On the Death of Liberalism and Its Institutions

With the birth of civilization came the creation of a class of the citizenry who seem to derive a perverse kind of pleasure from prophesying its doom. Ironically, it is the leisure time law and order affords men, who would otherwise fill their days with worry over how best to secure their needs against the privations of the wild, that makes such pointless pursuits as forecasting societal apocalypses possible. But whereas our forebears left such jokers standing where they belonged — shouting from the muck of street corners, fully open to the censure and ridicule of their more industrious brethren — we in modernity have elevated their histrionics, enshrining it in cable television hits and digital soundbites scrubbed of all context.

The latest trend in end-times prognostication fixates on the perceived decline in liberalism as a functional guiding ideology for society. In a world of fake news, social media sniping and physical confrontation of political foes, it often seems traditional bedrock liberal values — free speech and equality of rights to name a few — have been replaced with the politics of social grievance and sensitivity. The primary guiding maxim of the strange twilight zone land into which we’ve drifted is not governed by Aristotle’s golden rule: treat others with the respect you’d like to be afforded. Rather, offense is the barometer used as a gauge…