Why liberalism will always be coercive and authoritarian is really not too difficult to understand.  Equality must be enforced by a political entity, which by definition is an unequal playing field that exerts power from above on those below.  It's a fake equality the left envisions versus the organic equality envisioned and implemented by the Founding Fathers of the United States. 

Ours was and in some ways may still be an imperfect system, but it reflects in a nearly perfect way an invisible structure that allows the individual to live out what he wants to do based on personal interests and skills that are infinitely diverse and unequal throughout the population.  Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn sums it up nicely in his quote: "Human beings are born with different capacities.  If they are free, they are not equal.  And if they are equal, they are not free." 

The premise of the book Homo Americanus: The Rise of Totalitarian Democracy in America is the way in which the United States is on a path toward tyranny because of Liberalism's insidious thought manipulation and control in the form of cultural Marxism, political correctness and now "wokeness" that's been going on for the last fifty years.The following is a passage that describes how the left uses language to abolish hierarchical differences in virtually everything while masking the real intent of seeking and maintaining political power and control.  This also explains why the liberalism has succeeded to a large extent in politicizing nearly every area of American life:

Socialist Newspeak was created for the purpose of maintaining political power and imperialist expansion. Even its economic part was important only in so far as it served politics. American Newspeak is an ad hoc creation of a liberal-democratic ideology, and it creates even more strange words and grammatical rules as the movement discovers new hierarchical obstacles on the way. To many such rules and changes seem absurd, but the world without hierarchy is absurd, and we should awaken to it. Hierarchy is an essential component of excellence, nobility, virtue, and the good life. In a word, hierarchy is the highest aspiration of human nature. As Aristotle put it, philosophical or intellectual life is possible in so far as there is something divine in us. Without it the world looks like an open and flat terrain. It is vast but uninteresting. So is newspeak. Language that does not reflect the wide world which is diverse and therefore interesting, cannot be beautiful, either. It is, as it is in Orwell's 1984, an instrument of ideological oppression.

With liberalism, the focus is on the collective, where the state anoints itself as the arbiter of which categories of citizens are allowed to advance themselves — basically a power given to itself to pick society's winners and losers, which is the exact opposite of the way the Founding Fathers intended the country to work.  The paradox inherent in liberalism of using power, which is also by definition unequal, in order to create equality can only lead to authoritarianism and dictatorship.  This is the lesson of Soviet Russia that was birthed out of the most idealistically egalitarian political philosophy in history, Marxism. 

Lenin's name for his socialist movement of Bolshevism was called the Vanguard of the Proletariat, more commonly known as the Dictatorship of the Proletariat that led to the Russian Revolution and the creation of the Union of Soviet Socialist States (USSR). The intrinsic contradiction of this oxymoronic term is self-evident — that an entity from above thinking it can mandate equality, and somehow this magical thinking will lead to authentic equality, is absurd on the face of it.  What you end up with, as proven by the historical record, is a synthetic equality that falsifies reality since it leads to the exact opposite of Bolshevism's goals and ideals.

Soviet Russia was for most of its existence ruled by Joseph Stalin, who was one of the most notorious mass murderers of his own citizens, exceeding that of another 20th-century mass murderer, Adolf Hitler, but exceeded by his fellow Marxist, Mao Tse Tung. What is going on in the United States by contemporary liberalism is really not different, but it's obviously on a scale much more limited, thankfully, because of the checks and balances in the Constitution.  Take away those checks and balances, and you will see the United States ramp up into a socialist dictatorship in the blink of an eye. 

And for those paying attention, this is the purpose behind the Democrats' efforts to federalize elections — packing both the Supreme Court and the Senate by making Washington, D.C. a state, the end result being a one-party country with nearly total power.

The Founding Fathers were truly geniuses in seeing the need for so many checks and balances, including federalism, built into the American democratic experiment they created.  It was James Madison who said: "If men were angels, then government wouldn't be necessary." 

Image: JSMed via Pixabay, Pixabay License.

Correction: The first sentence in the third paragraph was corrected for clarity.

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