Cracks in the Liberal Edifice

As we have contended all along, the liberal lie and illusion of money worship and brute global conquest set the stage for the populist mania and mendacity and the Marxist idealism and fervor which we are witnessing in our government and politics today. But aside from serving as a state ideology for all these years, liberalism was also declared by some – but especially by the neocons who hijacked the American government at the start of the 21^st century – as a world religion or ‘world philosophy’ or unquestionable meta-narrative of world history that needed to be spread the way all other religions and philosophies and interpretations of history are spread, and even by force if necessary.

At the end of the 20^th century Cold War, Francis Fukuyama had a Hegelian outlook towards liberalism, in the sense that Fukuyama could not conceive of any other way that countries around the world could organize their governments and societies aside from liberalism. In Fukuyama’s view, there was simply no other way in which countries could in fact organize their governments and societies, and as a result, the spread of liberalism all around the world was inevitable. He wrote:

“The question of whether there is such thing as a Universal History of mankind that takes into account the experiences of all times and all peoples is not new; it is in fact a very old one which recent events compel us to raise anew. From the beginning, the most serious and systematic attempts to write Universal Histories saw the central issue in history as the development of Freedom. History was not a blind concatenation of events, but a meaningful whole in which human ideas concerning the nature of a just political and social order developed and played themselves out. And if we are now at a point where we cannot imagine a world substantially different from our own, in which there is no apparent or obvious way in which the future will represent a fundamental improvement over our current order, then we must also take into consideration the possibility that History itself might be at an end.”

Liberalism in theory was conceived as individual freedom on a societal level and democracy on a governmental level. But of course, and as we contended all along, liberalism in practice amounted to frenzied money worship and brute global conquest. From both a theoretical and a legal perspective, and even though it never translated as such into practice, liberalism is defined in America as “the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.”

Moreover, John Mearsheimer went as far as arguing that not only could the theory of liberalism not be put into practice, but that the theory itself is flawed in two major ways. Mearsheimer wrote: “Two of political liberalism’s most salient features are also its two significant flaws: the prominence it accords individualism, and the weight it places on inalienable rights.”

In terms of the first major flaw as it pertains to individualism, Mearsheimer suggested that liberalism “wrongly assumes that humans are fundamentally solitary individuals, when in fact they are social beings at their core.” He added that liberalism “pays little attention to the fact that human beings are born into and operate in large collectivities, which help shape their essence and command their loyalties.”

And in terms of the other major flaw, which is the liberal notion that there are universal and inalienable rights, Mearsheimer contended that there are three major flaws associated with this basic and essential flaw of liberalism. One is that there is simply no way to reach a global or universal consensus on what constitutes “the good life.” Second, and as Kissinger once said, if one had to choose either order or justice, one would choose order. And third, there is the issue of culture and nationalism in particular, in the sense that group survival matters more than the freedom of the individual to speak out against the group or assert themselves against the group.

Hence, and to conclude, while brilliant and beautiful in definition and theory, when it comes to application and practice, the kind of money worship and brute global conquest which liberalism translates into fostered a kind of widespread social reality whereby populist mania and mendacity and Marxist idealism and fervor come to the fore in a very palpable manner.