In the summer of 2018, Barack Obama published a list of books worth reading. One was Patrick Deneen’s Why Liberalism Failed. Obama’s assessment: “I don’t agree with most of the author’s conclusions, but the book offers cogent insights into the loss of meaning and community that many in the West feel, issues that liberal democracies ignore at their own peril.”

Liberalism, according to Deneen, founded itself on the notion of securing liberty by granting rights, a free-market system, and space for individual initiative. But, as he takes stock of liberalism, he sees the liberal state as expanding in ways the founders of liberalism would have found frightening. Rights seem to be limited to the rights that the rich and powerful, the oligarchs, define as rights. Individual initiative and the free market system are more for the oligarchs, and those the oligarchs choose to enable, than for the average citizen in the liberal order.