Just finished Patrick Deneen's Why Liberalism Failed, and I can't emphasize enough how terrible of a book this is. Keep in mind that it has heavily influenced the PostLiberal Right's ideology (the Conservatives currently in power). He hates both Progressive Liberalism as well as Classical Liberalism (free markets, democracy, etc). He spends 250 pages complaining about modern consumerism (a valid complaint) and blaming it on individualistic societies that allow people to live how they wish. His conclusion is essentially to advocate for a society with mandated community and enforced hardship, since he believes that some type of asceticism is the only true form of freedom and individuals cannot be trusted to create their own communities. He identifies real atomization of society, but his only alternatives are social arrangements that historically required either geographic immobility, religious monopoly, or state enforcement (i.e. authoritarianism of some type), but he never honestly states this outright even though his argument is obvious. https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300240023/why-liberalism-failed/
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in the words of Socrates, what the fuck
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