But all the campus adventures amount to so much throat-clearing before he gets to the gravamen of his argument. In the introduction, he gives a hint at what’s to come: “What is needed — and what most ordinary people instinctively seek — is stability, order, continuity and a sense of gratitude for the past and obligation toward the future. They have been too degraded by an “invasive progressive tyranny” to yield anything other than a populist movement that is “untutored and ill led,” he writes, alluding to Trump. Deneen spends much of “Regime Change” taking cover in gauzy abstractions, so it’s the occasional blunt-force statement like this that reveals what he would ultimately like to see. There is a lot about “the past” in this book and barely any actual history.

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Persons: untutored, ”, Trump, ” Deneen, aristoi, Patrick J, Deneen, Márton, Tocqueville, Aristotle —