The University of West Florida will be hosting one of the nation’s top political scientists next week. Dr. Patrick Deneen is a professor of Political Science at the University of Notre Dame. His 2018 book “Why Liberalism Failed” has been published in 20 languages around the world and earned praise from former President Barack Obama. His latest book is called “Regime Change: Toward a Postliberal Future."
Dr. Deneen, a graduate of Rutgers University, is the featured speaker at this year’s UWF Askew Lecture in downtown Pensacola. He spoke with WUWF’s Bob Barrett who asked just how many definitions of liberalism are out there.
Patrick Deneen: Yeah, probably as many definitions as there are people on the planet.
Bob Barrett: Given what we hear in the media every day, and I say this as a member of the media, do the terms conservative and liberal even mean anything anymore?
Deneen: Well, they mean a multiplicity of things, but they refer back to some very fairly specific political philosophies. And that's the area that I teach in. So when I use those terms, they are connected to some very distinct and concrete philosophical traditions. So even though there are a multiplicity of definitions, I think there are ways we can talk about these that connect them with a body of thought that have a certain amount of rigor and definition
Barrett: What was it about this theme, about these subjects that interested you? I mean, this has been a big portion of your life?
Deneen: Yeah. Well, I study political philosophy, and I teach political philosophy, which means I'm teaching sort of the great books. I'm teaching the great texts of the Western tradition. I start with Plato, and we run through Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Locke. And all of these thinkers are talking about political ideas or ideologies, some of which are still influential, and some of which we now regard as antiquated and no longer relevant to us. And so when you begin looking at political philosophy in that broad historical scope, it allows you to see your own way of life and your own system as one of a number of types or ways of thinking about organizing politics. So, in a sense, it allows you to see that system a bit from the outside as opposed to living within it. It allows you to see it more philosophically. And once you begin to look at it a little bit more from the outside, you can, I think, more clearly, see both its benefits and its positive features, as well as its negative features. So I think it's that philosophical traction that, for me in particular, drew me to the kind of study of our own system, our own way of life.
Barrett: Do you think the average person on the street gives this too much or too little thought?
Deneen: (It’s) probably just about right in a way. Because most of us have to get along and do our jobs and live our lives. And these kinds of more philosophical reflections are not necessarily everyone's taste or can be kind of a distraction. But in a way, that said, I think the political system that we live in is one of the most philosophically based political systems in the history of the world. The American system began as a set of philosophical claims. And if you read the Declaration of Independence or you read the Constitution and the works that justified our Constitution, the Federalist Papers, you quickly come to see that our own system that we kind of take for granted and think about it as a just kind of background order, actually is based in a set of ideas that can be debated and that were debated. And so I think if we had a form of education, a system of education that really emphasized to every American citizen, or potential American citizen who wants to be here, the basic ideas and justifications of our political order, we might actually have a more healthy political order as a result of that.
Barrett: Do you think current civics education goes nearly far enough?
Deneen: No, I don't think it does. And that's in significant part not only because of the absence of civics in our elementary schools and our secondary schools. But broadly speaking, there's a complete absence of civics at the college level, where typically the people who are training teachers, and the people who will be interacting with children of the next generation, they don't have the equipment to teach civics. So I think it would take a pretty significant commitment across the board for us to begin a more serious cultivation and education in civics in this country.
Barrett: Given the current political climate and what's going on with schools and everything, do you think there's a teacher alive who would take on that topic or just say, 'No, I'm not touching that,?'
Deneen: Well, everything is politicized. Everything is always politicized. So you're right that it's not a particularly promising environment in which to tackle this particular issue. But I think to an extent, you could argue that the nature of our political crisis or the breakdown of various aspects of what we once thought about as a kind of fairly healthy American political system is not unrelated to the fact that we have lost a kind of widespread knowledge of what the American political system is about. So, I guess you have to start somewhere, and my view would be we could start, at the very least, with simply explanatory introductions to what is the Declaration of Independence? What are its arguments? How does it relate to the philosophy of liberalism? What are the ways in which that philosophy offers a certain understanding of who we are as a people? So I think you could base it on a kind of more factual basis that wouldn't necessarily, right off the bat, get you into the hot water of partisan stances.
Barrett: When you go out and you give speeches and you give talks like you're going to give in Pensacola, what do you talk about? What's your subject matter?
Deneen: Well, I try to do what I'm talking about here. You know, there's the great image of the two fish swimming in the fishbowl, and an older fish swims by and says “Isn't the water nice today?” And the one younger fish turns the other younger fish and says, well, what's water? When you're someone in my position who studies these kinds of ideas as my professional life and my career, I get the great privilege of introducing my students, and then people in communities where I go to visit, I get to introduce them to water, or the water that we swim in. In many cases, people are aware of, to some extent, are aware of the kind of water we swim in. But I try to do that in a way that, without assuming a deeply professional knowledge of this material, that helps people get a deeper understanding of this order that we live in, and I hope helps them to articulate in a more nuanced way the nature of, I think, the political dissatisfactions that we're all feeling across the political spectrum. In a way, you could say that's what holds us together at the moment, is that we're all discontent. I try to speak to those discontents in a way that doesn't immediately and, perhaps not ultimately, that it doesn't alienate at least half of my audience. And that's a challenge these days, trying to appeal to something common that we might all recognize that are the source of our present discontents.
Barrett: When you speak to your audiences and you do (question and answer segments), are there questions that you absolutely know you're going to get almost every time?
Deneen: Well, sure. There's the questions you've been asking, “What is liberalism?” although I do try to explain that in the talk itself. There's always questions about Trump, of course. I expect those will continue for at least six more months and maybe a bit longer thereafter. But maybe the question that I hear most often, especially from younger people, is the way in which technology is shaping and transforming sort of their lives and the political world they live in. And I think for those of us of a certain age, these were not pressing questions when we were their age. When we were 18, 19, 20 years old, our biggest concern wasn't how our current technology back then was transforming our world. So I think it's helpful for those of us who are kind of running the world right now to be really keenly aware and sensitive to the ways that digital natives are experiencing the world in ways that are, I think, deeply problematic and even, creating real distortions in the lives of the young people in our society today.
Barrett: When I was 18, the biggest technological breakthrough was a touch-tone phone.
Deneen: We didn't get that for years. We were doing dialing.
Barrett: Well, you're coming to the South, so this is the most important question I've got for you. Is Rutgers ever going to have a winning football team?
Deneen: Hey, I'm in Notre Dame now, so I get to root for the Fighting Irish. Uh, boy. Ah, it's just at least worth mentioning. Rutgers played the very first collegiate football game against what was then its arch-rival, Princeton University, 20 minutes down the road. And it's been a pretty steep decline since that first victory of Rutgers in the very first college football game well over 100 years ago. I wish my alma mater well but playing catch up in this day and age is extremely difficult, as we know.
Patrick Deneen will be the featured speaker at the Askew Experience UWF Downtown Lecture Series on Monday, April 1, at 6 p.m. at the Museum of Commerce in downtown Pensacola. This event is free and open to the public, butregistration is required.
