With the failure of communism, the West presumed that capitalism and democracy triumphed. But the same liberal ideas that were at the heart of the demise of communism are very much at work to bring about a failure in the West as well. It is a disease that we are not immune to, and it is leading us to the precipice of economic collapse and chaos, and progressively to tyranny.

Liberalism, like communism, subscribes to the belief that an enlightened ruling elite has the knowledge, the expertise, superior moral strength, and the where-with-all to bring about desired outcomes whether in the environment, eugenics, the economic realm, or in society. The liberal dismisses God, nature, the accomplishments of the past, and the complexities of all these things, simply believing that through their enlightened wisdom and intervention they can force the world to conform to their wishes. The fact that virtually all experiments with liberalism in the past whether large or small have been unmitigated disasters does not seem to interest them.

Liberals seem to have an almost autistic disconnect from reality. It seems they do not want to deal with the world as it is, but rather impose their idea of reality on the world. This explains in part the aversion of liberals to reason as the latter is deeply connected to experiential feed-back and to reality. Liberals want to impose “socially constructed truth” rather than seek it. The connection between the reigning epistemology and liberty is a tight one. Once we see epistemology being co-opted, the threat to liberty is unmistakable.

Liberalism places the growth of the State above that of the individual. Through growth of the State, the liberal elite strive to seize power and destroy anything that gets in the way of their power grab: religion, capitalism, the role of the family, the Constitution, the rule of law, moral values, the vitality of individuality, as well as the role of reason and the pursuit of the truth. To build their castle they need to destroy democracy and capitalism as we know it. Liberalism is destroying our economy through reckless spending and debt and destroying democracy as the size and reach of government expands, power is centralized, and the ruling class is becoming more and more detached from the public. Democracy and liberty are very tenuous and can easily be lost.

Liberalism is fixated on income redistribution. This nation was founded on the principle of equal opportunity for all, but liberalism strives instead for equal outcomes. If you have the latter you will not have the former, and individuals will lose the ability to control their futures. Moreover, in robbing Peter to pay Paul, the government gains power and influence in the distribution process, so it is in effect complicit in legalized theft. Is this a sound basis for moving civilization forward?

Liberalism sees the world as a zero sum game in which the gain of one group is at the expense of another. It bases its support on the demanders of government services, not on those who contribute to society. The ideology of liberalism involves a taker-mentality, not a giver-mentality, so it is no surprise that their “expressed” compassion is an empty sham.

The book seeks to explain the enduring failure of liberalism by looking at it from a wide variety of different angles: political, economic, philosophical, epistemological, institutional, moral, judicial, and psychological. It is different than most books in that it digs below the surface, examining the underpinnings and foundations of liberalism. It is written in the tradition of Von Hayek’s Road to Serfdom and de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, and is laden with the ideas of many prominent thinkers, including Aristotle, Kant, Rousseau, Fromm, Freud, et cetera.

It is an intellectual, but not pedantic, book, aimed at the common man, seeking to bring big ideas down to earth, helping to provide guidance through our current political-economic-social morass.It is not focused on the people in politics and only slightly on the issues, but rather on underlying forces shaping events and prefiguring our future. Liberalism is not what it appears to be, working principally through dissimulation. It is no longer based on the British philosophic traditions which were fundamental to the creation of this country, but rather has mutated into the French tradition of liberalism which has strong collectivist and totalitarian traits. While the British tradition puts the individual above the State, the French puts the State above the individual and is all about planning.

While today’s liberalism cloaks itself in the tonalities and rhetoric of the British tradition of liberalism, speaking of liberty, fairness, and individuality, it is fundamentally destructive of all three. Not even many liberals really understand the true nature of character of liberalism. Its dissimulation has beguiled our culture into dropping its immunologic defenses, and this adverse mutation of liberalism is growing like a cancer, metastasizing, and systematically destroying all that has made this country great.

We are now living in a culture which rewards the irresponsible and those who make bad decisions, while it penalizes those who behave responsibly and make the right choices. Would anyone think this is a good way to raise one’s kids? Would anyone expect that kids raised with up-side-down incentives would turn out well? I think not, yet liberalism is doing this on a societal level.

The liberalism of today is certainly not that of JFK who in his inaugural address famously intoned, “Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.” Today everyone wants to know what the government can do for them. We have all become claimants, not contributors.