Triumf człowieka pospolitego

by Ryszard Legutko

Książka niniejsza traktuje o podobieństwach między komunizmem i socjalizmem a liberalną demokracją.

Człowiek socjalistyczny i liberalno-demokratyczny nie tylko nie mają pamięci, lecz z nią walczą, relatywizują jej przekaz.

Oba ustroje wytwarzają – przynajmniej w warstwie oficjalnej wykładni ideologicznej – takie nastawienie do świata, dzięki któremu człowiek czuje się znacznie swobodniej niż kiedykolwiek w przeszłości. Zrzuca z siebie ogromną część związków lojalnościowych i zobowiązań, jakie go do tej pory pętały: religijne, obyczajowe, narodowe, środowiskowe, tradycyjne, autorytetowe.

We współczesnym świecie w coraz większym stopniu bierze się w obronę rzeczy wulgarne, brzydkie i oburzające, które naturalnie określają aspiracje człowieka liberalno-demokratycznego, co ten coraz śmielej i z coraz mniejszym wstydem potwierdza.

Genres: Politics, Nonfiction, Philosophy, History, Cultural, Economics, Political Science

318 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2012

About the author

Ryszard Legutko is a politician and professor of philosophy at Jagellonian University in Krakow. He has translated and written commentaries on Plato's works, and has written on Socrates and liberal democracies as well.
He is currently a Member of the European Parliament, Chairman of the Parliamentary Group of European Conservatives and Reformists, and a member of the Foreign Affairs Committee. He has also served as Poland's Minister of National Education.

Reviews

[Murtaza · Rating 2 out of 5]

Any thinking person who reads the news should at least be interested in the phenomenon of Reaction, which is lately showing some signs of life as the liberal order continues to falter. The argument of this book, which, notably, is written a Polish intellectual, is that liberal democracy shares in common many of the pernicious aspects of Soviet Communism. As a critique of liberalism it hits some poignant notes, including the tendency of liberalism to incentivize mediocrity, homogenize difference while celebrating faux-diversity, its minimalist anthropology and finally its quiet politicization of all spheres of life. He also makes good points about the historical experience of Eastern Europeans fighting against Communism, most of whom were not actually interested in becoming "liberals" and instead wanted to revive their repressed religious and national traditions. The point that modern identity-political groups like feminists, racial minorities and sexual minorities have been repositioned under liberalism as the "proletariat" of the Communist lexicon is also well taken, although he's not the first to have noted it.

Nonetheless, as I made my way through the book, the early chapters of which were promising, I became increasingly tired of the tedious and borderline hysterical sense of victimhood that it espouses. Liberalism has truly eviscerated all that Legutko held dear, continuing the job that Communism once did. But what exactly does he hold dear? At one point he literally laments that the politicization of the intimate details of life by liberalism, particularly language (true), has made it such that people cannot even make "faggot jokes” without fear of censure. The thing is, if one is truly committed to a classical or Christian metaphysics where people can develop their Platonic virtues to the highest level, why would they want to waste their time with something as crude as "faggot jokes" in the first place? This point is only the most vulgar example of many from the book that suggest that what he is truly aggrieved by, at least in part, is the dethroning of people like him from a privileged strata of society. This would validate the liberal-leftist critique of the old elites, who were routinely accused of dressing up their power as virtue. In such case I actually sympathize more the liberals, who may have correctly grasped the basic mediocrity of even those who use their power to proclaim themselves heroic and brilliant.

While Legutko is inarguably erudite, his talents are undermined by the fact that he is perceptibly seething with indignation throughout every page of this book. His criticism of things like the hegemony of "entertainment" among modern mediocre man are quite on point, but many others are just bizarre. It seems that there is quite a bit of aggrieved emotion under the academic tone of the writing. Despite this, I am still somewhat sympathetic to him because of his country's unique history. Poland after all was absolutely brutalized over the 20th century, first by the Nazi occupation (which, it must be said, the local population was not completely aloof from) and then by the brutalities of the Soviets. If he has a victim complex after such experiences, it is not so hard to understand. What I find more troubling is the universal claims made by the book, such as the risible description of a monolithic group of people called "Christians" who he characterizes as the most oppressed confessional group on the planet. For a Polish intellectual who witnessed the cruel treatment of Christianity and its adherents by the Communists this is an understandable view. But it would be quite unfortunate to see this book read by conservative Americans, who live in a country that has by and large been a victimizer of others around the world and who have never actually been oppressed at home, and feel that it validates a sense of grievance on their part. Aside from its universal claims there are also many parts of the book quite specific to his homeland, and in those areas he certainly has the right to speak with authority.

In terms of critiques of liberalism, this is a fairly unremarkable one. A more powerful universal argument is that made by Patrick Deneen in his book "Why Liberalism Failed."

[Douglas Wilson · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a superb book. There are a few places here and there where I think he misses some American and some Protestant nuances, but in the main this is a must read.

[Chris Fellows · Rating 3 out of 5]

The temptation with this book is to go full Macaulay and write a ten thousand, fifteen thousand, twenty thousand word review that tells you much more about me and how clever I am than about the book. This temptation I will try to avoid. At least a bit. If you are reading this review I expect you are familiar with its thesis: Legutko has lived in Communist Poland and in Post-Communist Poland and has written this book about the worrying similarities he sees between the two. Everyone must think the same, or else; and the false gods of the ‘Liberal Democratic’ West are not so very different from the idols of the Communist East.

“The atmosphere the systems produce is particularly conducive to engendering a certain type of mentality: that of a moralist, a commissar, and an informer rolled into one. In one sense, this person may think that he performs something particularly valuable to humanity; in another, the situation helps him to develop a sense of power otherwise unavailable to him; and in a third, he often cannot resist the temptation to indulge in a low desire to harm others with impuntiy. For this reason tracking opposition and defending orthodoxy turned out to be so attractive that more and more people fail to resist it.”

Like most of my countrymen, I am used to thinking of ‘political correctness’ as an American disease, so it is salutary and sobering to read a book such as this which is primarily concerned with the impact of the same disorder on the European Union.

The odd thing about reading this book was that as I went on I found myself growing more cheerful and optimistic. It started from the question I have learned to ask myself, whenever I write a long screed complaining about something: ‘What positive alternative is there to this bad thing I am complaining about?’ I think it makes a difference if you can propose a solution, as well as describing a problem, even if (like Dostoevsky) nobody ever remembers your solution and only applauds how elegantly you have stated the problem. So, I thought, what is the alternative to this ‘liberal democracy’ which Legutko does not like, and which I do not particularly like either?

For almost all places, at almost all times, have enforced an irksome conformity. We who lived when Communism collapsed have been lucky enough to have lived through one of those stages of rapid flux from one to another, in which for a brief period of time all the walls seem to vanish like the insubstantial fabric of a dream, and endless vistas of possibility stretch out in all directions. ‘What joy it was in that dawn to be alive...’ But the steady-state condition of human society is not like that.

Legutko never spells out clearly what sort of society he would like to see instead. Is there any time we can point back to and think, that was definitely better than this one? I think if we read any history at all we have to say, no. Was the Poland between the wars a society where hierarchical structures guided people towards high ideals while letting them speak and write freely, harmoniously combining the best features of Christendom and the Enlightenment? I don’t think so. Or is Legutko looking back nostalgically to the glory days of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth? I think, though he never says so explicitly, is that something like that is what he would like: an aristocracy, a constitutional monarchy, respect for western culture, and an overarching Church that tolerate minorities magnanimously rather than being a tolerated minority itself. It would be nice to have more detail of this positive vision. He does say: “Christianity is the last great force that offers a viable alternative to the tediousness of liberal-democratic anthropology” (And I wish this were true; but atheist statist authoritarianism that puts bread on the table is still going very strong; and Islam is a force looking stronger every day).

Christianity had nigh 1500 years to work on Europe, and very rarely reached the heights of the Most Serene Republic in its best years. I am sure that the average person plucked from a field or street anywhere in Europe between the time of Constantine and the French Revolution had more to fear from speaking their mind if they disagreed with the prevailing orthodoxy than an average person you were to pluck out nowadays. So if Legutko’s preferred vision is a Distributist neo-mediaeval republic on the Polish-Lithuanian Commonealth model, I would expect, from a philosopher and political scientist, more detail about how will get there, and how we will incorporate checks and balances to avoid all the flaws we know Christendom was prone to.

It is not clear how Christianity differs in essence from Communism and ‘Liberal Democracy’, as described by Legutko: “Once a man joins an ideological group all becomes clear to him and everything falls into place; everything is either right or wrong, correct or incorrect.” Except that everything will fall into place in the way Legutko approves of. Furthermore, offering God to Man only as a means to the end of ordering society seems to me to somewhat sacriligious. It is like offering Victoria Falls as a means to make a cup of tea.

Ah, I have worked it out. This is primarily a Euroskeptic polemic, the goal of which is to fire up as many Euroskeptics as possible within a ‘broad tent’ of opposition to the nihilistic vision of European Union. As such, too much of a detailed positive vision would be counter-productive.

Where was I? Ah, why I got more cheerful the more I went along reading this book. Trying to think about where and when, if anywhere and anywhen, humanity was better off reminded me of all the other places besides Central Europe where things were much better than they were thirty years ago. There were a lot of them, and they were places where ‘Liberal Democracy’, broadly understood, was definitely on the side of the Angels. The problems Legutko talks about are problems of Western Europe and its overseas offshoots in the Americas and Australasia. All those places put together have a population less than that of China. While I yield to no man in my loathing for the unelected unrepresentative swill who tyrranise the Renegade Mainland Provinces, things are undoubtedly better than 30 years ago in China by a very great extent, and not only in material terms: people have more access to all the good things about Western culture that Legutko is keen on, there are many more people who, as Christians, are active participants in the Western culture that Legutko is keen on; and the worst excesses of ‘liberal democracy’ seem pretty harmless compared to the things that people have to put up with. In Korea, also, the growth of Christianity and liberal democracy over the past half-century have been positively rather than negatively correlated, as far as I can tell. In India, which again has about as many people as Europe and the Americas put together, people are also not only materially better off, but have much greater exposure to the good bits of Western civilisation, and the switch from ‘Third Way Socialism’ to something more like liberal democracy was a major driver of this. Indonesia has gone from dictatorship to something like liberal democracy; a peaceful and democratic transfer of power is not big news in Nigeria, which also has moved in the direction of liberal democracy with good results; ‘liberal democracy’ is still something people look at as a source of hope in places further to the periphery of Europe, like Turkey and Ukraine. In all these countries of course there are big problems, but political correctness does not rank highly among them. As I read through Legutko’s book, I thought about all these places more and more, and the declining relative importance of Europe and the Americas made me more and more cheerful about the way the world is going.

Legutko valuably points out the pernicious over-emphasis on ‘entertainment’ in the West. We are all doped up on electronic soma 24/7 so we never stop to think about the Ultimate End of Man, or the Nature of Reality, or What Constitutes the Good Life. But I guess, honestly, not too many of us ever thought about those things back when we were tilling our barley fields and occasionally seeing someone who could read in the distance.

