Patrick Deneen is a professor in the political science department at Notre Dame,

the Catholic University in Indiana that was founded in 1842.

But he is not a political scientist.

He is quick to point this out, and he has a lot of practice pointing it out because that's what most people

think he is. He calls himself a political theorist or a political philosopher. Another thing he is

not is a political operative, although that's the impression you might have gotten if you read a

recent Wall Street Journal article with this headline, the ideological gurus battling for the soul of Trump

world. That's certainly the impression that I got. Here's the subheadline of that article. Techno-libertarian

Curtis Jarvin and Catholic conservative Patrick Danine have just one thing in common, a desire to

destroy the American establishment. Here's one line from that

article by Joshua Chaffin and Zusha Ellenson. On one side are tech bros racing to create a new future.

On the other, a resurgent band of conservative Catholics who yearn for an imagined past.

Until I read that article, I had not heard of Patrick Deneen, which I'm a bit embarrassed to say because he's a pretty big name in some of the circles I try to keep up on.

He's best known for writing a widely read book called Why Liberalism Failed.

It was published in 2018, not by a commercial publisher, but by Yale University Press.

Maybe that's why it didn't have a sexy subtitle. It was simply why liberalism failed, like a

hammer fist. If a commercial house had published it, there might have been a subtitle like

a soft-spoken political scientist reveals a hidden schism

in the soul of America. The books forward, which was written by a pair of Yale editors, argued

that Deneen's book is disruptive not only for the way it links social maladies to liberalism's

first principles, but also because it is difficult to categorize along our conventional

left-right spectrum. Indeed, the book was praised by everyone from Barack Obama to Victor

...