How do democracies disappear?

Everyone agrees that society is on a bad path, but what exactly is the cause of this evil?

Some stress economic problems: The simultaneous concentration of wealth at the top and stagnation in the middle layer has delegated the system. People like me stress cultural problems. If you have 60 years of radical individualism and ruthless meritocracy, you will end up with an atomic, skeptical and divided society.

But some stress intellectually. The people who designed our liberal system made fundamental mistakes that are already coming back. Notre Dame Patrick Deneen's polytologist falls into this camp. His last book “why liberalisation” failed is a challenge for those of us who want to revive liberal democratic order. It will attract many followers, among those who are losing confidence in the entire project.

Deneen argues liberal democracy has betrayed its promises. It should promote equality, but it has brought more inequality and a new aristocracy. It had to give ordinary people control over the government, but ordinary people feel removed from the government. It was to promote freedom, but it creates a degraded popular culture in which consumers become slaves to their appetites.

Many youths feel trapped in a system they do not believe in. Deneen quotes one of these students as saying: “because we see humanity and therefore his institutions as corrupt and selfish, the only person we can rely on is ourselves. The only way we can avoid failure, not feeling left in the mud, and finally not diving into the chaotic world around us, is to have the means to rely solely on ourselves.

The problem, Deneen argues, began at the beginning of the occasion. Greek and medieval philosophies praised freedom, but they realized that before a person could help govern society, he should be able to govern himself. People had to get used to virtue through institutions that had not been chosen by family, religion, community, social standards.

When Communism and Fascism failed in the 20th century, this version of liberalism appeared triumphant. But it was a victory like that of Pirro, argues Denene.

Liberalism claims to be neutral, but it's actually anticultural. It separates people from nature, community, tradition and country. Cut them off. <x)

Once the family and the local community erode and social norms break apart, individuals remain naked and vulnerable. They seek comfort in the state. It wanders between nonpersonial systems: global capitalism and the distant state. As the social order rots, people cling to security that offers authoritarianism. A feature of modern totalitarianism was that it climbed and took power through the discontent of the isolation and loneliness of the people”, he notes. Deneen urges people to dedicate themselves to the local community a kind of agrarianism of Wendell Barry.

Deneen's book is valuable because he focuses on the central problem of our time. Important debates are now not about politics. It's for the basic values and structures of our social order. Still, he's wrong. Liberal democracy has done well for 300 years. If the problem were really in its roots, would it not have appeared earlier?

The difficulties stem, not from something inherent in liberalisation, but from our neglecting the moral order and vision of human dignity, which are embedded within the liberalisation itself. As those who have read John Stewart Millin, Walt Whitman, Abraham Lincoln, Vaslav Havelin, Michael Novak and Meir Solovetic, liberal democracy contains a rich version of human prosperity and solidarity, which Deneen erases as rubber, from history.

Liberal democracy and moral order rise above the idea that souls form in freedom and not in servilism, in enlargement and not in stagnation. On the idea that our basic institutions, such as family, faith, tradition, and community, guide us toward greater love and shared dreams, which we follow in the great gym of freedom.

Yes, liberalization sometimes has tension with religion, tradition, family, and community, which Denene rightfully exalts. But liberalization is not their killer. At this point, there are community healers in towns and towns, who actually live the liberal democratic vision of good life deep in their communities, handed over to their ideals, extending their hand to other communities, growing in their freedom.

We don't have to have fun with little things. / NYT In Albanian from the World.al