Originally sent to VIXCONTANGO subscribers on June 3rd, 2022
As I was going through the latest issue of Foreign Affairs, I stumbled upon a remarkable obituary of liberalism written by none other than the father of modern liberalism himself – Francis Fukuyama. The piece is called “Liberalism Needs the Nation” and in it Fukuyama tries to put together a twisted argument for why the Democratic Party in America and liberals worldwide in general need to participate in the fight for Ukrainian independence. You have probably seen how all the liberal pundits on Twitter put Ukrainian flags in their handles, Ukrainian flags on their lapel pins and in my very liberal town in Connecticut, there are far more Ukrainian flags being waved alongside the LGBTQ pride lawn signs than there are American flags. The lifetime proponents of open borders and the destruction the nation state and fervent haters of everything traditionally American, all of a sudden found a flag to wave and new issue to feel more virtuous about – and Mr. Fukuyama of course is again there to provide the bankrupt reasoning for their flip flop. Not that Fukuyama is a bad thinker but with thinking like his, one can’t be surprised why Japan floundered in World War 2. The holes in his reasoning are bigger than the Pacific Ocean.
It is a very bizarre feeling living in America these days. I immigrated to a country called America 30 years ago and now I find myself in an occupied territory where bizarre rainbow flags are being waved from government buildings and churches in towns all across the country. These flags were something I used to only see in the distinctly gay Castro district of San Francisco during the annual gay parade there. Now this bizarre Californian ideology is chasing me across the continent. I ran away from California 20 years ago about as fast as I could but apparently California is not done stalking me.
There is an illegitimate regime that has taken over the US government with its own strange ideology, it has a flag and has done a soft coup while nobody noticed. That illegitimate regime is erasing everything that America stood for 250 years. Freedom of speech in America is over. I and many others are banned from social media and live in society where one can’t express themselves on virtually any topic. Conservative comedians are getting attacked on stage. Jokes are entirely prohibited as any statement no matter what can be dissected in a negative way. During communism, people had vastly more freedom of speech than the average American does today. I have lived in both regimes and it is not even close. People in America are afraid to speak unless of course they are from the “protected” classes favored by the Democratic Party. The protected classes are allowed everything and can even shit in public like in San Francisco. Double standards everywhere. I can tell you one thing though – nobody was shitting in public during communism.
If I were to apply for a job in a corporation in America today I probably won’t get it regardless of qualifications simply because I am from Eastern Europe and I am white. Somebody in America’s elite decided that I am not oppressed so therefore I am marked for extinction – denying me survival in America is now priority number one of this country. I survive in America despite America not because of it. Just put me in a coffin and bury me. I feel like Rip Van Winkle. I wake up in a place that I can’t even recognize. People used to leave Europe for the stability of America, but today America is the most unstable place on the planet. After waging an economic war on its own population in the Midwest for the last 2 decades depriving it of manufacturing and jobs, overnight for its next act liberal America has decided to perform an economic genocide on anything Eastern European and remotely connected to Russia. All of these sanctions don’t hurt Russia, but they do hurt Eastern Europe greatly where inflation has skyrocketed 50% and purchasing power has collapsed. Europe will see its biggest recession yet. America has suddenly decided to erase Russia from their foreign policy, history books and maps. In Ukraine, Biden’s puppet Zelensky is on the march to cancel the great Russian author Pushkin. Pushkin lived most of his life 200 years ago in what is modern day “Ukraine”. Yet his statues are being pulled down in the towns he used to live in by American financed Nazi military groups like the Azov batalion. But what happens in Ukraine won’t stay there. I won’t be surprised if Mark Twain’s statues in Connecticut get pulled down soon by an angry crowd of woke Yale students wrapped in Ukrainian flags and tattooed with Nazi Black Sun insignia, Twain’s library in Redding burned and his books banned. If it happens in Ukraine, it will happen in Connecticut. In fact, it is happening in Ukraine because Connecticut wants it to happen. America’s liberalism is on the march to erase everything in its path – nations, borders, history, religion, race, identity. Everything.
