Making the Empire More Colorful

Roger Berkowitz
In Harpers last week, Christopher Beah talks to Patrick J. Deneen, Francis Fukuyama, Deirdre Nansen McClosky, and Cornell West about Liberalism and whether it is worth saving. Amidst a thoughtful and wide-ranging discussion, the conversation turned to the neo-fascist or anti-liberal backlash. West and Deneen find common ground in their skepticism about the professional managerial class and its embrace of multiculturalism. It just makes the ruling class more colorful, West argues. Liberalism, Deneen adds, always needs to distinguish those who are good liberals from those who are not yet mature and educated enough to live freely. The discussion is well worth your time. 

West: The danger, though, is how intense the backlash is at the moment, especially against the elites and the technocrats. The backlash is deeply white supremacist, deeply male supremacist, deeply xenophobic, with a deep hatred of us sitting around this table—the professional-managerial class, the elites who will betray them. We might not have that much time. American neofascism may kick in so quickly that we don’t have time to deal with these subtle issues.

And that’s why we have to ask: How do we attenuate the neofascist backlash? Look at Charlottesville. “Jews will not replace us, blacks will not replace us, women will not replace us.” This is the lunatic fringe, but it’s moving to the center. That was 2017. Five years later, it’s been normalized.

Deneen: This is not just a problem with American capitalism, and the political blowback that we’re talking about is not limited to the United States. Conditions here are maybe particularly fertile for it, but it’s happening all over the developed Western world. We’re seeing the advance of right-wing populism in Italy, and elsewhere in Europe. We’ve certainly seen it in parts of Eastern Europe. It’s not a uniquely American phenomenon.

And I think it does arise from what Christopher Lasch called the betrayal of democracy by the elites. As Lasch described it, we have a managerial class that sees itself as detached from and no longer bearing responsibilities to those who have not been successful—because it’s their fault, they didn’t work hard enough.

West: Part of our problem, especially in this country, is that we’ve got some very precious fellow citizens who are thoroughly convinced that the professional-managerial class is dominated by greed and arrogance and condescension and haughtiness and has given up on respecting them as human beings.

All the talk about plurality and diversity and equity and all these bureaucratic categories trying to deal with difference—when it really comes down to it, this class doesn’t respect ordinary people. So this multiculturalism within the professional-managerial class, what does it do? It just makes the empire more colorful. It just makes class hierarchy more colorful. And yet the damage is still done—people still feel as if they’re pushed to the margins, as if their dignity is being crushed.

Deneen: This is a sentiment that’s expressed on both the left and the right. In National Review, Kevin Williamson condemns the people who didn’t get out of these backward, broken-down, nowhere places—Steubenville, South Bend, Gary—because they just didn’t have the gumption to get up and rent a U-Haul. We’re talking about people whose families may have lived there for generations. But he says it was their fault for not renting a U-Haul.

There’s a sense that it’s your fault if you’re a loser in this system, and it’s no comfort to say, “Well, you’re twenty-five times richer than people two hundred years ago.” It’s no comfort to these people if they’re being condescended to and regarded as objects of contempt by their betters. If you don’t want the ugliest form of rebellion that I think we are increasingly likely to see, there had better be a genuine sense of duty and responsibility to these people that doesn’t presume that you have to go to Harvard or Yale or Princeton to succeed.

And to be frank, I think this is just liberalism, once again, identifying those who haven’t accepted or embraced the ideal of the autonomous individual that has always allowed liberals to define a certain part of the population as existing outside of the liberal circle. It has been Native Americans. It has been African Americans. It has been unborn children. And now it’s increasingly those members, especially of the white working class—though it’s not just the white working class—who haven’t pulled themselves up by their bootstraps and gotten out of Steubenville.