Deneen is one of a handful of cultural conservatives that understands that "liberalism" is first and foremost about how culture adapts to the market economy:
Hobby Lobby—like every chain store of its kind—participates in an economy that is no longer “religious” or even “moral.” That is, it participates in an economy that arose based on the rejection of the subordination of markets embedded within, and subject to, social and moral structures. This “Great Transformation” was detailed and described with great acuity by Karl Polanyi in his masterful 1944 book of that title. He described a sea change of economic practice that took place especially beginning in the 19th-century, but whose theoretical groundwork had been laid already in the 17th- and 18th-centuries by thinkers like Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Adam Smith. As he succinctly described this “transformation,” previous economic arrangements in which markets were “embedded” within moral and social structures, practices, and customs were replaced by ones in which markets were liberated from those contexts, and shorn of controlling moral and religious norms and ends. “Ultimately that is why the control of the economic system by the market is of overwhelming consequence to the whole organization of society: it means no less than the running of society as an adjunct to the market. Instead of economy being embedded in social relations, social relations are embedded in the economic system.”
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Polanyi describes how the replacement of this economy [embedded in traditional communities] required concerted and often violent reshaping of the existing life-world, most often by elite economic and State actors disrupting and displacing traditional communities and practices. It also required not only the separation of markets from social and religious contexts, and with that move the “individuation” of people, but their acceptance that their labor and nature were nothing more than commodities subject to price mechanisms, a transformative way of considering people and nature alike in newly utilitarian terms. Yet market liberalism required treating both people and natural resources as these “fictitious commodities,” as material for use in industrial processes, in order to disassociate markets from morals and “re-train” people to think of themselves first and foremost as individuals separate from nature and each other. As Polanyi pithily described this transformation, “laissez-faire was planned.” (Source)
While I almost always agree with Deneen and the others at TAC in their understanding about how we got here, I depart from them because I am resigned that what was lost is lost, and it's pointless to keep whining about it. And I differ from them because I embrace the welfare state when they do not, not because it repairs the damage done to embedded communities, not because it's some approximation of utopia, but because human decency demands that something be done to mitigate the damage wreaked by market capitalism, and no other means is capable.
I read somewhere, probably in TAC, that the one thing that all conservatives agree about is that something happenened in the past--a mistake was made--and now things are terribly wrong. They differ on how far back the mistake was made. For some it was the 1960s; in Deneen's case it traces back to mid to late 1600s and Hobbes and Locke. I wonder, though, if Deneen would agree with me that a mistake was made in 1979/80 when the Anglo-American world to the cheers of conservatives embraced Thatcher and Reagan. By his own argument Neoliberalism is Hobbes and Locke updated and repackaged, and surely he can see that it takes a bad situation and has made and continues to make it worse.