It would be gutless of me to review this book without empirically testing its hypothesis. It is obvious from evolutionary biology that homosexuality is intrinsically disordered, as the Catholic Church teaches, and that it is almost certainly a mental rather than a physical disorder.

[Alex Strohschein · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ryszard Legutko's "The Demon in Democracy: Totalitarian Temptations in Free Societies" is a brilliant book, written by an astute Polish politician and thinker who lived under both communism and liberal-democracy. Legutko analyzes liberal-democracy's affects on our understanding of history, utopia, politics, ideology, and religion. Legutko's basic argument is that the very objectives that communism set out to achieve are being accomplished more subtly by liberal-democracy as they are based on shared presuppositions and values. Legutko states that:

"In a way, liberal democracy presents a somewhat more insidious ideological mystification than communism. Under communism it was clear that communism was to prevail in every cell of social life, and that the Communist Party was empowered with the instruments of brutal coercion and propaganda to get the job done. Under liberal democracy such official guardians of constitutional doctrine do not exist, which, paradoxically, makes the overarching nature of the system less tangible, but at the same time more profound and difficult to reverse. It is the people themselves who have eventually come to accept, often on a preintellectual level, that eliminating the institutions incompatible with liberal-democratic principles constitutes a wise and necessary step" (22-23).

Both communism and liberal-democracy are oriented to the future, blissfully optimistic that progress will herald utopia as societies escape the repressive and restrictive customs, traditions, and mores of the past (20-23). Those of a more conservative bent are wary of rapid change, aware of human weakness and the inability of mankind to achieve perfect harmony whereas the liberal is constantly seeking to change and reform (24-25). Liberal-democracy's doctrines of freedom and equality ultimately undermine themselves as the government must taker greater and greater measures to legislate equality and the crusades of social justice warriors who seek to silence free speech in society and in particular, on post-secondary campuses. One thinks of the ongoing furor over University of Toronto professor Jordan B. Peterson's (author of "Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief") refusal to refer to individuals with new pronouns such as "zhe". Liberal-democracy seeks to destroy "old communal bonds" and replace them "with new modern ones." For instance, feminist ideology proclaims the universal sisterhood of all women and LGTBQ individuals also conceive of themselves as a new, transnational bloc (94-95). Legutko observes:

The acquisition of all these catchphrases by the mainstream resulted in - paradoxically - further homogenization of the modern world, the more effectively executed because concealed behind the shamelessly fraudulent rhetoric of cultural diversity. Hence multiculturalism does not avert the progressive politicization of liberal democracies, nor stop the herdlike proclivity of a liberal-democratic demos; in fact, multiculturalism pushes them to a new level. Never before in human history did we see a similar phenomenon when millions of people, indistinguishable from each other, using the same patterns of thinking, politically homogeneous and oblivious to any other way of viewing the political world except according to the orthodox liberal-democratic version, are not only convinced of their own individual and group differences and proclaim the unchallenged superiority of pluralism, but also want to enforce the same simplistic and tediously predictable orthodoxy on the entire world as the ultimate embodiment of the idea of multiplicity" (96).

Legutko also declares:

"When the state takes over responsibility for the rules of cooperation and their enforcement on all layers of society, there will be no limits to its interference in people's lives. The laws it enacts must of necessity be increasingly more detailed and intrusive because what threatens those rules and has to be curtailed is believed to be hidden deeply in social practices and human consciousness. This slippery-slope argument, so often used by liberals, is particularly pertinent here. The logic of liberalism is that whatever seems to be the most obviously nonpolitical, sooner or later will become political. The logic of democracy - with its notions of participation, inclusion, and representation - only strengthened this tendency (100-101).

Throughout the book Legutko traces the genealogy of the ascension of liberal-democracy. Overall, a fantastic, wise book.

[Charlie Huenemann · Rating 1 out of 5]

In this book Legutko compares liberal democracy to communism. The similarities he finds are at a very general level: both systems think they know how human societies ought to be arranged, and both views repress views that undermine them. Therefore, he concludes, they are pretty much the same thing. But it is not clear what Legutko means by liberal democracy. Sometimes he thinks it is a long tradition of political liberalism that would include figures from Locke and Jefferson to Reagan and Thatcher. But more often he uses the term to refer to advocates of social justice within liberal democracies. This latter group really pisses Legutko off because they tell him he can't tell faggot jokes anymore, and they protest speakers with racist or sexist views (like Legutko himself, as it turns out). He thinks these people are pretty much like communists, even if they don't have the secret police and don't send people to gulags. So, you see, liberal democracy is very bad.

[Fadi · Rating 3 out of 5]

Nothing new under the sun. The original title in Polish (can be translated as "The Triumph of the Common Man") would be better, expressing the main thesis of the book.

[David Alexander · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is one of the most up-to-date and nuanced critiques of modern democratic liberalism in its current stage of hardened dogmatism that I have come across. The book is helpful especially in illuminating the similarities and affinities and history between democratic liberalism and communism, and in correctly framing the formers growing coerciveness.
I read this book after a reading a review of it by Adrian Vermeule in the January 2017 edition of First Things. Vermuele hilights how Legutko shows the religious nature of democratic liberalism in a way that goes beyond Tocqueville's observation of its incipience. "The Revolution's descendants not only possess a theology and eschatology, but a central sacrament and an accompanying liturgy." Legutko was born in 1949 and is a Polish philosopher and a member of the European Parliament who was a dissident under communism and a high minister in the new Polish liberal-democratic state. He has served as the Minister of Education and Secretary of State in the Chancellery of the late Lech Kaczynski, and so on. Such credentials in conjunction with the substantive nature of the book seem to mark him for me as something of the philosopher-king variety, not unlike the Socrates's ideal, about whom Legutko has written books.
Legutko also writes from the vantage point of having lived under a communist regime and now a democratic liberal regime.

I think Legutko's critique seems quite complementary with Eric Voegelin's notion of gnostic mass movements of modernity. Communism was one such mass movement and democratic liberalism is another expression of it, distinctive especially in its sexual anthropology.

This book is full of insight. Some of his points that he drives home are that liberal democracy, despite all its talk of multiculturalism, is a powerful producer and imposer of uniform views, behavior and language. The spirit of liberal democracy today shares much of the bad and ugly features of the spirit of communism. It "obfuscates the real world" and is engendering an uncompromising hostility against all dissidents. "In both systems a cult of technology translates itself into an acceptance of social engineering as a proper approach to reforming society, changing human behavior, and solving existing social problems." Communism was a system that "started history anew" and had to be in essence and practice against memory. Those who fought against the regime also fought for memory. With democratic liberalism's current hardening into dogmatism, it also makes memory an enemy which dissidents must learn to cherish all the more. Legutko shows how the disposition of the two regimes toward memory and history is a natural outgrowth of their belief in the power of techne. Both embrace the idea of progress, as a natural offshoot to this belief in the power of techne, and they assess the world with respect to its relation to the old or the new. In light of this, recent calls among Christians toward "the Benedict Option" have a salient ring to my ears when I recall Anthony Esolen's remark that the Benedictine monasteries in medieval times were "outposts of memory."

Both regimes speak fondly of "the people" and large social movements while at the same time having no qualms about ruthlessly breaking social spontaneity for the sake of social reconstruction.

The book is divided up into the following topics: History, Utopia, Politics, Ideology, and Religion. Each is a penetrating look at these aspects of democratic liberalism. In Hymn 22 of Ephrem of Syria's Hymns on the Nativity, Ephrem stresses the need to know the disease inn order to appreciate the healer. Legutko's depth of observation from a historical, philosophical, political and personal perspective are great aids in discerning the parameters of the disease. We have enjoyed the auspices of democratic liberalism and have become lotus eaters. To even seek the healer in our illness, we must recognize the illness better, and I think Legutko is an excellent ally in this regards.

Legutko's insights seem to me very complementary with the insights of others I consider to be or to have been very prescient and awake: Rod Dreher, Robert Oscar Lopez, Philip Rieff, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Anthony Esolen, Pierre Manent and many others. Legutko's contribution is in the same area as Manent. He provides scholarly and penetrating philosophical insight into the current malaise that besets Western democracies and he aids us in our self-understanding.

Some of the parts of this book I want to remember are his treatment of divertissement and modern democracy; his observation about the extinction of the absent-minded professor types; his observations about art in relation to current liberal-democratic man.

Regarding democratic liberalism and entertainment in modern capitalism:
Legutko described Mr. Gradgrind in Dickens's Hard Times as "a strict, fanatically disciplined modern man, mercilessly attempting to eradicate human weaknesses" (pg. 35). This cold rigor of capitalism eventually receded, giving way to a new development in capitalism. "The discipline of work and high requirements of productivity persisted in the new times, but in other matters man refused to go back to his previous self…. He compensated the strict work imperatives by his every increasing indulgence in entertainment… A failure to provide human endeavors- even the most noble ones - with an entertaining wrapping is today unthinkable and borders on sin… The modern sense of entertainment increasingly resembles what Pascal long ago called divertissement: that is, an activity - as he wrote in Thoughts - that separates us from the seriousness of existence and fills this existence with false content. Divertissement is thus not only being entertained in the ordinary sense of the word, but living and acting within artificial rules that organize our lives, setting conventional, mostly trivial goals which we pursue, getting involved in disputes and competitions, aspiring to honors-making careers, and doing everything that would turn our thoughts away from fundamental existential matters. By escaping the questions of the ultimate meaning of our own lives, or of human life in general, our minds slowly get used to that fictitious reality, which we take for the real one, and are lured by its attractions" (pg. 36). "Having neutralized all musings about objectivity, the modern man takes pride in his deep involvement in entertainment, which in the absence of other objective references he considers natural… For the first time in the entire history of mankind there appeared a type of human being who thought that not having been surrounded by entertainment from cradle to grave in all areas of life was an anomaly" (pg. 37).

The disappearance of the academic eccentric:
"Let us note here the disappearance of the academic eccentric, a well-known personality, for centuries almost inseparably associated with the academic tradition and its peculiar atmosphere of the freedom of inquiry and inimitable relations between teachers and students. It is not only the ominous presence of political correctness that makes the life of a dissident unbearable. The functioning of the university itself has become so heavily controlled by procedures, rules, and regulations that all deviations from the routine are strictly controlled. If the legendary professors of old, whose unconventional behavior persists in real or imaginary stories to this very day, suddenly, by some miracle, managed to find themselves at today's universities, they would soon be coerced to submission or disposed of as unruly troublemakers." pg. 69.

