Patrick J. Deneen

Why America needs regime change

From our UK edition

No sensible reader of the news could look at America and think it is flourishing. Massive economic inequality and the breakdown of family formation have eroded the very foundations of society.  Once-beautiful cities and towns around the nation have succumbed to an ugly blight. Cratering rates of childbirth, rising numbers of ‘deaths of despair,’ widespread addictions to pharmaceuticals and electronic distractions testify to the prevalence of a dull ennui and psychic despair. The older generation has betrayed the younger by saddling it with unconscionable levels of debt. Warnings about both oligarchy and mob rule appear daily on the front pages of newspapers throughout country, as well as throughout the West.

The end of liberalism

From our UK edition

In recent days we’ve seen inspiring demands for liberty from the oppressed citizens of Iran. Our situation in the West today seems the opposite: too much ill-used liberty combined with a soft authoritarianism that we have largely welcomed.  We buy what we want, throw away what we no longer desire, and allow the debt to accumulate.  We enjoy Caligulaesque sexual liberty but no longer marry nor have children.  We eat until we are obese, legalise drugs that take the edge off, consume a degraded popular culture that leaves us stupefied, and alter our brainscapes through unceasing consumption of online ephemera.