When I arrived in the United States 30 years ago, Francis Fukuyama wrote the seminal book on liberalism called “The End of History” with which he announced that liberal democracy had won over fascism, communism and the nation state forever. Even though the liberal movement didn’t start with Fukuyama, Fukuyama was its biggest thought leader and America was captured by its self-serving narrative. In Fukuyama’s vision, nations and borders were obsolete. Instead, the individual ruled and then the purpose of the US government was to become a global dominating force and “protect” every individual around the world. There wasn’t an “oppressed” minority anywhere in the world that the US didn’t feel the moral obligation to send troops to ensure its protection. The idea of the US as an unelected global policeman traces its roots to Fukuyama. Every grouping of people around a territorial line (state), a shared history, language and ethnicity (nation) or race was immediately deemed an enemy to this liberal new world order and targeted for extinction. There was only one set of rules – the American ones – and if you didn’t like this “rules based order” get ready for America to destroy you. And boy did America wage war after war in Korea, Vietnam, Somalia, Syria, Libya, Iraq, Iran, Ukraine, Yugoslavia, on and on. Borders and nations are the last thing liberal America would respect. In 90% of world conflicts since WW2 America was a direct or indirect participant. America has killed over 37 million people in all these in pursuit of America’s vision of borderless liberalism. Stalin is starting to feel jealous. In its bid to save all the oppressed people in the world, America turned the world upside down everywhere. Whether people were really oppressed we’ll never know because the American government isn’t capable of saying the truth. Of course, sole discretion as to who is deemed “oppressed” was for the American foreign policy “elite” to decide. That same “elite” in Washington DC that over the past 40 years has turned America’s K-12 school system into a giant day care center and its colleges into sports leagues and adult parks. That same elite that relies heavily on the Russian, Chinese and Indian educational systems to educate America’s future professionals.
The end point of this global liberal vision is a single world government, one giant global elite bureaucracy that rules over the entire world. And of course it is very important for that bureaucracy to be unelected and unaccountable. Accountability is the last thing any real bureaucrat wants since bureaucrats don’t produce anything. They aren’t bound by economic rules like the rest of us in the private sector. Bureaucrats are parasites. The only thing a parasite wants to figure out is how much blood it can suck from its host (private sector). When left unchecked the parasite will destroy the host and in the process kill itself. An unchecked government bureaucracy tends to destroy the country it is supposed to guide to a better future. Happens time and again. When you think more deeply about what the end goal of Fukuyama’s vision is, liberalism is just another word for imperialism. The same imperialism that Hitler aspired to with the Third Reich. It just that “liberalism” sounds so much better than “imperialism” in polite society. And of course, it is very important for America’s modern “liberal” imperialists to rephrase the issue and call Hitler’s imperialism “nationalism” and then smear their mortal enemy – every nation state in the world. National sovereignity is not allowed in America’s rules-based order.
Over the past 40 years, through neoconservative and neoliberal governments, America pushed for Fukuyama’s vision of a strong unipolar one world “liberal” government. As technology advanced over the last 30 years, big government repression advanced as well. With Biden, we have the apogee of the unhinged bureaucrat who represent mortal danger to everybody else in American society. They can eradicate anybody from life without jailing them through bureaucratic oppression. Debanking, deplatforming, social media ostracision, frivolous lawsuits, government investigations, fake protests, FBI intimidation, big tech blackmail, denial freedom of speech, choice and association, America is a master of all that. The government lawyers can make anybody disappear. If you go into an American courtroom, America can find a lawyer to can convince a jury of people of anything. Black is white and white is black routinely in America. There is no definition that isn’t under attack. Clinton’s blowjob isn’t sex. Supreme Court justices don’t know what a woman is. Hunter Biden is a choir boy. When we don’t know what “is” is, we end up with a cacophony of voices. The country loses itself in the cacophony. We’re reliving the Biblical story of Babylon and the tower that fell. When you have a government responsible to too many constituencies, it collapses from the volatility. Liberalism takes society towards back towards its natural state of entropy (chaos and disorder).
