If you’ve ever read Reddit threads apropos “moving to town X or Y in the United States,” then you’ll likely have come across some comments like: “We’re full.” To this, another person might reply, stating that that is “MAGA country,” with the implication that the writer making this claim is a progressive. Though this distinction–MAGA country or coastal elitism–touches a nerve, it’s not quite an accurate view of the current political situation.

Such, at least, is what Patrick Deneen makes plain in his excellent book Regime Change: Toward a Postliberal Future (2023). In other posts, I’ll try to lay out the argument at some length, but for now I’ll limit my remarks whose chief point is to understand statements like “We’re full.”

For Deneen, the distinction between “the many” (demos) and “the few” (aristoi) is pivotal. The current power elite is meritocratic. It consists of the unholy family of (a) classical liberals, (b) progressive liberals, and (c) Marxists or post-Marxists. He focuses, largely, on the first two categories, at least in “Part I,” which unfolds his account of the state of the United States right now.

In broad strokes, it can be said that the current power elite is, by Deneen’s lights, pro-free trade, pro-material prosperity, and pro-identities. What binds together those who would seem to be speaking at cross purposes (i.e., pro-wealth like The Wall Street Journal and pro-identity like The New York Times) is the notion of progress–be it material or technological (in the case of classical liberals) or social (in the case of progressives). Change, disruption, flux, “creative destruction,” personal transformation, and the like: all these are the rallying cries of the current power elite. What also yokes them together is that, perhaps for the first time in Western history, the elites are totally separated (geographically and otherwise) from the commoners whom they disdain.

Since its inception, liberalism, Deneen thinks, has slowly yet inexorably decimated the lives of common people, and in countless ways. Livelihoods since the end of manufacturing age have collapsed as have marriages and church attendance. Drug use, as well as other social pathologies, have meanwhile skyrocketed. It’s a bleak, coarse, harrowing picture of rural life in America, of “red states,” of “flyover country.” UBI, Deneen might say, would only add insult to injury. And what this devastation has bred in turn is immense resentment for and outright animosity toward meritocratic elites.

And so, is it that surprising that when tech workers think about moving to northern Georgia, rural Montana, eastern Washington, or rural Oregon they’re met with resistance and antipathy? Locals aren’t wrong to think that whatever remains of their local culture could change in ways that resemble “California.” Nor do they want to put up with more development, more classical liberals and progressive moving in, more congestion, more progressive schools, and the like (even if their home values may, in some cases, soar).

“Haven’t you already done enough,” they say, “when, behind closed doors, you call us a ‘basket of deplorables’? Are you going to call our religion–whatever remains of it anyway–backward? We’re not going to become Woke! You’d better stay out!”

This moment in American history is, indeed, a terribly sad one. How we got here is part of the story that Deneen wants to tell. Whether “common-good conservatism” of the kind he espouses will offer a way forward is an open question.