From the opinion pages of the Wall Street Journal, this is Free Expression with Jerry Baker.

Hello and welcome to Free Expression, a weekly podcast from the Wall Street Journal editorial page with me, Jerry Baker, editor-at-large of The Journal.

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This week is the primary contest for the Republican presidential nominations about to get underway

with the first debate scheduled for later this month, I'm taking another dive into the

roiling debate over the future of conservatism, with one of our most prominent, and some would

say controversial modern conservative thinkers. Patrick Deneen is Professor of Political Science at the University of Notre Dame.

His 2018 book, Why Liberalism Failed, set out a strong case against what political protagonists and thinkers are both left and right had long considered axiomatic.

He argued that the liberal democracy most of us assumed had triumphed over all other competing ideologies in history in the

closing years of the 20th century, had in fact failed us. It was liberalism itself, he said,

that was responsible for the dysfunctional and demoralized Western societies of the last 10 years or so

that in turn had birthed the politics of Donald Trump, Brexit, and so-called populist movements

across the Western democracies.

In his latest book, which has just been published, called Regime Change, he advances the argument

by making the case for what he says should now replace liberalism, what he and others have

generally called common good conservatism, the governing philosophy that, among other things,

elevates traditional values, culture and institutions

to restore the primacy of national solidarity and cohesion over ideas of progressivism,

progress in general, and individual liberty. And Patrick Deneen joins me now. Professor Dene,

thanks very much for joining free expression. It's my pleasure. It's nice to be here.

The prescriptions that you laid in your new book. But let's start start we made by defining our terms and sort of recapping and repriezing the arguments you made in the first book, which you do, of course, at the start of this latest book, too, which is about liberalism, the idea of kind of liberal democracy, which, as I said, as sort of many of us for years, thought was sort of axiomatic that we'd been on this progress throughout history and, you history and we'd reach the end of history with the triumph of liberal democracy at the end of the 20th century. You take strong issue with that. You argue that liberalism has failed. So can we start by first of all just defining our terms what you mean by liberalism? Because I know, and again, in this book and others you go into the different strands of of what we might call liberalism. Let's talk about liberalism and recap for us why and how you think

liberalism has failed. Well, I feel like I've defined these terms many times, and yet I have to

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