My father who had PhDs in microbiology and cybernetics had a saying he repeated often: “every extreme turns into its opposite”. By this he meant that when something is taken to extreme it becomes destructive. Sustainable organic systems can’t tolerate extremes because the extremes destabilize them and ruin their ability to survive in the future. In this case, liberalism was fine when it was a grass roots, counter cultural movement but when state power is utilized to protect every individual, liberalism turns into fascism – the state ends up policing every small part of social and economic life. When you police all individuals many of whom often have completely opposite viewpoints, the state inevitably has to take a side and harm some. Big government simply can’t be a champion of liberalism. Liberalism can’t be coming from the government. It turns into fascism. For that reason today in bastions of liberalism like America and Canada we observe fascist behaviors similar to a century ago in Nazi Germany. The target isn’t Jews but Russians today. Anti-semitism has been replaced with Russophobia: burning of books, eradication of authors, eradication of history, eradication of trade, eradication of Russian nation, eradication of Slavic ethnic groups. Boy, aren’t blacks in the Biden government happy today to show who is boss and get on a high horse to oppress Russians? What did Russians do to blacks to deserve this? Did Russia put the US ambassador to the United Nations Linda Thomas-Greenfield forefathers in chains? Remind me which Russians enslaved blacks in Atlanta before the Civil War? None of what you watch on TV makes any sense at all. It’s just repackaged American imperialism masquerading as “liberalism” and using minorities to deflect the blame for the same old destructive behavior we have seen for decades.
Where does liberalism find its roots? Liberalism is based on the concept of trade – economic cooperation and comparative advantage. While nations have always been all about territorial control, the practical reality is that all commodities and products needed for a good life in a given nation can’t be found on the territory of the nation. Autarky (economic self-sufficiency) is rarely possible, no matter how big a country is. Thus a nation must engage with other nations on economic matters. Leon Trotsky’s article “Nationalism and Economic Life” in Foreign Affairs is an excellent read on the subject:
The fiction of economic self-sufficiency thus causes tremendous overhead expenditures in two directions. Added to this is inflation. During the nineteenth century, gold as a universal measure of value became the foundation of all monetary systems worthy of the name. Departures from the gold standard tear world economy apart even more successfully than do tariff walls. Inflation, itself an expression of disordered internal relationships and of disordered economic ties between nations, intensifies the disorder and helps to turn it from a functional into an organic one. Thus the “national” monetary system crowns the sinister work of economic nationalism.
The most intrepid representatives of this school console themselves with the prospect that the nation, while becoming poorer under a closed economy will become more “unified” (Hitler), and that as the importance of the world market declines the causes for external conflicts will also diminish. Such hopes only demonstrate that the doctrine of autarchy is both reactionary and utterly utopian. The fact is that the breeding places of nationalism also are the laboratories of terrific conflicts in the future; like a hungry tiger, imperialism has withdrawn into its own national lair to gather itself for a new leap.
While liberalism is a successful economic ideology, it is an utter failure as a social ideology. Starting with Obama, America incomprehensibly moved away from successful economic liberalism by implementing a heavy sanctions regime and splitting the world into Western and Eastern spheres while simultaneously moving towards a destructive policy of social liberalism. Liberalism finds its death in the “paradox of liberalism”: If all people of the world blend into one global culture and their history, race and ethnicity is erased then diversity itself disappears. They become all the same. You see it clearly in America today. 2nd generation American born Indians or Asians hardly have any understanding of the history or culture of India or Asia. They can’t even hold a conversation with their own immigrant parents. They are often ashamed of their own parents. Young Asian-American TV anchors are totally bewildered when they interview proper Asians. They can’t understand their viewpoint at all or even conceive of the existence of such viewpoint. How dare you be Chinese? How dare you be Russian? In order to have diversity, you need to have different cultures, different ethnicities, different religions and different practices. The atheism of liberals is not a replacement for religious tolerance. Atheism itself is an attack on every religion. Social liberalism is not a replacement for diversity. Social liberalism is an attack on diversity. To have diversity, you need to respect identity and to respect identity you need to respect people’s history, culture, religion and the complex multi-generational processes that created that identity which includes nationalism. The people living today aren’t an accident of randomness. They are the product of the deliberate efforts of prior generations who organized in various forms to guarantee their children’s survival. The nation state and territorial defense alongside religious and ethnic lines is how this survival was ensured through the centuries. Even the theoretical attempt by Fukuyama to discard the concept of a nation is sure sign of intellectual laziness and rank stupidity. It’s a practical impossibility. In his own article Fukuyama admits to what should have been obvious to him 30 years ago – that a nation is a fundamental organizational construct. Human rights aren’t universal. Nations define what human behaviors help them survive. Some nations put the public interest ahead of the individual’s rights. Other nations don’t. The cat can be skinned a thousand ways. Fukuyama‘s ideas were so bankrupt he himself had to write their obituary. It only took him 30 years of war and 30 million deaths to realize his own stupidity. The vision of unipolar world order, “end of history” and all of that neoliberal and neoconservative non-sense was doomed from the start. The cherished concept of “diversity” can only exist in a multi-polar world order that has healthy respect for the national sovereignty. That is the world order that China and Russia will force on a liberal America that has lost its way.
