Classical Liberals are Disney Adults

We have all heard the old boomer or Gen X person say, “I am not a conservative, I am a classical liberal” line. This is usually because when they were forming their political opinions, conservatives were seen as hill billies with no teeth or the Christian who was screaming at the blacks to get out of the pool or put baby in the corner.

They were raised in a cookie-cutter suburb where the minorities they interacted with were often children or adults of the same financial means as their parents.

They all had manicured lawns and new cars every 5 years. They went to college and followed the path laid out before them.

They watched their family members make financial mistakes or act irresponsibly, and then blamed them when they fell. They were told they were individuals and if they only worked hard, they would achieve the American dream.

Their parents worked diligently, took them to their sporting events, and supported them throughout childhood.

When one of their friends’ families got divorced due to their father or mother falling on hard times, they were told that the parents just didn’t love each other enough.

They enjoyed reading comic books and playing Dungeons and Dragons with their friends. They lived the way people did on TV, assuming everyone else lived similarly.

Their neighborhood was an HOA that lived on the broken windows theory of crime and delinquency. That is, if we stop small crimes, then big crimes will never happen.

They attended a school filled with people just like themselves. They never seen a teen pregnancy, and most of them lost their virginities as seniors or later in college.

Their parents took them on vacation and sent them to the camps full of more people just like them every summer.

Every achievement they have ever made was rewarded by teachers or their parents. They were recognized for their hard work and dedication.

They think that it is the normal way that all humans can and should live everywhere. They believe the only reason they don’t succeed is that other humans are not putting in enough individual effort.

There is one more brand of these people, which is the came from nothing ” overachiever type. Those whose families were poor or immigrants or rural who climbed out of the bucket to reach the level of the suburb dwellers or higher.

These people are your billionaire types, the guys who promote books like Poor Dad, Rich Dad. The Dave Ramseys and such.

Just avoid debt, work hard, and steer clear of risky behavior, and you will be rewarded. The creed of the protestant work ethic types. Stop buying cars you cannot afford. Don’t use credit for everyday purchases, and eat baked beans 5 days a week.

I cannot deny that for some people, these methods will work. I have friends who worked hard and achieved amazing things. They are completely alone, divorced, their kids hate them, and their bodies are broken at 40. But they have houses, trucks, cars, businesses, all of it. When they die, though, it will all be given away.

The classical liberal belief structure is that of a child who assumes that the ideas formed through the Enlightenment led to the rise of our civilization. These Anglo ways of life, which promised property rights, freedom, liberties, and political power, were colonial promises designed to attract immigration to virgin geography. They were a relic of a time of abundance that has long passed.

They were invented by nobles’ sons who had become merchants and traders. They sought the chance to be free from traditional responsibilities to their community and families. Free from the burden of ethnicities. Free from the burden of the earth and time itself.

Thinkers like Voltaire, Locke, and Paine gave credence to these beliefs. The American experiment, fueled by endless land and energy, stood as a testament to the new idea of liberalism as France collapsed again and again. The technology brought by newfound energy, like steam and coal, fueled transportation and logistics chains that opened trade to places never thought possible.

This seemed like a miracle, and the ideas developed from these advancements came to be known as liberalism. The original liberals, such as Thomas Jefferson, were radicals who advocated for a revolution every generation, believing that people should not be bound by the laws of their predecessors.

This thought train of Whig history, which posits that things should always improve and culture should also shift to the left, offering more freedoms in perpetuity, became the expectation.

The idea of capitalism became ubiquitous. Inexplebably linked to the idea of liberalism, where no man or woman should be locked out of the process of commerce because the market needs access to all people. Capital must expand into every orifice of life. It needs to have everyone everywhere available to operate. It needs to sell you things, and it needs you to produce for it. The economy became the greatest focus. The sciences of government, such as psychology and psychiatry, have developed comprehensive doctrines on how to repair and reintegrate individuals who are seen as broken or disruptive human capital back into the economy.

There is a reason the most famous classical liberal today is Jordan Peterson.

This system brought science into every part of human life. It destroyed the superstitions and practices that befuddled the merchants trying to do business in rural areas. It combined militaristic Prussian school tactics with bureaucratic capital ventures to unify geographies under a single language and belief structure.

It destroyed the mythical and replaced it with the rational.

We became not a son or daughter or father or mother, we became a single entity. We became consumers and workers hell bent on building a dream life.

We replaced our wives with washing machines and refrigerators. We replaced our husbands with dating apps and government subsidies. We made our children into data that could be harvested on social media.

We replaced our towns with suburbs and subdivisions. We replaced our elders with television and music. We replace our markets with grocery stores. We replaced the seamstress with Amazon.

Ultimately, though, this system was not designed; it was formed. It evolved from principles of unlimited resources and a continually expanding human capital pool.

We forgot ourselves and our humanity in the name of science. We often forget that we are humans who are part of a lineage. We stopped having children and families. This classical liberal framework is nothing more than a defense of a system that has led to our own destruction. This autistic need to chase the truth has tried to create a universal human. A homo liberalansis. A human without roots, a deracinated individual bugman who only cares about brands and appearance, who will buy the new iPhone on credit while he wears his Berkenstocks to Whole Foods and shops for gluten-free pasta. This is the system created by scientific advertising aimed directly at the heart of men who have nothing in their lives larger than themselves.

This is the heart of the classical liberal. A bugman who feels for the tragedies he creates but has no idea he created them.