Liberalism in essence is aggressive:
"In its essence, liberalism is unabashedly aggressive because it is determined to hunt down all nonliberal agents and ideas, which it treats as a threat to itself and to humanity. The organizing principle of liberalism- as in all other philosophies aiming to change the world radically- is therefore dualism, not pluralism." pg. 78

Liberal-democratic politicized privacy and sex:
"The liberal-democratic man politicized his privacy, perhaps his main contribution to the change in thinking about politics. He politicized marriage, family relations, communal life, language. In this he resembled his communist comrade. But his greatest success in this regard, unmatched so far by any competitor, was to politicize the area that seemed to be the most private of all things private, the most intimate of all things intimate and thus the least appropriate to political meddling: the realm of sex." pg. 106

"Today the Christians' devotion- or rather, surrender- to liberal democracy is measured by their enthusiastic support of the claims of homosexual activists and by acceptance of what the feminists call women's reproductive rights. One shudders at the thought what will be expected of the Christians in a few years' time." pg. 170
 
"Christianity is the last great force that offers a viable alternative to the tediousnessness of liberal-democratic anthropology." pg. 174

[Wesley Giesbrecht · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book by Professor Ryszard Legutko is a thought provoking, eye opening, and soul penetrating tour de force. Having lived in both communist and liberal-democratic societies, he's able to subject both to a microscopic analysis to see how the two are much more similar than we would have imagined. While stressing that there are obvious differences between the two, he displays how both systems understand themselves to be the climatic end of history. Since both systems understood themselves to be the culmination of historical political evolution, both understand the need to speed along the process through direct action to bring about their respective utopias. These utopian dreams and historical theories are based on the shared anthropology of the "new man". Both the communists as well as the liberal-democrats understand their new man to be the next and more glorious stage of human evolution, but since their systems figure as a sort of inaugurated eschatology where their can be nothing else beyond their system, this next stage of human evolution consists of nothing more than the continuous conformity of mankind to their respective vision of the eschatological man; be it the communist man or the liberal-democratic man. Legutko looks at the ideology and methodology of both systems in light of five themes: history, utopia, politics, ideology, and religion. Each chapter contains the Marxist view on the subject (including later socialist positions) as well as the liberal-democratic view, and by lining them up side-by-side, you see striking similarities.
Professor Ryszard Legutko's book is a must read for anyone who's been noticing the similarity of language, attitude, and methodology of the modern liberal society with those of the 20th century socialists.

[Matthew · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very interesting but extremely dense, Legutko demands your full attention and intelligence.

A dissident under communism, Legutko notes a panoply of similar instincts under liberal democracy: the unquestionable power of their ideologies, the relentless politicization of ordinary life, the same idea that each represents the end of history, the same hostility towards religious belief. There is some overlap with other diagnoses of the errors of liberalism - such as Deneen's Why Liberalism Failed - but Legutko has much that is new to say.

What emerges is a picture of liberalism as a totalizing ideology, one that inevitably and by its own internal necessity, reaches ever more deeply into private life, demands ever more conformity to its own doctrines, and erodes or attacks whatever refuses to capitulate to its own ideological structure, whether it be civic institutions, the family, or religious groups. All this is done with a less brutal hand than communism, but the direction of travel is the same; and perhaps, as with the proverbial frog boiled slowly, it is all the more effective.

[David Shane · Rating 5 out of 5]

A wide-ranging diagnosis of dysfunctions and hypocrisies in the mindset and institutions of the modern West, written by a philosopher who grew up under communism, lives under modern "liberal-democracy", and sees many parallels between the two systems. Especially appreciated the section on "ideology" myself and, more than anything, the point that ideology is stifling to thought and that the prevailing liberal-democratic anthropology is (and these are my words now), just kind of shallow and boring. Books like this are valuable because, by giving words to "what your society believes without even saying it, and why", it helps your mind to leap beyond it and believe something else. Similar to Patrick Deneen's "Why Liberalism Failed" in that the book helps us to see the (sort of) internal logic at work in what often appears to be the absurdity around us today. Plenty of paragraphs to highlight to help you make the argument to other people mentally trapped in the ideologies of liberal-democracy.

[Marta Marecka · Rating 2 out of 5]

Nie uważam, że przeczytanie tej książki było stratą czasu. Krytyka prof. Legutki dotycząca wad demokracji, deficytu demokratycznego Unii Europejskiej, obniżenia poziomu kultury i edukacji jest interesująca i przynajmniej godna przemyślenia. Problem w tym, że rozwiązania proponowane przez pana Ryszarda są klasycznym przypadkiem lekarstwa gorszego niż choroby. Legutko proponuje wzmocnienie roli konserwatywnego kościoła katolickiego i odrzucenie tego, co nazywa pogardliwie „tolerancjonizmem”, czyli praw kobiet, mniejszości homoseksualnych i ogólnie wszelkich mniejszości.

Przyznam szczerze, że ciężko czytać mi było tę książkę, jako że autor z wyraźną pogardą i wręcz nienawiścią odnosi się do osób takich, jak ja (jestem feministką, ateistką, córką przedstawicieli kościoła otwartego i mam lewicowe poglądy – przy okazji śmiem twierdzić, że mój światopogląd nie jest skutkiem bierności wobec obowiązującej kultury, lecz wynika z wielu lat przemyśleń i wielu przeczytanych książek). Autor imputuje wszystkim, z którymi się nie zgadza, że są lumpeninteligencją, którą kieruje jedynie chęć czynienia innym krzywdy i która podejrzliwa jest „wobec wszelkich wzorców i ideałów, których istnienie mogłoby nadmiernie boleśnie odsłonić jej poddanie się nijakości”. Mało subtelna ta krytyka zaskakuje nieco w ustach człowieka, który ukazuję sam siebie jako bastion kultury, obyczajów i moralności (nawiasem mówiąc, chciałabym wiedzieć, cóż to za głębokie cnoty moralne pielęgnuje pan Legutko poza chodzeniem do kościoła i szczekaniem na lewaków; ja tam nie słyszałam jakoś o jego dzielnych czynach, nadzwyczajnej działalności charytatywnej i walce z biedą oraz wyzyskiem).

Takich paradoksów jest tu więcej. Legutko krytykuje monopol liberalnej demokracji proponując w zamian monopol kościoła (za oznakę walki z chrześcijaństwem uznaje wolność religijną i równy status wszystkich religii, podczas gdy w jego oczach chrześcijaństwo powinno mieć szczególny status i szczególne przywileje). Prawa reprodukcyjne kobiet uznaje za naruszenie praw katolików (bo wszak liberalno-demokratyczna policja zmusza wszystkie kobiety do korzystania z antykoncepcji). Demokrację oskarża o to, że jest zbyt demokratyczna, Unii Europejskiej zarzuca zaś brak demokratyczności.

Wiele argumentów Legutki nie ma żadnego związku z rzeczywistością. Twierdzenie, że w przeszłości dziedzina seksualności nie była uznawana za odpowiednią dla politycznych zabiegów jest po prostu głupie (Turing?). Twierdzenie, że w obecnych czasach homoseksualiści stanowią grupę uprzywilejowaną zakrawa na urojenie. Czy pan profesor miał kiedyś w rękach raport Lambdy dot. dyskryminacji osób homoseksualnych w Polsce i wie, ile osób w Polsce doznaje ze względu na swoją orientację przemocy fizycznej i psychicznej? Zapewne nie wie pan profesor, bo też i dane empiryczne nie wydają się panu profesorowi szczególnie ważne. Pan profesor nie powołuje się w książce na żadne badania, a w niektórych przypadkach ewidentnie nie ma bladego pojęcia, o czym mówi. Jestem przekonana, że nie przeczytał ani jednej książki na temat feminizmu, który głośno potępia (przeciwstawiając feministki tzw. „kobietom realnym”). Wielki, różnorodny ruch, który często wręcz krytykuje się za zbytnie rozdrobnienie nazywa zuniformizowanym. Imputuje mu wrogość wobec narodu - nie zająknąwszy ani słowem o Konopnickiej czy Orzeszkowej - oraz religii, nie bacząc na wielki ruch feministyczny wewnątrz religii (przykładem jest tu chociażby teologia feministyczna).

Dużo w tej książce zdecydowanych poglądów i mocnych słów, a zaskakująco mało konkretów. Często nie wiadomo właściwie, skąd autor wyciąga wnioski, które wyciąga. Lektura pouczająca i ciekawa (najciekawsza krytyka zawsze pochodzi z zewnątrz, a jak już wspomniałam niektóre aspekty krytyki prof. Legutki są nawet sensowne), ale też mocno irytująca i oderwana od rzeczywistości. Polecam zajrzeć, ale zrozumiem, jeśli ktoś nie zdzierży w połowie.

[Frederick Frankel · Rating 5 out of 5]

A very influential book when it came out a few years ago. The writer grew up in Poland when it was a soviet satellite, and has now lived in post-communist Poland for several decades. He writes about his surprise when he realized that the mass culture of the West, as well as its educational system, bore an uncanny resemblance to the communist system he fought against.

Like other dissidents, he fought to preserve the unique culture of Poland, including its history and its attachment to the Catholic religion. In this book he explores the emergence of the same threats as they spring from the European Union and other Western institutions. He examines the similarities and the differences between liberal democracy and soviet communism, with a view of understanding their common ancestry in the Enlightenment. A stimulating read.

[Thomas Golding · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting, articulate, and courageous discussion!

[Fearless Leader · Rating 4 out of 5]

A good book. But for those in the know it wasn’t anything surprising.

[Charles Haywood · Rating 4 out of 5]

There is a scene in Thomas Mann’s "Buddenbrooks," in which a character comes across a book of philosophy (Schopenhauer) and realizes in a soaring epiphany that it contains the answers to all of life’s questions. For me, this book served much the same purpose—it explained to me why certain things are the way they are in the modern world. Although, sadly, it did not explain “all of life’s questions,” such as what is contained in Area 51. (I will also gloss over that the character in Mann’s novel quickly forgets the supposed answers and then drops dead of a tooth infection.)

Why, after the fall of Communism, were Communists in the restored West never punished, and instead rewarded with wealth, power, and global approbation? Why, in the modern world where freedom is supposedly increasing for all, is freedom instead decreasing for anyone who believes in objective moral standards? Why is every aspect of human life in the West now politicized by those who control our culture?

Legutko answers these questions. That’s not because Legutko provides an overarching ideological framework that answers all questions, à la Marxism. Quite the opposite. It’s because Legutko pulls together the threads of demonstrable reality in a fresh way, a way that is largely hidden, or suppressed, by the way discourse is conducted in the post-Communist West. In a sense, Legutko has shown us the fairies in the garden. You can’t go back, once you know they exist. Unlike leftist ideologies, that doesn’t tell you what you have to do, it’s just knowledge about reality. But very useful knowledge.

In short, Legutko’s answers to the questions are: Communists were not punished, and were rewarded, because Communist philosophy is much closer to, and more palatable to, the governing philosophy of the rulers of the West than the true alternatives to Communism. Freedom is decreasing for some because that is a necessary consequence of that Western governing philosophy. And life in the West is wholly politicized because of the ends at which that governing philosophy aims—which are not wholly dissimilar to the ends envisioned by Communism. Legutko’s book is devoted to demonstrating these claims.

