Thread by @contramordor

A lot of good people on the anti-Left side of things, especially those influenced by thinkers associated with the Mises Institute don’t understand why people like myself continue to bring up Classical Liberalism as problematic. After all, they rightly point out, the entire 20th

Century was a repudiation and revolution against classical liberalism. Liberalism, as people even like Paul Gottfried have pointed out, was sort of a myth since the latter half of the 19th century. First the Progressive movement and then the formalization of those impulses in the

Managerial Revolution of the 1930s rendered liberalism truly a thing of the past. So why then is classical liberalism still brought up today by many on the Right (like myself)? Here is how I would answer this: classical liberalism is not brought up because it describes our system

but rather because it is the impulse that prevents real oppositions from forming that can take down the Managerial Class. Liberalism is the political myth that hangs over the system, rhetorically employed to prevent political power from forming in blocks that can wield power to

confront and crush the actual parties that make up Western power. It would be “authoritarian” (the opposite of liberalism) to capture power and strip the present elites from their stations. It doesn’t matter that the present political elite are not liberal, liberalism is one

ideological restraint that binds would-be destroyers of Managerialism. Liberalism, which was defined by Carl Schmitt as the impulse to “negate the political” is a mentality in Western political life that seeks to avoid our rampant politicalization of everything rather than

seeking political victory. Because everyone sees that all of society is now political, their impulse is to remove politics and get back to socio-cultural neutralities. This is a liberal impulse. They cannot see that cultural norms developed for over a thousand years in the West

were actually never neutral at all; they have always played a political function and were the result of Christendom’s political decision-making and leadership. What is actually happening is that culture is being politically re-made in a way that is at odds with the norms of the

organic mentalities of a trained Western people. We are not going from a cultural neutrality to a cultural hegemony, but from one cultural hegemony to another. It is the framework and instincts of liberalism that prevents people from seeing this and therefore causes them to have

faulty solutions. Finally, liberalism as a body of principles allows the regime to coordinate the implementation of its social vision by making certain changes in the name of freedom, and preventing other actions at odds with its own interests, in the name of stopping tyranny.

If we can get beyond the rhetoric and framework of liberalism, we can more clearly see the political solutions that must be taken to confront political challenges. The regime benefits by liberalism’s refusal to employ power on the basis of its own principles. When we can see more

clearly the transformation in socio-political institutions in the Western world over the last 100 years or so, we understand that liberalism is not the solution: the negation of politics is a dangerous delusion in a time when the political needs to be embraced. Liberty does not

come to peoples by avoiding the political, but by securing it and bolstering it from all political enemies. Liberty is downstream from politics, not upstream of it. The political must be secured first.