At a time when prestige media outlets market the likes of Ben Shapiro, Bret Stephens, and Jordan Peterson as serious intellectuals, it can be refreshing to spend time with right-leaning thinkers who are at least minimally capable of wrestling with the challenges of our day. These needles in a haystack do exist.

The Niskanen Center publishes rigorous center-right libertarian opinion. For capitalist apologetics of the most grounded and candid sort, there’s the Financial Times. The flagship publication of Catholic conservatism, First Things, is often worth a read. Even Patrick Buchanan’s the American Conservative, for all its racist and misogynistic baggage, occasionally provides a forum for less bigoted and more thoughtful opinion on the Right.

The Notre Dame political theorist Patrick J. Deneen has been a ubiquitous presence at both First Things and the American Conservative, and his latest book, Why Liberalism Failed, has earned him plaudits from even some on the Left. The backcover of the hardback edition features the glowing praise of the radical historian Jackson Lears (“bracing antidote”) and leftist icon Cornel West (“courageous and timely”). Others have been less impressed. Jan-Werner Mueller, a distinguished professor of politics at Princeton, panned the polemic as a collection of “opportunistically recycled anti-liberal clichés.” New York Times book critic Jennifer Szalai, in an otherwise scathing review, called it “a deeply exasperating volume that nevertheless articulates something important in this age of disillusionment.”