way to go forward without destroying I think, that necessary institution. Probably we share agreement that we need entitlement reform that doesn’t destroy those institutions, but I do think there were at least enough members of the House of Representatives and Senate that wanted that itch to be scratched.

DUBNER: Going back to some of your policy endorsements in your book Regime Change, one of them was to enforce public morality, ban porn, and denounce transgressive media. What does that mean? Am I transgressive media? Who defines that?

DENEEN: Maybe this will be controversial, probably is, but the more anodyne understanding is that there used to be something called, I think, Family Hour on television. It wasn’t banning transgression per se, but it was recognizing that there are certain hours of the day when, in the interest of paying deference especially to families, maybe of a more traditional worldview, one’s job as members of the media was not to promote transgressive worldview to young children. That was specifically the kind of thing I was thinking about. The willingness to, in this case, publicly fund it at some level, or people are using public airwaves, to say, you have a responsibility to understand that you play an educative role in our society. You influence the worldview of people. And in deference to those who don’t want to expose their children to these transgressive ideas, as a public matter, a matter of public commitment, this is something we as a society should prioritize. Now, does that solve it? Does that solve the problem that kids can get on the internet and there’s a lot worse stuff on there than you can see on — yeah, no, it doesn’t solve that. 

DUBNER: Yeah, this is a genie-out-of-the-bottle problem. And let me just ask you to cast your mind back to maybe it’s 1,500 years or 2,200 years, I know your mind can go back there. We didn’t even get to talk about really your favorite dark-horse political philosopher. That’s Giambattista Vico, is that his name?

DENEEN: Vico. That’s right. 

DUBNER: Yeah, sorry. We’re running out of time. We didn’t get to Vico.

DENEEN: That’s okay.

DUBNER: I am curious how previous thinkers have dealt with the genie-out-of-the-bottle problem that you’re describing right now.

DENEEN: Every society advances a set of views. I think we tend to operate in the view that, well, we ideally operate in a neutral system, right? This is the liberal conceit, a neutral system that doesn’t put a finger on the scale in any particular direction. But the finger on the scale is there, and the finger on the scale is on one that I could say broadly seeks to dissolve, take down, whether by intent or simply force of societal norms, to disassemble the guardrails that most societies understand as necessary to form and shape a responsible human life. That argument, the suggestion that, Okay, let’s as a matter of public record say, here’s something that we value. We value a public, educative aspect of our society. We value advancing views of human flourishing that include the idea of sound families, that include that idea that marriage is a positive good, which social studies will tell, you this is the case — getting married, staying married, having children. That commitment to local communities is a positive good as opposed to simply being a part of this more deracinated globalized economic system. And that suggestion, that argument was it would be a beneficial and desirable aspect of shifting from this substantive libertarian worldview to one in which we support a certain set of positive visible goods. Does it solve the problems? Of course not, but I do think those public stances very often, in very subtle ways, help to shape how we perceive the world. 

DUBNER: When my kids were young, and they would encounter something in school that was overboard in terms of — you know, all the things that you get in an enlightened New York City school — I came up with a phrase, I’m sure many people have said some version of it before, but I said to them, you know, I think that almost every correction is an overcorrection. The problem is, when the correction is made and it is an overcorrection, the opponents will try to invalidate the reason for the correction in the first place, which is legitimate. 

DENEEN: This is one of my major concerns about aspects of the current Trump approach to correcting many of the elite institutions. Where those institutions now stand is a kind of overcorrection coming out of the late ’60s and, you know, a whole host of desires to kind of overturn an older, maybe more traditional way of life. And the Trump moment has, you know, there’s a real danger that it could also be an overcorrection. I’m not the ideological guru, necessarily, but to the extent that I do have some ears in that world, it’s to call for and to underscore that there needs to be articulated a positive vision. What is good journalism? What is a good university? What is a flourishing social and political order? There’s a real danger that the desire to correct the correction ends up simply being one that disassembles and destroys. I’m the last person you would encounter that wants to see, for example, the university simply dismantled. It needs correction, and I’m sad to say that it had ample opportunity to self-correct and didn’t take it. In more hopeful moments, I’m beginning to see some evidence that that’s happening. Under the threat of political pressure, there’s a kind of awareness that, Well, yeah, we really do need to correct what we’ve done. That’s the hopeful mornings. And then the more fearful mornings are the ones where I think, Oh, it’s all going to go wrong. 

In the few weeks since I had this conversation with Patrick Deneen, I have found myself thinking hard about it. I suspect you will too. There are a lot of interesting ways to interpret Deneen, because a) he’s an interesting thinker himself; and b) he’s got a particularly fluid way of connecting thinkers from antiquity to the here-and-now. But the conversation also left me with more questions. When you want to shift a social or political system back toward its traditional roots, who gets to decide which elements of progress have been hurtful, and which have been helpful? Which parts of the correction are overcorrection, and which are sensible — and for whom? Many millions of people around the world have purposely moved away from traditions that they felt held them back, or punished them. Do Aristotle and Vico — and Patrick Deneen — speak for them? Defend and protect them? It’s not clear, at least not to me. Another way to interpret Deneen after this conversation is as a sign to the Democratic Party. Here’s what I mean by that: when you lose the allegiance of a thinker like Deneen, you’ve really lost something. He was a Democratic lifer; he got his Ph.D. under an “ardent New Deal Democrat,” as he put it, and he spent time in the Clinton administration. So if you, dear listener, are a Democrat, you may find yourself wishing he had stayed in your camp, because he could be really useful right about now. And if you’re a Republican, you may find yourself hoping that Deneen will be the “ideological guru” that the Wall Street Journal was describing. Because a Republican Party under the influence of someone like Patrick Deneen would certainly be a more deliberative and conventional party than the one it’s become. Let us know what you think, whatever side of whichever aisle you happen to live on; our email is radio@freakonomics.com. My thanks to Patrick Deneen for the conversation — thanks also to Cass Sunstein, Eugene McCarraher, Marc Dunkelman, Robert Putnam, and the editors of Commonweal Magazine for research help. Take care of yourself and, if you can, someone else too.

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Freakonomics Radio is produced by Stitcher and Renbud Radio. This episode was produced by Alina Kulman, and edited by Ellen Frankman. It was mixed by Eleanor Osborne, with help from Jeremy Johnston. The Freakonomics Radio Network staff includes Augusta Chapman, Dalvin Aboagye, Elsa Hernandez, Jasmin Klinger, Gabriel Roth, Greg Rippin, Morgan Levey, Sarah Lilley, Theo Jacobs, and Zack Lapinski. Our theme song is “Mr. Fortune,” by the Hitchhikers; and our composer is Luis Guerra.