Legutko is Polish professor of philosophy who was a dissident under Communism; he is today also a parliamentarian both in the Polish parliament and in the European Parliament. His overarching project in this book is to analyze and compare the similarities of totalitarian Communism (a tautology, of course) with “liberal-democracy,” the wholly dominant socio-political system of today’s West. His point is not that Communism is better than we think; it is that “liberal-democracy” is worse than we have been taught to think.

Hearing that is like hearing an attack on water and air. How can anyone be against liberalism and democracy, the core of our modern, free, open, society? But that’s Legutko’s point—liberal-democracy is neither free nor open. Instead, properly examined and explained, it is a largely baneful ideology, and shares a very uncomfortable set of core characteristics with the ideology it supposedly vanquished twenty-five years ago, Communism. Moreover, those shared characteristics are not just philosophical; they include some of the least pleasant tendencies toward brutality and coercion.

Legutko’s book is another wedge in what might be called the Great Fragmentation—the splintering of the Western conservative movement as it has existed since approximately 1950. If today’s political system is the inevitable outcome of certain political premises, basically those of the Enlightenment, and that outcome is profoundly opposed to everything a certain strain of conservatives hold dear, why should not the very foundation be re-examined by those conservatives, and Enlightenment political thought wholly or totally rejected? That has huge implications for conservative unity and therefore conservative power and political action. But that’s a question for another day, and not something on which Legutko really focuses.

This is a pessimistic book, written in 2012 (though the English translation only came out in 2016). It sees little pushback being possible in the current environment. Legutko’s attitude towards liberal-democracy is much like Whittaker Chambers’s toward Communism. Since 2012, though, a series of earthquakes, the largest being Brexit and Trump’s ascendancy, have suggested that the foundations of liberal-democracy are more rotten than Legutko believes, or at least believed in 2012. It’s not that Trump has, or British voters have, absorbed and endorsed philosophies that oppose liberal-democracy. Rather, they have seen that the Emperor has no clothes—that liberal-democracy is a bad deal for them and for society. They may think this in an inchoate manner; they may think it in a stupid manner. But as with the fairies in the garden, once you realize that the Emperor has no clothes, there is no going back to the way things were. The trick, for us (or me), the self-perceived paladins of the West, is to harness that tide of realization, and ride it to the creation of the new world, of real freedom and real self-government.

But we are getting ahead of ourselves. Anybody who has bothered to read this far is asking what exactly is meant by the hyphenated term “liberal-democracy.” Legutko means an ideology, of course, but what constitutes that ideology? “Liberal” traditionally means expanding freedom. A “classical liberal” is an economic free-marketeer. “Traditional” liberals in the United States (as opposed to the New Left, a strain that rose to power in the 1960s and is now wholly dominant) focus on increased freedom, but view government as a mainspring of providing that freedom, and believe that continuous societal improvements can thereby be made. To Legutko, the “liberal” part of “liberal-democracy” has passed beyond those relatively narrow goals, and now means unalloyed, even anarchic, freedom—but to believe and act in exactly the way permitted, and no other. And “democracy,” similarly, means pure democracy, not a mixed, republican government—but only one where the people have the right to vote in a way that is approved by the liberal ideology of perfect freedom to do anything other than that proscribed.

But this begs the question—what is that ideology, and what is proscribed? Liberal-democracy, to Legutko, is the end result of the historical process begun in Enlightenment thinking. Originally, liberalism was not connected to democracy—in fact, democracy was regarded as inimical to liberalism, in all political thought from Athens to Tocqueville. Liberalism was man’s freedom from tyranny and the ability to express himself, in as eccentric a way as he pleased. Democracy was coercive egalitarianism. Liberalism, according to Mill, would combat democracy’s tendency toward mediocrity and would encourage excellence and achievement. Therefore, the best system was not democracy, but a mixed system, that included elements of monarchy and oligarchy, combined with freedom from tyranny. The American system was such, as was the British, and some European systems.

In the 20th Century, though, these systems became increasingly egalitarian, focused on equality of result, not equality of opportunity. This destroyed the original Enlightenment conception of combining a mixed government with increased, but not absolute, freedom. The view became prevalent that more democracy, that is, more direct government by popular vote, is always better, even though the defects of this are well known. And liberalism came to mean freedom to do anything but criticize certain choices of others. Hence: “liberal-democracy.”

And it is this liberal-democracy that is Legutko’s target. The process he outlines has resulted, over the last few decades, in “an emergence of a kind of liberal-democratic general will. Whether the meaning of the term itself is identical with that used by Rousseau is of negligible significance. The fact is that we have been more and more exposed to an overwhelming liberal-democratic omnipresence, which seems independent of the wills of individuals, to which they humbly submit, and which they perceive as compatible with their innermost feelings. . . Through people’s actions and minds this will ruthlessly imposes liberal-democratic patterns on everything and everyone, including those who should firmly stand for alternative proposals. . . . This grand design, its supporters say, should be implemented at all cost because it is believed to bring with itself freedom, autonomy, tolerance, pluralism, and all other liberal-democratic treasures. Therefore, all barriers that block its coming can and must be broken down, also for the benefit of those who put up those barriers.” This is “coercion to freedom,” visible, Legutko says, in such disparate policies forced on us as abortion, celebration of homosexual acts, quotas for representation of the supposedly disadvantaged in all areas of life, and suppression of so-called hate speech.

Today’s liberal-democrats define liberal as anything expanding freedom from authority and portray liberal-democracy as the only “realization of the eternal desire for freedom.” But this is slander, since “liberalism was certainly not the only orientation expressing the desire for freedom, nor was it particularly consistent in this devotion. The supporters of republicanism, conservatism, romanticism, Christianity, and many other movements also demanded freedom, and did a lot to advance its cause.” (As I say, this, and Legutko’s entire analysis, leave open the question of to what degree the Enlightenment itself can or should be accepted by conservatives; it may be that “liberalism” even in its earlier sense is ultimately incompatible with human flourishing, a view that is given credence by the vast majority of Western civilization’s towering cultural and civilizational accomplishments being accomplished by non-liberal societies. But again—a question for another day.)

Legutko begins his comparison project (for the framework of this book is a comparison to Communism, even though much of it is simply an attack on liberal-democracy) by evaluating “History.” He analyzes how we got here, and talks about how Communism views history, how liberal-democracy views history, and that both view it as “history has a unilateral pattern and that a better world is shaped by conscious human activity.” History necessarily consists of reaching a final stage of total social development and structure, under which human nature would be fully realized, necessarily led by the group most aware of its historical role and therefore entitled to command the benighted. Orthodox Marxists saw these as “laws of history.” Both Communists and liberal-democrats no longer talk of history as having “laws,” since that has been discredited by modern science, but “both the communists and liberal democrats have always upheld and continue to uphold the view that history is on their side”—that is, history has a pre-determined arc, and in the view of both Communism and liberal-democracy, its parameters are the same, with the only difference being that the structure at the end of history is (somewhat) different. This is best characterized as the view of “historical necessity.”

This creates an internal tension, because “any opposition to this process was extremely harmful to humanity and inconceivably stupid.” “The very idea of liberal democracy should presuppose the freedom of action . . . yet the letter, the spirit, and the practice of the liberal-democratic doctrine is far more restrictive: so long as society pursues the path of modernization, it must follow the path whereby the programs of actions and targets other than liberal-democratic lose their legitimacy. The need for building a liberal-democratic society thus implies the withdrawal of the guarantee of freedom for those whose actions and interests are said to be hostile to what the liberal democrats conceive as the cause of freedom.” This is analogous to Communism, since as with Communism, “everything that exists in society must become liberal-democratic over time and be imbued with the spirit of the system.” And this explains why, in both the liberal-democratic system and in Communism, no engagement other than coercion is permitted with opponents on the Right. “Why should anyone seriously enter into a debate with the opponent who represents what is historically indefensible and what will sooner or later perish?”

Legutko sees the idea of historical necessity as “dubious, not to say ludicrous, to any sane mind.” Yet it characterizes both Communism and liberal-democracy, and is particularly attractive to the intellectual class, and Legutko ascribes this to that it “gives an intellectual more power, or at least an illusion of it. He feels like a part of a powerful global machine of transformation.”

And, this also answers why everything is politicized in the West, just as it was under Communism. “As a result, liberal democracy has become an all-permeating system. There is no, or in any case, cannot be, any segment of reality that would be arguably and acceptably non-liberal democratic.” Any vestige of limitation, so-called tyranny, from the traditional structure of the family to traditional churches and schools, to any group that is not wholly devoted to individual choice, must be consigned to the dustbin of history, and quickly, by force if necessary. Hence, the politicization of everything, for anything not politicized is failing to fulfil its necessary role in moving history forward to the inevitable goal.

Legutko makes other points about the historical nature of the two systems. Liberal-democracy seeks total liberty along with total equality. “The triumph of liberalism and democracy was supposed to be emancipatory also in the sense that man was to become free from excessive demands imposed on him by unrealistic metaphysics invented by an aristocratic culture in antiquity and the Middle Ages. In other words, an important part of the message of modernity was to legitimize a lowering of human aspirations. . . . The main principle behind the minimalist perspective was equality: from the point of view of the liberal order one cannot prioritize human objectives.” The natural result is a lowering of standards. Despite the hopes of liberal thinkers such as Mill that man would by nature seek the better, “One can look at the history of liberal democracy as a gradual sliding down from the high to the low, from the refined to the coarse.”

Related to this is the exaltation of “dignity”—a false dignity, not as traditionally, an ennobling attribute that carried corresponding duties, but a term used to allow people to “submit whatever claims they wished, and to justify those claims by referring to a dignity that they possessed by the mere fact of being born without any moral achievement or effort. . . . And since having this dignity carried no obligation to do anything particularly good or worthy, he could, while constantly invoking it, make claims that were increasingly more absurd and demand justification for ever more questionable activities.” Legutko doesn’t mention it, but this exactly explains the behavior of the United States Supreme Court over the past few decades, with the radical majority’s focus on “dignity” and “stigma”—the latter meaning daring to uphold any standards that would limit people in pursuing whatever they want to do.

Returning to history, Legutko concludes the chapter by noting the post-Communist regimes (focusing on Poland, of course), immediately prior to the overthrow of Communist power, “stood up in defense of human dignity (in its original and not the corrupted sense), access to culture, respect for truth in science and for nobility in art, and a proper role given to Christian heritage and Christian religion.” But as soon as Communism was overthrown, they aspired only to the liberal-democratic model, striving to follow “the West,” buying into the myth that the opposite of Communism was their liberal-democracy—when, really, it wasn’t that much different. And, ultimately, former Communists had more in common with the liberal-democrats in control of the West than did their opponents under Communism, who hewed to religion, family, tradition, and the permanent things, and thus were first excluded, and then demonized. (Again, this book being written in 2012, Legutko does not mention the recent rise to power of political parties in both Poland and Hungary that are not in thrall to liberal-democracy, represent those anti-Communist forces, and are therefore viciously attacked for their heresy, in an ongoing battle, the result of which will be very telling. I’m optimistic, for their approach seems to be to realize this is not a struggle for accommodation, but a zero-sum game.)

