Pop! Goes the Liberal Bubble

Reinterpreting everything since FDR

The U.S. government is currently being dismantled by psychopaths, fascists and deviant grifters. It’s being ripped up, sold off and embarrassed. It’s extorting our allies, copulating with our enemies, and making a mockery of everything America has ever been about.

OK, yeah, we know. But how on Earth did this happen? What do we do about it?

As a liberal Democrat my entire adult life, I wanted to reflect on the basic misunderstanding that I think we collectively developed, that, until I really studied the dynamics at play in current events, was a bubble I lived in myself.

Liberalism is a political and moral philosophy based on the rights of the individual, liberty, consent of the governed, political equality, the right to private property, and equality before the law. [emphasis added]

The key flaw in liberalism as currently executed by the establishment, the flaw that led to the destruction of the federal government that we are witnessing in real-time, is that it takes for granted that all humans believe in individual rights by definition. This is dangerously naive, and led to our current existential predicament. Slavery, as Elon Musk likes to remind people, is the norm in human civilization, not the exception.

Since FDR remade the federal government in the shock of the Great Depression, liberalism built an expanding — and therefore thinning — bubble around itself that could not even imagine that someone would do such a thing as take away basic human rights.

Can you imagine it now?

During the Biden administration, the two most frightening words I heard — and I heard them over and over again — were “norms” and “institutions.” These are phantoms of FDR, the same mistaken belief that WWII erased Nazism, that the fall of the Soviet Union was the end of communism, that democracy is the inevitable outcome of humanity, or that America is exceptional.

It cannot be said enough that over the course of human history, democracy is a vanishingly small phenomenon — a mere blip in a sea of monarchies, dictatorships, and empires. Why? Because it’s hard. Because democracy requires individuals to work together despite having the freedom to compete for limited resources.

As a reminder, that competition is called capitalism.

The fundamental problem with post-FDR liberalism is that it failed to recognize that capitalism itself is just as philosophically anti-liberal as communism or fascism. “Fiduciary duty” — which is required by law of Boards of Directors and Officers — is about putting the financial goals of the company above human considerations.

Importantly, this does not mean that capitalism per se is evil any more than competition is evil. Competition is what creates progress. Competition to establish our “inalienable rights” is what led the Founders to Revolution. Then they built a flawed but progressive system designed to prevent anyone from taking those rights away again. But when that system was expanded by FDR, liberals did not do what the Founders would have wanted — to make the institutions and norms that held them up have the force of law.

When this carnage is done, we tend to our wounded, mourn our dead, and revive the American Experiment, it must be with wide open eyes to the fact that humanity is both a solo and a pack animal. We lost this reality in the hopes and dreams of an eternal democracy where we all flock together voluntarily out of our shared love of freedom and human rights.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t work that way. Every single “norm” was seen as territory that was ceded ahead of time, every “institution” was seen as a house of cards that could be brought down with no consequences. And the “peaceful transfer” we were so proud of was seen as the final bowing down of a liberal establishment that is, as Peter Thiel said, “exhausted.”

We need a new liberalism, a far more militant version, ready to fight and die for the fundamental truths that freedom is the reason America exists, that human rights are not optional, and that a government of the people and for the people, must also be by the people. And we must recognize that while this situation is not our fault, it is still our responsibility to fix it — this time, for real.

We must be ready to go to war for our principles, or they are principles in name only. If we are not willing to die for our country, we are not patriots, we are vassals.

Liberals do not need to be weak. People who truly believe in individualism, liberty and consent of the governed must remember that historically this is not the province of the faint-hearted. The bubble we’ve been lucky to live in for nearly a century has burst. That sucking sound you hear is fascism stealing your labor and resources.

“Liberal,” of course, has the same root as “liberate.” It’s time to remember what that means — and get ready to liberate ourselves. This liberal, for one, has only begun to fight.

Long Live America. 🇺🇸

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