The country I live in is called “United States of America”. It is not called the “One State of America”. America is a federation of states. It was built to be a federation of different cultures. Somewhere along the line America’s elite confused itself into thinking that “united” and “uni” are the same word and the same concepts. “United” sure as heck does not mean “one”. It means “different but together”. America’s founding principle is the federation (the founding documents are called the “Federalist papers”) implies discussion and resolution of differences on a federal level. It doesn’t mean the elimination of differences at the local level through government force. Federalism is a very different concept than Fukuyama’s state enforced liberalism and I am not sure how America got to this place where it abandoned its founding principles. The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1990 was the worst thing to happen to America. It lost its ideological compass. I hope America finds its way back to its founding principles because Fukuyama’s liberalism will surely lead to the destruction of the American state as we know it.
The current Biden government is clearly the biggest domestic threat to the American constitution ever seen in the history of this country. It is not an accident that he has the lowest approval ratings of any President ever, even worse than Trump. His ideological abandonment of the American Constitution is unlike anything we have ever seen. Trump presented a monarchist threat to the American constitution. Sadly American voters replaced it with an even more dangerous liberal globalist threat in Biden. Biden routinely thrashes core constitutional principles in his public addresses and with his executive orders. The court system can barely keep up with constraining Biden’s extremism in the executive branch. It is pretty obvious that Biden has an ideology that is incompatible with what the American constitution stands for.
Ultimately, Biden’s imperialist ambitions both domestically and abroad put America in a very dangerous place. If America continues on its current globalist course, it will find itself in a war with every other nation that wants its sovereignty respected. Nations will rise up in a coalition to fight against America and its globalists. With its behavior towards Russia and China over the past decade, America has brought Russia and China together closer than ever before because American globalist imperialism has presented itself as an existential enemy to both of those nations. Other nations like India and Saudi Arabia in the Middle East are also waking up to the grave threat that America’s globalism presents to them. The naked aggression of the Biden administration has been a rude wakeup call to a lot of countries. Since America is incapable of checking itself, other big nations will have to do the dirty work of checking it on the global scene. The only thing I fear here is that these countries decide that America needs to be broken up to ensure that its imperialism is squashed forever as it was in Germany and Japan in WW2.
Russia doesn’t want American weapons on its borders and China doesn’t want American weapons on the stationary aircraft carrier that is Taiwan. Neither China nor Russia aspire to be a single ruler of the world. Only America has those delusions of global grandeur. With COVID, China wanted to show America that Fukuyama’s liberalism isn’t a panacea and with Ukraine invasion, Russia wanted to put a stop to American funded Nazism and the most irresponsible foreign policy in American history. It’s pretty clear to me what is required to achieve global balance of power. It is not clear however whether Biden’s foreign policy establishment has the humility to understand it and that ultimately can be a very bad development going forward.
America’s 30 year experiment with liberalism resulted in an abject failure. American unipolarity is dead. America now needs to find a new governance philosophy that allows it to survive in a multi-polar balance-of-power world that will seek actively to contain American belligerence. A return to federalism and republicanism is probably what is needed here. Unfortunately given America’s track record of constantly screwing up world affairs since WW2 and the Cold War, the transitional period will likely to be very unpleasant for everybody involved.
References
Liberalism Needs the Nation by Francis Fukuyama
Nationalism and Economic Life by Leon Trotsky
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