Next Legutko covers “Politics,” by which he means both the mechanics of politics within liberal-democracy, and even more so the politicization of all aspects of life that necessarily characterizes liberal-democracy. This is largely an expansion of some of his earlier points. “Communism and liberal democracy are related by a similarly paradoxical approach to politics: both promised to reduce the role of politics in human life, yet induced politicization on a scale unknown in previous history.” Originally liberalism actually did expand freedom in the non-political sphere, but “in its essence, liberalism is unabashedly aggressive because it is determined to hunt down all nonliberal agents and ideas, which it treats as a threat to itself and to humanity. The organizing principle of liberalism—as in all other philosophies aiming to change the world radically—is therefore dualism, not pluralism.”

Any community, such as family or nation, that may interfere with the liberal-democratic program must be made anew, and made no longer an obstacle to progress. Organic, historically constituted communal bonds are to be replaced by identity group bonds, but only of approved identity groups, which are willing to be active participants in the corrosion of society and any form of traditional belief or practice, and are not communal groups, but political groupings organized from above. All this is, in practice, indistinguishable from Communism, though the goals are somewhat different.

As far as daily political behavior, cooperation towards the defined goals is essential, because failure to cooperate leads to a litany of horrors in the liberal-democratic mind. “Effective politics becomes thus a comprehensive task because the preconditions on which cooperation is dependent are not only numerous, but constantly growing in number. Literature, art, education, family, liturgy, the Bible, traditions, ideas, entertainment, children’s toys—all can be deemed conducive to cooperation or strengthening intolerance, discrimination and domination. . . . This explains the rise of the infamous phenomenon of political correctness. There is nothing mysterious about it. It is simply a practical consequence of the view that the duty of the citizens of the liberal-democratic society is to participate in the great collective enterprise, where everyone cooperates with everyone else at all levels and under all circumstances. . . . Because the logic of this system turns on ‘dialogue,’ ‘respect,’ ‘equal rights,’ ‘openness,’ and ‘tolerance,’ everything is by definition political, and nothing that relates, however remotely, to these notions is trivial, minor, or irrelevant.”

[Review is continued as first comment.]

[Scriptor Ignotus · Rating 4 out of 5]

It should come as no surprise to a mind fertilized by the richness of historical perspective that the intellectual systems of communism and liberal-democracy, so often supposed by a fossilized political culture molded by the rhetoric of the Cold War to be fixed in primordial and antipodal opposition to one another, are in truth more like a pair of catty, rivalrous siblings than eternally implacable enemies. Both are products of an inescapably modern and post-Enlightenment outlook; one that imposes upon the actually-existing social order a totalizing and cohesive geometric simplicity, and finds in the infinite varieties of inherited human life so much pliable wax to be conformed to the shape of its own ideological presuppositions. Like all modern ideologies from the time of Machiavelli, both systems prescribe a radical break from the mystical envelopment of tradition, asserting instead the capacity of tékhnē to sustain an artificial regime of human life and to refashion the human person accordingly.

Both rely upon a type of anthropological minimalism: for the communist, human nature is epiphenomenal to material relations of production, while for the liberal-democrat humanity is merely a collection of rights-bearing individuals with material interests. Both view human history as an inevitable progression—if sometimes interrupted by malcontents—from a murky barbarism to a utopian eschatological state constituted by the perfect realization of the party ideal. Both regimes evangelize abroad and totalize at home: their champions view themselves as harbingers of a new epoch of human consciousness that must be imparted to the entire species, and even if liberal-democracy initially posited itself as a stricture only on the formal apparatus of government, the democratization of liberal precepts from the nineteenth century onwards has carried its subjectivizing and vulgarizing imperatives into every niche of ordinary life; perhaps even to a greater extent than was ever accomplished by the Soviet experiment.

While the totalitarian inclinations of communism have always been well understood and regarded as endemic to its vision of life, those of liberal-democracy have traditionally not been recognized at all, perhaps owing to its more gradual historical crystallization. Liberal-democracy is, of course, a composite term, and the two halves of the composite developed in divergent ways before they were twisted together in the twentieth century. Though regarded with skepticism in the ancient world, the ideal of democracy was revivified by the Enlightenment’s playful rejection of established authority. Direct democracy, or at least something approximating it, found its standard-bearer in J.J. Rousseau, who held that in a legitimate political order all laws and institutions must be expressions of a collectivized general will. The general will was taken to be the only true expression of democratic freedom, and so, in the most notorious passage in The Social Contract, Rousseau asserted that any dissenter who set himself against the general will would have to be “forced to be free”.

Liberalism was introduced in large measure as a mechanism for counteracting the totalizing ambitions of majoritarianism. Nineteenth century figures like J.S. Mill and Benjamin Constant advocated liberal strictures on democracy in order to protect certain social spheres of refinement and eccentricity from the crude superficiality of mass politics. But beginning in the early twentieth century and accelerating in a more organized and programmatic form after the 1960s, the language of liberalism was coopted by the very democratic pressures it was intended to mitigate. The liberal constellation of contractarian rights, egalitarianism, personal autonomy, and social noninterference were applied by the progressive movement to an ever-expanding and largely fabricated collection of identity groups, the supposed grievances of which were used as a battering ram to destroy those traditional and inherited elements of society seen as obstacles to the newly congealing liberal-democratic establishment. The subjectivizing tendencies of liberalism were combined with the totalitarian reach of direct democracy, and a monster was born.

Legutko draws a parallel between the “identity politics” of the twenty-first century West and the class politics of the communists. Under communism, the meaning of history was tied up with the advancement of the proletariat and the displacement of the bourgeoisie, who hoarded the means of production and the wealth they produced, and thus dammed up the tide of progress. The proletariat consisted of anyone who worked for wages; but since wage-earners in pre-communist societies had no real consciousness of their shared class identity, let alone any sense of political solidarity, communist regimes essentially had to invent the concept of the proletarian and to inculcate a public acceptance of the term and its applicability in order to advance their political aims.

In much the same way, the liberal-democratic order is constantly fashioning new aggrieved identity groups and using them to undermine organic communities and social conventions, which are inevitably defamed as vestiges of oppression and ignorance that must be swept aside so that the “right side of history”, which happens to always align with the sensibilities of the political, media, and corporate elite, can prevail. Feminism inevitably triumphs over patriarchy, weakening the traditional family structure and the communal ties that obviate reliance on the state and the market for social goods; “queerness” triumphs over “heteronormativity” to the same end; secularism pushes religion further into the private domain of personal conviction, furthering social atomization and moral relativism; the historical marginalization of “people of color” allows the regime to delegitimize the entire constitutional order as an outgrowth of “white supremacy” and work to overturn it.

Communists and liberal-democrats speak at length of “community”, but this never refers to communities as they actually exist: multifarious, dynamic, cohesive, hierarchical, creative, intimate, complex, profound, and sometimes even politically incorrect. The “communities” they champion are instead always new and synthetic constructs; each “community” functions more-or-less like its own political party, though it adheres to the same ideology and directs itself to the same political ends as all the others. The result is a paradox: the ideologies which have most stridently claimed the mantle of pluralism, which claim to represent the vast diversity of human experience, have in practice been the most effective agents of political, social, and cultural homogenization the world has ever seen. Those who resist this monocultural imperialism are then labeled enemies of diversity and toleration!

What’s more, because these “communities” are vehicles of political activism instead of inherited ways of being, those who would otherwise be included in their ranks are shunned if their own views and experiences contradict the party platform. Thus “people of color” who reject critical race theory become “white adjacent”, women who criticize certain forms of feminism become traitors to their sex, and so on. The liberal-democratic discourse on “community” is then revealed to be an attempt, on the part of a totalitarian political ideology, to swallow up and metabolize the fullness of human life: a fullness which always exceeds, and inevitably defeats, the totalitarian system. The communist analogue of this phenomenon would be the working-class people who rejected the tenets of Bolshevism or Maoism and were thus transmogrified into reactionaries and class enemies.

The situation is quite bleak; but identifying the contours of the regime under which we live and the dynamics by which it operates, as Ryszard Legukto has done here along with numerous other post-liberal writers, may be the most critical step toward developing the capacity to envision a new way forward.

[Meghan Davis strader · Rating 2 out of 5]

I’m not really sure what to make of this book. The author comes from a unique perspective, and he’ll be explaining his positions: but then suddenly he’ll make huge leaps that don’t seem to have anything to do with what he was talking about. And then contradict himself 2 sentences later.
For instance, when discussing ideologies, he points to the communist proletariat as the “true worker”. But then connects that to a feminist sisterhood (his position being that women are just figments of the political imagination. That women might want to work and live in a free society without harassment doesn’t seem to be an explanation he is willing to entertain.) He’ll go on to say that these groups of “special interests” are polluting the free society with their charges of oppression, but then also say that Christians are the only group that can actually claim oppression.
There are moments like this all throughout the book that make the book read like his formulated ideas in written form were getting him off track from his already formed ideas, and he would have to wrench his own conversation back to where he started.
However, I did find some of his larger points very interesting to think about (democracy as utopia, for instance) and took a fair amount of notes down (when he wasn’t advocating against domestic violence laws).

[Luke Rajlich · Rating 2 out of 5]

I read (half of) this book the gain a better understand of european populism. The leading polish political party is a right-wing populist party. I eventually stopped reading because it started to sound like whining more than anything else.

The gist of the book is that liberal democracy is a good thing as a system of government but that the system of government has been quietly hijacked into a political ideology. My assessment of the book is that it is a long winded complaint about how liberal democracies have given special protections to disadvantaged groups and a complaint against socially liberal policies in general, but doesn't really give much justification why this is bad for society or how this is totalitarian. Doesn't touch on economic factors at all, at least in the first half. The first half didn't give any direct arguments that liberal democracy is in actuality destroying the west. Maybe the second half of the book is better...

I believe some context on Polish political history explains some aspects of the views in the book. Poles broke communism via solidarity (populist in nature) and it is a very catholic and socially conservative country with respect to other European countries.

[Mitch · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm not sure what to make of this book. The author's analysis of several of the downsides and negative tendencies of liberal democracy seem largely correct to me. His wealth of knowledge of the western canon of thought that he uses to derive examples and arguments from is impressive as well. However, the comparison he makes with communism seems forced and unnecessarily provocative, while some of the points he advocates for seem plainly inconsistent. Overall, a decent book with a not too common, yet important, message.

[Aron Kerpel-Fronius · Rating 2 out of 5]

This could have been a very interesting, needed, well-argued book, challenging the supposedly dominant liberal democratic ideology of the western world which they are trying to impose on their own societies and on countries such as Poland or Hungary. Instead, Legutko brings poor arguments, or rather a bunch of unsupported claims and statements, resulting in a highly emotionally charged and not very coherent piece. Nonetheless, I did not regret the time I spent on it.

[David Selsby · Rating 4 out of 5]

Q. How are you squaring the fact that your reading list is starting to look “conservative,” or that someone who looks at what you’re reading in the last couple of months would think you are a “conversative”?

