The Weakness of American Classical Liberalism

The unaddressed weakness in our founding philosophy

Welcome to Musket Philosophy.

This is a blog where we talk about the psychopolitics of modern America through the eyes of history, with many references to the founding fathers.

Today’s piece will be on my longstanding crusade against Classical Liberalism, which over the years, I have soured on. Being that I was once a liberal myself, I find it difficult to write a piece railing so hard against it, but I can come to no other conclusion given my observations.

Let’s begin.

When our founding fathers first wrote the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States, things were a bit different. Sexual morals were substantially different than they are now, and practically every single person in the country was a Christian of some sort. There were no phones, and the road to a job often involved apprenticeships at an early age. Many young men went to work before they were ten. They grew up much faster, and the cultural fabric of the country was tightly knit.

More importantly, club membership and group organization were quite popular. In the early 1800s and 1900s, there were thousands of organizations you could be a part of. There were so many secret organizations you could be a part of that, at one point, there was an “Anti-Secret Society Convention.”

But most importantly, there were churches and lots of them.

Churches served a distinctly unique function for many communities. In many places, they were the center point of the community, where everyone coalesced together and became one in pursuit of a higher goal. Large groups of people orienting themselves together for a singular purpose shockingly creates solidarity amongst the people involved. This is what is known as “supraordinate goals.”

Church membership is falling off a cliff.

Notably, it starts falling off a cliff following the widespread adoption of the internet.

The internet is a wet dream for classical liberalism. It allowed for the decentralization of information dissemination. That’s a bunch of big words in a row to say you could see anything you wanted, anytime you wanted, from nearly any place you wanted.

In 2023, the internet is prolific. It’s everywhere. It’s on your damn fridge. The device in your pocket can access any piece of information you could possibly want. You can watch Ben Shapiro smacking down a leftist. You can watch 47 minutes of anime porn. You can find a Reddit group called r/antinatalist to bitch about how awful you think people who have children are. You could do all three of those things if you wanted to.

The point here is that whatever your desires are, they can be fulfilled by technology. Therein lies the problem. We have access to addictive content all day, every day, that is like a real-world version of porn (sometimes a literal version). And what is porn? It’s a fake, cheap, hyperbolic version of something wonderful in real life that isn’t nearly as good as the real thing. Yet many people choose this outlet to fulfill their desires. Many men and women choose the internet, which is a pornographic version of reality, to fulfill their desires. This often comes at the expense of their real life, and increasingly so. In a society that values long-term success and stability, and morally, one might think we would avoid this, and here’s the problem.

The internet and social media serve to addict you to your own personal desires at the expense of the good of others and isolate us from each other more and more as time goes on. But what led us to be so detached from reality? What allowed us to become so attached to the internet and our devices?

The American ideas of classical liberalism have led us to be laissez-faire on this subject. Parents are giving their kids iPhones at age five, and those kids don’t ever stand a chance. Classical liberalism finds itself in parents who simply let their kids have their technology. More conservative parents might augment their kid’s screen time, but many simply allow the kids free reign. The vast majority of parents have fallen into the late stage of classical liberalism, which at its heart is a small child screaming for the candy bar in the aisle, and the sensible parent, wanting to stop the screaming, simply gives in and then blames the decision on the want to eliminate the screaming.

When you allow your more hyperbolic emotions to run your life and when parents and society turn their back on their duty to moderate extreme emotions and toleration of everything for toleration’s sake we end up in a society with child drag queens, radical feminists, and critical race theorists.

But wait, how did we end at these radically Marxist theories from classical liberalism?

That’s a good question. So let’s examine the basic ideas of tolerance from the classical liberals, which let’s face it, are really modern centrists. How did centrists end up supporting the wokes, and thus eventually adopting the moral system of the wokes? By the way if you want a definition of woke, here you go. But anyways, centrists like the status quo. They don’t want to change anything or hurt anyone. They just want peace. They want to drop their kid off at school, go to work, come home, and eat a decent meal with their families. This leads them to be squishy when it comes to conflict. Thus they end up tacitly accepting things like Affirmative Action, DEI policies, and feminism.

But of course, these things have no moral order to them. They are based on envy and greed, so how does one end up with classical liberals accepting these policies? Out of fear of change for the status quo, of course, and for fear of the cancel culture left. Thus, they compromise on their “values” to keep their world the same. They tolerate the woke insanity because, after all, it’s not in their backyard at least. The logic of “let people do what they will in their own bedrooms” is what gets us here, outside of the normal moral order.

Simply put, toleration without moral order is bound to result in the powerful raw emotions inherent to humans running the show. Many think that we live in a post-emotional world or a world of scientific rationalism. Those people are fools.

As James Madison noted in Federalist #10, “The latent causes of faction are thus sown in the nature of man.”

Faction is 1776 speak for political party, but political party is also just code for something else. It’s code for personality makeup and expression. If we assert that causes for passionately assembling into political parties are inherent in human nature, this only leads us to one conclusion. Our brain structure and emotions dictate what political party we will be in.

What this then means is that if something can manipulate your emotional state consistently, then it can potentially change your political party.

Now, what if I told you the emotions that are more likely to make you a self-aggrandizing anxious, depressed jackass are the ones that keep you staring at your screen all day? Now, what if I told you every single child in the modern West is staring at a phone, looking at social media, that is designed to do just that?

You might say, Houston, we’ve got a problem.

This moves to the final point about classical liberalism and wokeness. To put it simply, without moral order and agreed upon values that are not crossed, the ideas of toleration will be taken to an extreme, and if the ideas of toleration are driven by fear and envy, which social media heavily promotes, our culture’s center point will increasingly move to the left, and away from social order. Technology will continue to push us towards chaos if we allow the emotional manipulation of social media companies to dictate our lives.

If only there were a solution to this.

In the words of the great and celebrated Montesquieu:

Religion is always the best guarantee one can have of the morals of men.

Humbly and sincerely to my friends and enemies,

Musket out.