644. Has America Lost Its Appetite for the Common Good?

Patrick Denineen is a professor in the political science department at Notre Dame, the Catholic University in Indiana, that was founded in 1842. But he is not a political scientist. He is quick to point this out, and he has a lot of practice pointing it out because that's what most people think he is. He calls himself a political theorist. or a political philosopher.

Another thing he is not is a political operative, although that's the impression you might have gotten if you read a recent Wall Street Journal article with this headline, The ideological gurus battling for the soul of Trump world. That's certainly the impression that I got. Here is the subheadline of that article, techno-libertarian Curtis Jarvin and Catholic conservative Patrick Denin have just one thing in common, a desire to destroy the American establishment. Here's one line from that article by Joshua Chaffin and Zusha Ellenson.

On one side are tech bros racing to create a new future, on the other, a resurgent band of conservative Catholics who yearn for an imagined past. Until I read that article, I had not heard of Patrick Denineen, which I'm a bit embarrassed to say because he's a pretty big name in some of the circles I try to keep up on. He is best known for writing a widely read book called Why Liberalism Failed. It was published in 2018, not by a commercial publisher, but by Yale University Press.

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