Squaring with what I used to say? Read? Do?

Q. Yes

Which one?

Q. All. I mean, book review after book review here for years, it would seem, were left wing, about Marx, complimenting Marx, complimenting Lenin, critiquing the bourgeoisie, focusing on politics through a class lens, and so on. Do you believe any of that stuff anymore?

Of course, I believed everything I wrote when I wrote it, and I believe a lot of it still today. This is the universal problem for all non-specialists, for all non-scholars, right? 99.99% of the citizens of the United States don’t have Phds in political science, philosophy, sociology, economics, antiquity, etc. That same percentage of people aren’t scholars in any particular field, which means they haven’t spent 10 years reading the history of thought that applies to a specific field. Maybe a lot of the “scholars” earning Phds are mailing it in or not acquiring an education of breadth and sophistication. But anyway, let’s assume they are. My point is that by the time we’re 30 years old, the number of people who’ve acquired a deep, broad, comprehensive understanding of the history of philosophy, political science, social science, economics, government, the ancients, and civics is infinitesimal.

Q. So all of us laypeople are on our own to piece together an education after we’ve received our BAs in English Literature, Theater Arts, Psychology, or whatever?

Exactly. Then our education begins. Or it becomes refined. I’m just reading more deeply now. The arguments, histories, and theses Patrick Deneen, Ryszard Legutko, Adrian Vermeule, Gladden Pappin, Sohrab Ahmari put forth are extremely compelling. Everything I’m reading by them is generative, robust. These guys are really smart and their thinking is challenging me to look at the world in a different way, challenging me to question things. More specifically, their work is challenging me to think about and consider how different intellectual and epistemological traditions and inheritances have achieved hegemony, when they’ve been hegemonic, when they haven’t been and why, where we are in the Modern Era, and what inheritances and traditions of thought and society-building we’ve abandoned and why. Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, Burke--these are figures whose teachings and the traditions that grew in the wake of their teachings I have had little interaction with.

It’s only “conversative,” or “only” conservative if you’re surveying the political landscape and theorizing with an impoverished point of view. We have to get first things first: the New York Times, or actually let me say more accurately, the people who write for the New York Times, the New Yorker, The Atlantic, Washington Post and any other elite liberal outlets I’m not mentioning are not intellectuals. Perhaps some of them are in their personal lives, but professionally, they are hacks. They might be good writers. They can organize ideas well; they can address all the points an audience wants addressed. They have strong vocabularies, etc. But they are ideological hacks churning out content in the name of propagating the American liberal imperium. That’s all they are. That’s all they are accomplishing. Don’t get me wrong, there are elements of our liberal order that are laudatoary and worth defending: the rule of law, civil rights, statutes of anti-discrimination. In addition to being hacks, they are also the elite. Every outlet I mentioned above consists of ideological workers of whom upwards of 90% went to the most elite, expensive educational institutions in the country. It is their country, culturally speaking. And everything I said about those elite news outlets can also apply to other cultural institutions: Hollywood, Broadway, radio, advertising, athletics (although the actual game-play isn’t touched by it), public education, the university.

Q. So you’re suggesting this ruling elite, propagating the ideology that sustains the liberal imperium is going to cast anything that opposes that project and its commitments as reactionary, conservative, revanchist, fascist?

Exactly. All the aforementioned institutions are progressive in the sense they are commited to ensuring more rights that protect new identities and demographics who need to be protected. These progressive institutions, and they are the bailiwick of liberalism writ large and embody the contradictions inherent in liberalism, are tasked with and legitimate themselves by increasing a rights-based society. As more and more people differentiate themselves under the auspices of a liberal logic--more individualism, more specificity, more particularity, more choice--an administrative and bureaucratic state always follows in the wake of these changes in order to enshrine and codify that individualism, that atomization, those choices, whether we’re talking about sexual orientation, racial egalitarianism (which has, rightly, been codified at the state and federal level, so we’re talking about racial preferences at this later date), same-sex marriage, gender identity, or gender transitions. The liberal logic, by privelaging the prerogatives of the individual, paradoxically empowers powerful and pervasive bureaucratic and administrative mechanisms to ensure the rights of those individuals. So what is lost? The “rights'' of traditionalists. The conservatives. Those who would like to form communities of whatever size--municipal, county, state--that enshrine societal practices based on normative commitments of what that discrete community feels is the common good. And that common good might have hierarchies, proscriptions, and notions of virtue, morals, and ethics promulgated through laws and ordinances, or if not codified, then simply propagated and embedded by the normative dictates of elders and other community members.

Q. So these conservative writers, including Legutko whose project seems very much of a piece with Deneen, Pappin, and Vermeule, are intent on conserving things, or putting forth a robust intellectual scaffolding and logic by which and why these conservative “values,” traditions, and inheritances should be conserved. Some of these traditions and inheritances are commitments of those who are members of the Republican Party, and those members are fighting for these values in a way it’s not possible to if you’re an elected official in the Democratic Party. So we can start to see how these post-liberal commitments map onto our current American political landscape.

Yes, I think that’s accurate. And it’s more than just excavating discrete epistemologies from earlier eras; or exploring how these traditions and inheritances of Western Civilization have evolved and either been hegemonic or been in retreat (during the liberal era), but Legutko et al. are examining how to organize society now, towards what Vermeule and others call the “common good.” The commitments and projects that make up Aristotelian-Thomist traditions inform and seek to maintain “natural law.” The inheritance of the liberal order that’s been hegemonic since the 18th century, in addition to the laudatory and invaluable features I mentioned above, includes increasing atomization, alientation, rights-based society, consumerism, globalization, anti-culture, and the homogenization of not only national landscapes but homogenization of the international landscape so that it adheres to the prerogatives of the libeal imperium.

Q. I’m guessing some of these things worth conserving are family, nation, religion, Judeo-Chritian morality and ethics, hierarchies, etc.?

They are. I wish I would have come to these conclusions when I was younger so I didn't have to allay the faint voice in my head saying one of the reasons I’m receptive to the ideas of the post-liberals is that I’m older now, and I understand what is really important in life. This voice makes me question whether or not I’m appreciating the gist of these arguments on their merits as opposed to the fact they might just be overlaying with psychological and spiritual predilections I’ve arrived at as a result of the discrete factors of my personal life--age, wisdom, experience.

These are not strange things: Judeo-Christian morals and ethics, family, national integrity, embeddedness in a community, traditional notions of marriage and what constitutes a man and a woman. One of the remarkable things about reading “The Demon is Democracy” is how untimely it was. It was published in April of 2016. He’s writing in Poland and his gaze is most directly trained on Europe and how the European Union and its various decisions has made it an embodiment of what we call “wokeness” in the States. The book was published before Trump, Brexit, and other populist upheavels around the globe. Over and over while reading “The Demon in Democracy,” I kept thinking, “God, things have gotten so much worse.” Many of the arguments Legutko presented about liberalism being a utopian ideology based on a logic of the constantly improving man ring true. His comparison of utopian liberalism with the utopian ideology of what evolved into Marxism-Leninism in the 20th Century is persuasive. Things have gotten “worse.” We are not progressing. Perhaps it’s time to contemplate the fact we (the Western world) might be in thrall to a utopian ideology (liberalism) whose defining feature at this point is the exacerbation of global wealth inequality, the destruction of the natural world, the globalization of homogenization that comes with the anti-culture of liberal capitalism that overwhelms and ultimately destroys all discrete , local, regional cultures, traditions, and practices.

I don't agree with tall the moves Legutko makes within his argument about the moral bankruptcy at the heart of utopian Marxism, but he presents an extremely compelling argument that needs to be grappled with by all people who take seriously and hold stock in materialist critique and materialist logic to explicate the mechanisms of political economy. One can sit around--and there are tens, hundreds, thousands do just that--with his or her “leftist” magazines, journals, online journals, podcasts, tweets, blogs, vlogs, YouTube shows beseeching the working man to stand firm against the depredations of capitalism: organize, organize, organize. Talk to people in the community; salt the shop floor. Organize, solidarity, etc. Of course, no one is arguing against that. But it’s not happening. We’re getting nowhere when it comes to bringing capitalism to heal. Nowhere. Zip. Zilch. There was a hint of a rumor that the American populace might get behind an anti identity-politics populist candidate in Bernie Sanders is 2015, but I don’t think we should ever forget what the Democratic Party had to say about the possibility of even the mildest form of social-democracy taking hold in the polity’s imagination. Were Sanders to have won the Democratic nomination, I have no doubt the captains of industry and finance, probably even the big unions with significant connections to institutional capitalism through pensions, plus the Deep State, and the whole kit and kaboodle of career spooks, national intelligence ghouls, and military-industrial complex functionaries, administrators, and sundry hangers-on with their snouts in the trough would have moved heaven and earth to get Trump into office over Sanders.

Q. You’re still sympathetic to Marxism. But you think that the glimmer of social-democratic enthusiasm that sprang up among the polity 5 or 6 years ago is a spent force in the United States?

It is a spent force. There are a lot of reasons why it’s a spent force. To give just one example, Bernie Sanders took on all the worst baggage of identity politics in an attempt to curry favor with the upwardly mobile professional-managerial class--those who came from elite schools and who occupied all the bastions of cultural denomination, and it didn’t help him. He took on all the lame cultural war baggage, lost all the voters who went from Bernie to Trump in ‘16, and then after Nevada was buried by a phone call from Obama, which led to the zombie we have in the White House today. But anyway, it’s a spent force. Those that provided substantive, vital gestures and commitments towards socialism or even social-democracy via journals, podcasts, electoral participation have all cashed in wth jobs in the NGO-industrial complex, gotten sinecures in the academy or the news media/entertainment complex, or had the edge to their political commitments co-opted by the Democratic Party. The Squad is a joke and a spent force. Jacobin is now The Nation; in fact, Bhaskar Sunkara now works for The Nation. Once is a blue moon Bernie squeaks something about unionizing Amazon or Starbucks.

My point is while we wait for the great socialist revolution of the future (essentially a utopian wish), we need to live our lives, we need to make money, we need to make friends, find husbands and wives, get embedded in communities, raise our children, have free time, and enjoy life.

Q. So it’s a spent force but it seems like you are still sympatico with a Marxian critique of political-economy. Is there are a way that the communitarian ethos of the post-liberals and other figures like Christopher Lasch, a thinker from an earlier era, fit in with or merge normatively conserative/traditional Judeo-Christian values with a Marxian or almost Marxian critique of political economy?

