Liberalism is a cult.  It is not a philosophy of government.  It is the mask that madness wears in twenty-first-century politics and culture.  Its votaries now embrace an idea system of stupidity and error, a refuge of political identity for unfinished minds, altogether inclusive in its message and totalitarian in its instincts.  Rational thinking has become offensive and intolerable in accordance with the leftist assertion that the lie is stronger than the truth.  In pursuit of meaning and relevance through cultish activism, the new liberals are held captive to a hostile and controlling ideology.  They hate as only the young can hate, as their teachers have taught them to hate, as only mobs and ignorant tribes can hate, and they cannot escape their hatred.

What will become of the children of this hatred?  Liberals are more skillful in convincing one another of their righteousness than they are the millions who are deeply aware of their sins.  And their sins are multifold, the greatest of which is an ignorance of both history and human nature cultivated in the pure evil of identity politics, and those who are happiest in that ignorance are cursed with a sense of their invincibility.  The free nations thought they had quelled the totalitarian urge to power in the wars of the last century, but now we hear its martial anthem once again, for the shadow of an Old-World tyranny has fallen on America from within her borders, and liberals, like children with toys of mass destruction, are playing at civil war.

As far as the new liberals are concerned, the many centuries of civilizations never really happened.  This is all pre-history — the time before the Big Bang of world socialist victory, the time before all local traditions and constitutions and national borders were erased, before the ending of this tragic age of free societies, and before the universal calendar was reset to Zero.  Their new progressive age is a vision of fires and revolutions, of necessary ruin and reconstruction, of conquered and regimented societies with billions thinking as one.  But fires do not feed on their own ashes, nor do leftists trouble to build on the wreckage of democratic institutions they have destroyed.  Socialism preserves nothing.

Liberal doctrine has degenerated under leftist interference from an original declaration of freedom from all forms of tyranny into little more than a panoramic censure of Western civilization.  It is now the sport of little minds and great anticipations — minds that are too easily led by hate-filled personalities and false promises, not by honest thinking and principles of good government.  That cult is predatory and leaderless, but rigged for exploitation, wanting only the one inflaming voice to trigger the apocalypse.  And if leftist icons of the past could be resurrected, then the murderer Che Guevara would now hold untold numbers of adolescent intelligentsia in thrall to his revolutionary death wish.

The liberal mind exists without a defining quality, without conscience, and without principle — in a kind of quantum indeterminate state.  It pops in and out of the random drift of the world's stream of uncertainty.  It is both dead and alive, victim and predator, possessor and destroyer at the same time, and depending upon the political needs of the moment, it can emerge from any number of contradictory states of being with any number of provisional moral certainties.  It revels in the perverse, in the absurd, in delusions and dreams of power.  It dwells among the ghettoes of social media; it thrives and multiplies in cisterns of politics and journalism.  Democrat party activists are the slaves of every passion that wants war — and they have found war in a statist solution to the problem of freedom.

The Democrat party, however, seems to lack the vocabulary necessary to express a simple truth: that America, in her laws and in her protection of freedom and individual rights, extends civilization to the world.  Her Constitution limits the coercive powers of government.  Her people are sovereign over the state and enjoy the right to speak freely against possible abuses of the state, and even those who despise America, but who yet live within her cities — those who are filled with hate and cannot speak without hatred in their mouths — are free to speak under her protection.  Her cities and her rural districts are represented equally and fairly: in presidential elections, under the Electoral College system, the voice of the nation is truly heard, and the cities shall not rule the land.  The Bill of Rights and the Constitution's provision for a separation of powers protect the people and their government from periodic forces of usurpation.  Yet this sacred contract of the people with their government, written in defense of the correlative principles of equality, unity, and freedom under law — all this is fascism, according to the handbooks of "democratic socialism."

Socialism, or the Religion of Humanity, as the social scientists called it in the 19th century, requires a huge leap of faith into the abyss of collective salvation, for the fact of socialism is always attended by the fact of its dehumanizing consequences.  Socialism relies upon the programed consciousness of a social destiny, a conquest not of nature but of society; and wherever there is an unguarded space for usurpation, leftists will rush in to fill it.  "It is a weakness in you who are lovers of freedom," they tell us, "that you do not protect your institutions with greater care.  Clearly, you do not love your children, for you have allowed us into your schools to teach them."  And it is true.  Already in the classrooms, we hear the youth of our nation rehearsing the scripted dialogue of doctrinaire progressivism.

The child of the progressive era receives instruction until the iniquities of a searching intelligence are bred out of him; for the role of education, under the imprint of socialism, is to prepare the child for service to the state.  And if the votaries of this faith would think the project through, they would realize that their minds have been prepared for them on assembly lines, and that the logic of their egalitarian state leaves no place for the questioner.  The most devastating effect of leftist instruction is that we can use our minds to enslave ourselves, for only those who fear freedom want more government.

The Democrat party's playbook is wide open and available for all to read.  It is quite possible their usurpation will succeed, for the Democrats no longer fear the people, and the loss of that fear is the first giant leap towards coercive socialism.  Freedom is the cause of inequality, they tell us.  The state must not be constrained from necessary action, they tell us, and the people cannot be allowed to interfere with the state's authority to target, threaten, silence, punish and forbid.  The urgency of confronting the liberal promise of a new despotic order lies hard upon us, and the forthcoming election is the last call for freedom and self-government in the world.  Liberals value democratic election as a means of acquiring power but not as a means of preserving it.  Socialism may begin with democracy, but democracy ends with socialism.

Philip Ahlrich can be reached for comment at phahl@icloud.com.

Photo credit: Navyatha licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.