THE FOURTH TURNING IS EMERGENT.

Notre Dame political scientist Patrick Deneen suggests that the values regime of the Great Power Saeculum is crumbling.

Even those relatively inattentive to political matters now perceive the rise of a distinctive ruling class that today dominates the institutions of the West. Members of this ruling class are selected for their support and defense of the liberal order. Their main qualifying commitment is to the dismantling of a bounded world. In the economic domain, the liberal ruling class (right and left, Bushes and Clintons, Reagan and Obama) have dismantled national and politically constrained markets in favor of global markets, undoing formerly cherished protections for domestic workers in favor of the emancipation of globalized capital that seeks to extract and maximize “value” in every niche of the world. In order to compete in a ruthless marketplace, hard-won worker benefits—often achieved through the sacrifice of generations of labor unionists—have been undone. The priority of maximizing shareholder value and the advantages of the financial class have trumped considerations of basic decent conditions for the working class. In return for wage precarity, benefit reduction, the elimination of leisure, and general economic insecurity, the ordinary man and woman are promised a nirvana of consumer choice. The ethos of the insatiable consumptive has replaced the ideal of the proud producer.

The ruling class also governs over the unbinding of the social domain. In the name of a condition of equal independence, the basic norm of marriage between a man and a woman—the only union that can produce children and, thus, the future of humanity—has been “de-centered.” Fewer people than ever throughout the West marry or reproduce, imbibing the consumerist ethos of remaining commitment-free. Every June, we enter a month of celebration of forms of sexual union that are biologically barren—yet must be celebrated precisely because they are transgressive and unbounded.

That portrait of the gerontocracy, er, Ruling Class, has its detractors.  Professor Deneen's essay focuses on the "do as I say, not as I do" behavior of the ruling class, if in an odd way.

Meanwhile, members of the ruling class live by values not unlike those of the 1950s. As Charles Murray empirically demonstrated in his important 2011 study, Coming Apart, members of the ruling class trumpet the emancipatory philosophy of liberalism even as they themselves live as conservatives. They marry and tend to stay married, and have at least one or two children who benefit from massive investment of familial time and funds. They divorce less, raise their children to adhere to codes of hard work and self-discipline, and seek to avoid various addictions, such as alcohol, drugs, social media, and pornography. With the benefits of educations that allow them to navigate the unbounded economic market, many often not only successfully negotiate those challenges, but even flourish. They congregate in some of the nicest towns and cities in the nation, from dynamic cities to charming downtowns on the coasts.

Murray condemned this class for practicing what it does not preach. While this charge is certainly true, the all-too-common accusation of hypocrisy is the redoubt of those who disapprove of current conditions but who nevertheless wish to leave the basic structures of unboundedness in place. As a libertarian, Murray believes that most people can be simply encouraged to make the good private choices to lead good private lives. This stance studiously avoids considering the necessary structures of boundedness that give preference and encouragement to good collective choices that appear to be personal—ones that are never merely private. What claims about encouraging the flourishing of “civil society” and “associations” leave out—as admirable and necessary as those conditions are—are the ways that the consequences of unboundedness make it nearly impossible structurally for those outside the ruling class to fulfill what most recognize as flourishing human lives. One of the main features, and even designs, of liberalism is to disassemble what might be described as public social utilities, and in their place, to privatize all such social and political “utilities” for the benefit of the ruling class.

He's not referring to classical liberalism, or even to the sort of Hubert Humphrey, Henry Jackson technocratic liberalism that didn't deconstruct bourgeois norms simply because it felt good to do so.

The essay involves excerpts from a longer book, and I'm not sure what to make of Professor Deneen's argument, let alone the policy implications he draws.  I submit, though, that in the emergence of a new values regime, reality, which is socially conservative, will have a say.

The invention of liberalism was a wager that rapid change could always outstrip popular discontents. Each disruption would be followed upon by a yet newer one, keeping a restive demos in a constant state of superficial titillation even as it was forced to exert most of its energies in lagging efforts to adjust, while providing an atmosphere particularly conducive for a small progressive ruling class. That wager is now looking like a bad bet, with a result of deeply broken political, social, and economic arrangements. Each liberal party today continues to advance the notion that yet more disruptive change will bring about the cure of present discontents. The popular uprising has been directed against the liberationist agenda of both the liberal parties, demanding simultaneously an end to unbounded economics and an unbounded social domain. The many are demanding a better few—in significant part, to rule for the improvement of the many.

America is undergoing regime change. While the phrase is often used to invoke violent overturning of an existing ruling class, more accurately it refers to a fundamental change in the core values of a social and political order. The current liberal ruling class won’t give up its privileges without a fight, but lest that fight take the course feared by the classical thinkers—civil war or tyranny, or both in rapid oscillation—it would be better to acknowledge that the liberal wager has failed, and a post-liberal age must now emerge.

I don't know, maybe there still is value in the old mediating institutions, such as the church, the lodge, or the neighborhood tavern.