I’m glad you brought up Christopher Lasch. He’s an author I first heard of a few years ago in “post-left” circles. He’s an interesting guy. “The Culture of Narcissism” was terrible, but other than that, I can see why he’s talked about both in the discourse around the post-left and the “new-right.” He works in that register you describe--communitarian commitments, deep skepticism of the ever-expanding administrative and bureaucratic State; he’s leery of libertine morals and ethics at the expense of family, marriage, and community. He would fit right with the Compact magazine crew or the post-liberal thinkers I mentioned earlier. Coming back to Legutko, he had a very unique experience, or perhaps it wasn’t unique for those who grew up in Poland or other Eastern Bloc countries, insofar as he doesn't have any warm thoughts whatsoever about a Marxist-tinged social democratic project coming to fruition in the West. GenXers and Millennials who came of age in the wake of ‘89 don’t have a visceral reaction to the Soviet state, one way or the other. Even older writers, Deneen, for example, who are old Gen Xers/young Boomers didn’t live in Easter Bloc countries, obviously, and were not mature in their thoughts by ‘89. My point is Xers and Millennials who’ve gravitated towards democratic socialism, Leftism, social democracy and the whole suite of policy commitments associated with Bernie Sanders--free or heavily subsidized college, universal medicare, affordable housing, in other words all the public goods, don’t have a jaded notion of the State as an entity through which these laudatory proceeds can be distributed.

Writers like Adoph Reed Jr, Cedric Johson, Barbara Fields, Walter Benn Michaels, writers who’ve admirably taken to task the specious, petty bourgeois commitments of the identitarians, also put great stock in “public goods.” In many ways that’s the telos of their politics--working class coalitions built across races, the rejection of ascriptive identity as a means of creating solidarity, and the empowerment of the State, acting in concert with robust democratic mechanisms, to act forcefully for the betterment of all. People like Lasch (then), and other members of the new right (now), Legutko for example, aren’t nearly as sanguine about the efficacy and ultimately the viability of the State as a conduit by which public goods can be distributed or the common good achieved. And you know what? I’m sympathetic to their lack of sanguinity towards the State. Obviously, the libertarian economist and financial ghouls who are bent on privatizing everything under the sun in the name of market efficiency are so obviously lying and specious in their arguments that they can barely get them out of their mouths anymore with a straight face. But by the same token, leftists’ call to raise taxes, to accrue more money for the State to distribute equitably, isn’t a panacea if it’s not part of a larger, holistic political project. And I think that’s why a magazine like Compact is so interesting in the way it’s offering voices that both speak to the edifying nature of conservative normative commitments, religious commitments foremost, while also offering cogent critiques of foregin adventurism, rapacious oligarchy, and other deleterious features of the neoliberal state. When the State is involved, and if the state can be harnessed for the public good, then democratic controls need to be in place--real hands-on, forceful, volitional democratic controls orchestrating what is going where and why. That project seems at best something that can happen at the local or regional level, which brings us back to the type of communitarian, local agency that is part and parcel of the “new right.”

[Tomasz · Rating 1 out of 5]

Duże rozczarowanie. Praca jest jedną z ważniejszych pozycji polskiego konserwatyzmu. Tak naprawdę jednak, nie za bardzo wiadomo, co tu jest nowego lub co by nie zostało powiedziane gdzie indziej w lepszy, bardziej pogłębiony sposób.

Ocena wynika z istotnych błędów, stronniczości dużej powierzchowności rozważań oraz braku istotnej nowości w tym co pisze autor. Legutko jest z pewnością kompetentny w historii myśli politycznej, więc robienie sobie chochoła z przeciwnika trzeba potraktować jako świadomy zabieg (teoria krytyczna ma na celu rewolucję, feminizm jest jednolitą quasi-partią).

Na błędzie opiera się podstawowa teza o istotnych podobieństwach między liberalną demokracją i komunizmem, które objawiają się m.in. stosunkiem do nowoczesności, ale też szeregiem innych cech. Autor z pewnością jednak zdaje sobie sprawę, że to nie liberalna demokracja jest obarczana odpowiedzialnością za wiele krytykowanych przez niego zjawisk, ale własnie nowoczesność. Liberalizm, lewica i także konserwatyzm są owocami nowoczesności, różnymi sposobami reakcji na nią. Z tego wynikają ich podobieństwa i nietrudno byłoby wskazać podobieństwa między konserwatyzmem a komunizmem. Pod względem krytyki, argumenty autora są znane od dekad. Spłycanie sfery duchowej, postępujący konsumpcjonizm, wywyższenie przeciętności i równanie standardów w dół, relatywizm moralny. Książka to właściwie uwspółcześniona wersja argumentów Webera, Daniela Bella i Ortegi y Gasseta. Trudno znaleźć tu ślady nowszych autorów czy nowatorskich argumentów. Jako krytyka nowoczesności jest to więc praca wtórna.

Sam konserwatyzm jest mocno idealizowany (ew. krytykowany za liberalizację). Tymczasem część krytyk liberalnej demokracji wprost może zostać odniesiona do nurtu konserwatywnego. Przeciwstawianie ujednolicającej liberalnej demokracji konserwatyzmowi, promującemu różnorodność jest mocno dyskusyjne i właściwie gołosłowne. Rzeczywiście, pewne polityki liberalne mogą tak działać, tak samo jest jednak z politykami konserwatywnymi.
Podobnie jest z krytykowaniem zjawiska wulgaryzacji sfery publicznej. Znów odpowiedzialna jest liberalna demokracja. Tymczasem cały internet pełen jest zwolenników konserwatyzmu rzucających obelgi pod płaszczykiem szczerości czy świadczenia prawdy. Sam autor został sądownie skazany za lżenie licealistów.

Najlepsze fragmenty dotyczą konserwatywnej krytyki Unii Europejskiej i współczesnego Kościoła katolickiego. Także tutaj jednak autor nie wychodzi poza dłuższą (ale nie głębszą) publicystykę.

[Aaron Crofut · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of the more famous works critiquing the liberal and modernist political philosophy. Obligatory notice that "liberal" here is not a synonym for "Democrat" but of the entire Enlightenment project. Patrick Deneen, Kenneth Minogue, Pierre Manent, Sohrab Ahmari, and Rod Dreher among others have taken up this critique. Legutko's work benefits from 1) being published before Trump, and so is not a mere reaction to that event and 2) focused on Europe. The crisis we are facing is not unique to the United States. All attempts to blame Trump solely for our situation are dishonest for that reason.

And no, I'm not a fan of Orange Man. I fall into the category of folks who see him as a symptom of our problems, not the cause.

The gist of this book is that there are disquieting similarities between communism and our system of liberal democracy. Legutko would know, having lived and actively opposed both. Differences obviously exist as well; like Deneen, Legutko is quite clear about the impressive accomplishments of liberalism in preventing open persecution and in enriching every level of society to unheard of heights. But that does not remove those similarities, which tend towards reducing the human experience towards mediocrity and boredom. A life without teleology is likely to be one dominated by ideology, and this has severe implications for man's ability to truly seek the truth, for meaning, for purpose.

The communist would bring about peace by the gulag; we would bring it about with antidepressants and woke protests. "The vulgarity of the communists was precultural while that of liberal democracy is postcultural."

Legutko ends on a rather pessimistic note and believes mankind is content to settle into a "bread and circuses" world where we are willing to settle for food, warmth, and stupid Tik Tok videos to entertain us until we die. I'm not so sure I believe that low-level of human development can be masked over for long. Sure, many people are content with that, but there is a significant portion of society that is not. They are looking for something more; anything more, in fact. In the past, these people would become great saints. Now? I fear to know. But increasingly there is a willingness to overlook how truthful a cause is just for the sake of having a cause.

Whether we have enough prescriptions and therapy to contain that is an open question.

[Sam Strickland]

Legutko makes several disparaging comparisons between Communism and Liberal Democracy as ideologies. Among his most delightful, yet depressing, phrases are “anthropological minimalism” and constant references to “The Liberal-Democratic Man” (yes, I know it’s a translation). I find the comparisons he makes convincing enough. Still, the critique of a political idea merely because it directs and guides daily actions or places limits on speech continues to strike me as coming from a false, and perhaps idolatrous, view of freedom. Communities have and will always seek to enforce and shape their member’s habits of thought, speech, and bodily action. Our concern should be on the kinds of habits communities should form and the ways to cultivate them that are best in line with a robust anthropology. There are ways of getting someone to perform an action that are not coercive, on the one hand, or laissez faire, on the other.

As an aside I would like to see more constructive proposals for what our politics actually should look like instead of Liberalism, which is a nebulous concept that has prolifically spawned even more nebulous analyses. This is a comment about my reading habits more than Legutko’s book.

[Jalen · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was an excellent analysis of the de facto ideological similarities between socialist/communist societies and contemporary Western societies rooted in democratic liberalism. I thought it was even sharper and more focused than Deneen’s “Why Liberalism Failed.” I’m too tired to say more right now, but the key insight or takeaway for me was his insistence that Western societies are simply unable to imagine any progress or development outside of the liberal democratic model, i.e., the insistence that the problems inherent and caused by philosophical assumptions of modern liberalism will somehow be solved by a more radical devotion to liberalism. This really is almost pathological, which is a sure sign that you’re dealing with a deeply-rooted ideology.

I found that I didn’t fully agree with some of the arguments in the latter half of the work, and thought the first half was a bit stronger, but this really is a thought-provoking work and one of the better books on political philosophy I’ve read in quite a while. Highly recommend it.

[Timothy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Here is a book by a Pole about the darker side of what we call "democracy."

This is not the sort of critique I would make of democracy. I would have said what we have in the West is NOT democracy but a very mixed system of governance with an official civic religion we call "democracy." The mixed system, in America, features a sub rosa military-industrial complex conservatorship whose exact influence we peons cannot know.

As a civic religion, democracy mostly sucks, to put in the vernacular, and its most ardent partisans are clowns. And the system as a whole is sliding into wild instability because of the very nature of statism itself (the actual governmental policy set) — the long arc of the implementation of statist policies constitute a long con.

Statism and democracy are two distinct things: one’s a robust regime of control of the citizenry, and the other is a process by which citizens control the regime. It is an uneasy mix, and I'd say democracy is not democratic under statist policies, which tend to be technocratic, special-interest based, and socialistic.

But that's not what the author attacks. He explores, instead, the ominous parallels between communist rule and liberal democratic rule. His main focus, by the end, is on religion.

And it's fascinating!

[Jon · Rating 2 out of 5]

There’s a lot to say about this book, and I may write a longer review at some point. To sum up, this is probably worth reading for anyone still struggling to understand the anti-democratic rhetoric and policies of right-populist leaders. Beyond that, there’s not much to recommend it. Legutko offers many critiques but no vision for a sustainable alternative to liberal democracy. He clearly wants to restore pre-Vatican II Catholicism, reduce or eliminate domestic violence laws, and return us to a world where people can tell “f*g jokes” with no consequences. Otherwise, the goal seems mostly to be moving fast and breaking things while mocking any ignorant plebeian who suggests that radical anti-democratic authoritarianism might have fascistic implications.

[Jerzy]

(This is not a review of the book! Just a convenient place to jot down notes from hearing the author speak *about* his book, along with my own reactions and ill-formed political ramblings. Please ignore, or take with a big grain of salt.)

I still have not read the book, but went to a lecture by the author tonight. The audience members asked most of the burning questions I had.

