Dictionary of Micro Rants: Liberalism

I’m starting a new series of mini rants at this blog, defining an array of relevant terms in around three hundred words or fewer per entry. This series will amount to a sort of snarky personal dictionary, inspired by John Ralston Saul’s The Doubter’s Companion and Ambrose Bierce’s The Devil’s Dictionary. 

So, to begin...

Liberalism: modern ideology of individual freedom, now anathema to the United States, the so-called land of the free.

Originally, liberalism was the salvation of modernists from the Dark Ages, a celebration of Reason, Freedom, and Progress. Liberals were grim secular humanists, scientists, and renaissance men, God’s blood staining their faces as they set about creating a New World, free from superstition, oppression, and squalor, with each liberal serving as her own rationally self-controlling and creative sovereign. Now liberals are reduced to effeminate, vacillating, double-talking managers of the new form of dominance hierarchy they created, the stealth oligarchy in which the strongest and most vicious use democracy and free markets to enslave the mob. Ironically, liberal myths of our potential godhood have backfired, thanks to the liberal’s science-centered philosophy which corrodes all grand delusions, leaving the postmodern wasteland in which liberals know enough to be miserable and are free to endlessly consume as an oligarch’s branded cattle.

The very instrument that modern, classic liberals considered sacred, namely technoscience, has been used to control society and not just nature, and so armed with market research and cognitive science, American demagogues have demonized liberals, counting on the public’s ignorance of the liberal’s role in the birth of modern civilization. Liberals armed and unleashed a new breed of human predator and parasite, whose ill-gotten wealth co-opts liberal governments against the majority’s interests or whose perfected demagoguery creates the modern dictatorship. Thus has liberalism demonstrated our gross inequality, making nonsense of the liberal’s myth of universal human dignity. Liberalism was a paean to the end of the Old World, directing the modern experiment in social engineering which didn’t eradicate kings and other pseudo-gods but merely improved their methods of control. Liberalism is the myth of human progress, but liberals have shown that sometimes change is an illusion.