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If you drastically vary your account of the accused while adamantly proclaiming his guilt, you cast doubt on your judgment. So it is with Patrick Deneen and his grave and longstanding accusation against classical liberalism in America.

A University of Notre Dame political science professor, an eminent postliberal thinker, and a significant influence on Vice President JD Vance, Deneen has made a thriving career of condemning the United States as a nation that is classically liberal to its core. In late July, Jason Hart posted on X a clip from a 2021 National Conservative Conference, in Orlando, Florida, in which Deneen took the contrary view, decrying liberalism in America “as a recent innovation.” In the speech from which the clip was taken, Deneen argued that liberalism was a dastardly imposition on a nation with premodern roots that, at its origins, was blessedly free of classically liberal beliefs, practices and institutions.

Both of Deneen’s conflicting claims are false. Classical liberalism, the most successful strand of the modern tradition of freedom, is above all characterized by the belief that human beings are by nature free and equal and that government’s chief responsibility is to secure citizens’ equal basic rights and fundamental freedoms. It is neither the one and only set of political beliefs, practices, and institutions that formed America and which supposedly poisoned its roots, nor a lethal doctrine grafted on an essentially healthy America that at its origins stood for something else entirely.

Deneen employs both of his erroneous theses in the effort to vindicate the identical antiliberal verdict: Liberalism in America is the enemy of all that is beneficial, good, and just and therefore citizens should repudiate it.

Deneen’s contradictory and radical pronouncements are worth revisiting because they exacerbate the rampant confusion in the nation, to which the left has made the primary contribution, about the fundamental elements of the American experiment.

In his 2021 Natcon conference speech, Deneen asserted that the larger liberalism that encompasses much of the American right and left is “an ideology of rapine and plunder” foisted on the nation by a 20th- and 21st-century conspiracy of conservative liberals and progressive liberals. “We must see this jointly created invented tradition of America as a fundamentally or solely liberal nation as a recent innovation that is in fact a departure from the actual American tradition,” he declared. “It is an invented tradition that has been launched in the........

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