Will Americans Choose Populism and Liberty or Liberalism?

The topic of discussion for this Constitution Monday concerns liberalism versus populism. Popularism arose in opposition to liberalism. Americans did not like what was happening to their country in the name of liberalism and began looking for a leader that they could trust. The Tea Party arose in opposition to what Democrats were doing under President Barack Obama.

Then Donald Trump announced in 2015 that he was a candidate for President of the United States. Americans liked what Trump was saying and voted for him. Under the Trump administration, the borders of the United States became the most secure they have ever been. The leaders of Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea backed off from their threats towards the United States. The economy was roaring, and life was good in America.

Trump should have run re-election, but something happened to thwart his campaign. Joe Biden entered the Oval Office, and the United States began to go downhill under the policies of the Biden administration. Americans are now wide awake and are seeing the effects of Democrat policies. They are currently searching for another leader. Do they go with the tried- and-true leader but hated Trump, or do they go with someone else who has not proven their ability to make America great again? Trump’s base remains strong, but he needs Never-Trumpers, Independents, and even Democrats to join his cause: Make America Great Again.”

Patrick Deneen published an interesting article in the Deseret News about populism and liberalism. He began his article by stating, “Liberalism has generated its own undoing.” Further into the article, he wrote the following: 

Several hundred years into this experiment, we have witnessed at firsthand the rise of a new ruling class, a “meritocracy” that has thrived under the conditions established and advanced by liberalism. Liberalism is today in crisis, not just because of the bad behavior of the new elite, but because its rise has corresponded with the attrition of institutions that benefited the lower classes while restraining the ambitious who wished to escape its restraints. The weakening of the family, neighborhood, association, church and religious community, and other associations has resulted in the degradation of the social and economic conditions of “the many,” even as “the few” have garnered a monopoly both on economic and social advantages.

In the advanced liberal democracies across the world, working-class voters have risen up to reject the leaders who have regarded those who have been “left behind” with disdain and contempt. In response, liberalism has unmasked itself, revealing itself as an ideology that is willing to force those who oppose it into submission, and advancing an increasingly “illiberal” liberalism. Efforts to limit the political power of the culturally dispossessed and economically disadvantaged – frequently by accusing majorities of being “anti-democratic” – increasingly reveal liberalism not to be a mutually shared comprehensive system that allows self-determination, but rather a particular partisan set of commitments. Once an unassailable public philosophy, liberalism has been delegitimized.

The surge of a largely unorganized “populism” has arisen because of the degraded conditions that liberalism has created among the masses. Both social and economic conditions are measurably worse among the working classes across the western world, even as life has gotten better for the liberal ruling class. What is often called “progress” – globalized economic expansion and the dismantling of traditional social mores – has largely benefited only a small liberal elite. Like the revolutions against the ancient regime, the current order has lost support of the demos.

These degraded conditions have arisen not because liberalism has failed, but because it has succeeded. Titanic economic inequality and a fraying social fabric are the results of realizing liberalism’s conception of liberty. Ancient ideals of liberty as self-rule, requiring duty and self-sacrifice, were replaced with the liberal understanding of freedom: doing as one likes. Realization of liberal freedom has led to a hyper-individualistic order that weakens national economic solidarity and tends toward the dismantling of social institutions.

The institutions of family, religion and government raised guardrails on the otherwise natural appetites and desires that, when succumbed to, resulted in what the classical and Biblical tradition regarded as a condition of servitude or slavery. The person who succumbed to lower nature not only had the soul of a slave, but also had the soul of a tyrant – a gluttony for power that would allow the enslaved tyrant to commit any act, any crime, any awful deed. All of the citizenry, including the powerful, needed to be habituated to the virtue that accorded with this classical ideal of freedom, and the guardrails helped with that education for liberty.

Under the new definition of liberty, what had previously been considered as guardrails came instead to be regarded as oppressions and unjust limitations on individual liberty. As a result, the advance of liberal liberty has meant the gradual, and then accelerating weakening, redefinition or overthrowing of many formative institutions and practices of human life, whether family, the community, a vast array of associations, schools and universities, architecture, the arts and even the churches. In their place, a flattened world invites: the wide-open spaces of liberal freedom, a vast and widening playground for the project of self-creation.

Today, the story of liberalism’s tearing down of guardrails is often told as a progress from heroic overcoming of past injustices to a present moment of enlightenment, justice, liberty and equality. Oppressed people are liberated from the unjust constraints of an earlier age. Anyone questioning the story is accused of defending privilege and nostalgically craving to reinstitute the injustices of a benighted past.

Deneen’s article is much longer, but I encourage you to study it. The bottom line is that the liberalism envisioned and created by our forefathers has been abused and bastardized into what we have in America today. Americans can either rise up and vote Democrats and other liberals out of office, or we can continue down the road that we are currently traveling. If we choose to do the latter, we have no one but ourselves to blame when we lose true liberty and freedom.