In particular, one asked: Wouldn't your main concerns about liberal democracy (homogeneity of thought, & politicization of private matters) still hold true in states/times when conservatives were firmly in charge? Any ideology, once it starts being in charge, will continue expanding until it hits limits and gets pushback from opposing views. If so, does that mean the real failure is not inherent to liberalism, but rather the failure of us conservatives [in the questioner's words] for not doing a better job of resisting liberalism and "selling" our viewpoint as an alternative?
Legutko agreed that conservatives lately have not succeeded in making a compelling case for their side as well as liberals have. (And I do personally think there's a lot to respect about old-school conservatives who were "elite" in the best sense -- caring deeply about virtue and duty. I'm disappointed that they are not prominent in the Republican administration today. It's valuable for liberals to have sincere, thoughtful political opponents to temper our moments of overzealousness.) But then he proceeded to blame liberals for being *inherently* worse, in a way somehow related to them not being "open," which I did not understand...

In response to a later question, Legutko said his alternative would not be to swap out liberals for conservatives in charge, but to replace all-encompassing democracy & pursuit of equality with "mixed institutions"(?) In some realms of life they could still be democratic, but many would also be aristocratic or authoritarian, e.g. church hierarchies or elite schools, and this would be seen as OK. It seems he is disappointed that even the Roman Catholic church is becoming more liberal and less hierarchical in his eyes; and that *all* schools are pressured to be level playing-fields open to the wide public, rather than some schools still having the option to serve elites only and maintain existing hierarchies. (Such concerns sound overblown to me on this side of the pond, especially at a pretty-darn-elitist school myself. But maybe it's different & more-highly-regulated in Europe?)

And when pressed to tell us *who* are the aristocrats today whom we could trust to decide what's good and how much equality is enough... he conceded that there's no easy answer, and anyone he proposes could easily be dismissed. Being open to the idea of aristocrats is more important than proposing anyone in particular, he said -- but this strikes me as a HUGE cop-out. Yeah, Plato proposed rule by philosopher-kings, and it sounds nice, but if we've never successfully *had* a cadre of philosopher-kings who manage to rule stable and sanely, then I'm more in favor of a political system that's robust to reality instead of wishing & hoping for nonexistent unicorn overlords to appear out of nowhere.

I was, however, moved by how he talked about Polish historical memory. In the decades of occupation when Poland was wiped off the map, Polish nationalism had deeply buried roots -- taking pride and solace in our culture, language, music, literature, religion, etc., but hiding these from the Prussian, Austrian, Russian rulers. Then after a brief stint of independence, the Soviets took over and again national pride was repressed for decades. Now, finally, we have that independence back, yet [says Legutko] the liberals want to forget our history and look only to the future, forgetting the canon of our artistic masterpieces and the religion that kept us going through those dark times...
I sincerely don't think most liberals want to toss out our history entirely! Accepting that there are *also* other things worth learning about doesn't mean the canon is worthless. Accepting that other faiths and lifestyles should *also* have legal rights doesn't mean you have to change your personal faith or sexuality or whatever. Please, celebrate your pride and heritage -- just don't be a jerk while you do it; love thy neighbor, and try to learn a bit about them too.
However, hearing Legutko's point here made me wonder about conservatives in the US. Some seem like they sincerely feel under attack, in the same way that Polish culture was (indeed, for reals) under attack during the years of occupation. I can sympathize with that feeling, even if the feeling seems not entirely justified here, like an overblown martyr syndrome. (Compared to actual military occupation by another country that has literally wiped your nation off the map, murdered your friends and family, and put laws in place to forbid you from speaking your language or practicing your religion? Liberal democratic rulers aren't anywhere close to that.)

Long story short, there are some good provocative thoughts here, but I was not convinced overall. I could be swayed by an impassioned defense of classical ideals: Be aware of how the blind pursuit of equality might sometimes discourage the pursuit of excellence. Don't forget the canon of Western civ entirely as you are opening up to other traditions as well. Take care not to lose sight of the valuable things about our heritage.
But instead, this was an impassioned rant against liberalism. To claim that liberalism enforces more homogeneity than a hypothetical authoritarian, hierarchical church-state run by mysterious aristocrats? It's sincerely hard for me to see his point.

(Finally, as an aside, one of my colleagues claimed anecdotally that students in the audience at conservative events are much more respectful of other sides than students at liberal/progressive events. I haven't been to many of either, but I agree that the students tonight asked great questions, politely but firmly even in the case of those who clearly disagreed with the speaker. Maybe conservative students tend to grow up in families where respect for authority is paramount? I should ask my Statistics students do some data collection on this topic...)

---

Earlier notes:

The author is giving a talk here next week, and as a fellow Pole his name caught my eye. Looking at the other reviews, I expect to disagree strongly with the book. But I am curious to hear the perspective of a Pole who lived through much more of the Communist years than I did -- what exactly are the parallels he sees between then and now?

Despite the title, it sounds like it's not a critique of democracy as such, just modern liberalism. And it's hard to tell whether the main argument depends on liberalism specifically in any way -- aren't conservatives just as dogmatic when they are in power? Wouldn't you be just as upset by any ruling party/ideology you disagree with? What better alternative do you propose? But again, I haven't actually read the book yet.

---

Hmm, OK, I still have not read it but found an interesting story about him in the news: Legutko was sued for being derogatory towards a couple of high school students, calling them essentially "spoiled brats" (comes across a bit harsher in Polish, but still not exactly hate speech as far as I can tell). These students were petitioning that their high school remove Christian crosses from the walls and organized a school debate on the topic. In the end, Legutko lost in court and had to issue a formal apology in the newspapers, among other things.

Lot of things mixed together here: Separation of church and state is a principle I agree with, but I recognize the tension between that and local traditions / freedom of expression. And I certainly think there's no call to go around slandering high schoolers who seemed to be trying to work through these issues in a civil way -- but nor do I think that suing everyone who disses you is where our society should go either. In other words, I can see how an experience like this would give Legutko personal frustration with "liberal democracy" and a feeling that his freedom of speech is being limited. I still think he's overgeneralizing when he complains that liberal democracy shuts down *all* freedom of speech -- but at the same time this anecdote suggests that EU laws *are* more restrictive than the ones we have here in the US, and I need to learn more about that.

---

One more: here's an interview with him about Trump's election. I'm glad to see that at least he doesn't seem aligned with Trump's anti-intellectual rhetoric or the party that elected him:

If I am not mistaken, the Republican Party has long relinquished, with very few exceptions, any closer link with conservatism. If conservatism, whatever the precise definition, has something to do with a continuity of culture, Christian and Classical roots of this culture, classical metaphysics and anthropology, beauty and virtue, a sense of decorum, liberal education, family, republican paideia, and other related notions, these are not the elements that constitute an integral part of an ideal type of an Republican identity in today’s America.

I really don't believe the US Democrats are against classical Western civ, so much as saying "Let's think about it carefully and not trust it at face value -- it's just one part of our heritage, let's also see what's left out of this story, enrich our understanding of others, etc." Whereas the current US Republican administration seems anti-intellectual, anti-elitist, and outrightly opposing classical ideals of virtue and decorum. But maybe things are different in Europe and we are just talking past each other if Legutko's liberals and conservatives don't map neatly onto America's parties.

---

Finally: if Legutko is a Plato scholar & proponent of instilling ancient Greek virtues in everyone today, how is he so ardently against homosexuality? The speakers in Plato's Symposium are openly, from what I recall, pretty darn gay.

[Katelyn · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book is frustrating, to put it in a word. Legutko frames his definition of liberalism in such a way that to argue against him only goes to further prove his point that the liberal mainstream seeks to silence voices like his. (As with any statement of absolutes, both truth and hypocrisy emerge like a self-fulfilling prophecy).

Legutko starts off with a more objective outlook, sharing his experience living under communist control and providing a unique insight into the post-Cold-War era political interplay of Eastern Europe. Unfortunately, his logic becomes more cyclical as the book goes on until he rages subjectively against liberals and communists trying to silence things such as "superstition, tradition, the past, intolerance, racism, xenophobia, bigotry, etc" (7).

While he may be a scholar, Legutko seems to lack a comprehension of basic respect. He describes the civil rights movement as a radical shift to the left, seething against minority protections, especially those for "homosexuals and feminists- [who] have exerted a disproportionate influence on the government" (64). Let's be clear. Having legal protection from verbal abuse and harassment based on an unchangeable aspect of someone's identity is something white men already have, which reduces the comparative amount of privilege people like Legutko used to enjoy. It's like complaining that you no longer have a "right" to smack your wife because now there are repercussions. Like much of the book, these things are (to him) examples of totalitarian tendencies imposed by this new age on traditional society. He isn't incorrect that this is a shift to the left or that these groups have gained more power, but he fails to examine the underlying state these changes shifted from.

The author professes a desire for a true moral, merit-based society and rejects the idea of intrinsic human rights (specifically the Universal Declaration of Human Rights), claiming that bestowing such a thing onto people can only lead to widespread homogenization and mediocrity (which psychologically speaking, in a globalized world would be a normal trend). He attributes many of these things to the "alarming similarities" he sees between his definition of liberalism and communism, but it seems the underlying thread between the two is modernization and its "cult of technology," where "the temptation to give entertainment more and more prominence became irresistible, particularly in societies in which the fear of sin had lost its deterring power" (38).

The irony is, while Legutko seethes at the idea of homogenization and praises freedom of speech, the only things he actually advocates for are a return to his traditional Christian way of life and the ability to do and say as he pleases without consequence.

[Mike Fendrich · Rating 4 out of 5]

Is the decline of the American Republic, originally described as an experiment in limited self-government, an aberration to the founding principles or the logical conclusion to a form of government founded on enlightenment principles? Author Legutko, who lived through Communist rule and liberal democratic rule in Poland and has been deeply involved in the EU thinks the later. Although the means were different (fewer dead bodies on the liberal democracy side) the author makes the case that communism and liberal democracy result in very similar ends. Both are political philosophies that were born in the enlightenment and grew up and matured in modernity and steeped in an unsustainable hyper-individualism.

As a Christian, I found his chapter titled "Religion" to be particularly poignant. He writes, "The truth is that all these phenomena (the marginalization of religion and Christianity in particular), as well as other anti_Christian developments are the genuine consequences of the spirit of modernity on which liberal democracy was founded". He goes on to explain that the same anti-Christian stand of Communism is evident in liberal democracies, only the means to marginalize are different. Both political philosophies are intent on separating and removing authority structures that have been the basis of civic life for millennia and replacing them with the single, uncontested authority of the state.

Both philosophies are modern attempts at utopias. Legutko, while recognizing differences in methods, vividly describes that both philosophies demand absolute acceptance and obedience and do not tolerate divergent thoughts well at all (see political correctness here). While we in the west point to the brutality of communist regimes, past and present, (a true claim) we have been even more effective in minimizing the mediating structures (family, church, volunteer organizations) that lead to a lively and vibrant civic community and replace it with an omni-competent central government that exists to protect the rights of individuals (often at the expense of the rights of those holding onto the other mediating structures).

A good read, a difficult read for one who desires better from his country, but one that should be read. It is hard to find the good guys here.