The Freedom Illusion — Part III
How the party of FDR surrendered to the extraction machine—and why liberalism couldn't stop it
In Parts I and II, we traced the architecture of neo-slavery—a system designed to extract your wealth through debt, suppressed wages, and blocked generational transfer—and the four-hundred-year technology that built it. We saw how race was deliberately weaponized to divide, how Christianity was corrupted to justify extraction, and how the damage fell hardest on Black Americans while exploiting poor whites as enforcers paid in status instead of wages. We saw how the extraction class launched a coordinated counter-offensive through the Powell Memo, building an institutional network that captured the courts, the legislature, the media, the academy, and millions of minds.
But one question remains:
Where were the Democrats?
The party of Franklin Roosevelt. The party that built the New Deal, created Social Security, empowered labor unions, and constructed the middle class. The party that should have been the bulwark against extraction.
They surrendered.
Not all at once. Not with a single betrayal. But through a series of capitulations—each one rational in isolation, each one catastrophic in aggregate—the Democratic Party abandoned the working class and joined the extraction system they should have dismantled.
To understand how that could happen, we need to be clear about what kind of story this is.
It might be tempting to read everything we’ve covered so far as conspiracy: a shadowy cabal of elites meeting in boardrooms, pulling strings, consciously oppressing the masses.
Here’s a test: ask your average Fortune 500 CEO who Lewis Powell was. Ask them about the memo he wrote in 1971, or about the institutional network it spawned. Most will have no idea. They’ve never heard of Powell. They don’t know that Heritage, ALEC, and the Federalist Society were built as a coordinated project to reshape American ideology. They just… operate. They maximize shareholder value because that’s what business schools taught them to do. They lobby against regulation because that’s what their industry associations recommend. They see the world through a lens they didn’t choose and whose origins they’ve never examined.
The same is true across the board. The fervent pro-life evangelical has no idea that for most of their denomination’s history, abortion wasn’t a Christian concern—and that the change came from political operatives seeking votes, not from divine revelation. The economics student isn’t taught to question shareholder primacy any more than she’s taught to question gravity. The average voter doesn’t know that “illegal alien” became a term because the KKK successfully made it one a century ago.
This is what ideology does. It becomes the water we swim in—so pervasive we can’t see it as a choice at all.
But this doesn’t exonerate personal responsibility. Powell didn’t just swim—he wrote the blueprint for our current system of extraction. Weyrich didn’t just swim—he devised and built many of the institutions that drive extraction today. And there were many others we’ve already covered, and more we’ll meet in this section. So were these people evil geniuses, cartoon villains, plotting to build a system of immiseration so they could swim in their cash vaults? Perhaps—and surely there have been those who’ve used the system they built exactly that way.
But I’m confident the building of the system itself happened for a more insidious reason: these architects were each, guided by the baggage of their own ideologies, simply focused on winning in the short-term arena of their respective fields—without ever really questioning the water they were swimming in, without ever wondering about the meta-consequences of their contribution to the whole. And in doing so, they built the system we currently have. Whether the devastation that followed was their intention is irrelevant: it was the emergent consequence of building without a vision of human flourishing to guide them.
And that we are still stuck in this system—unable to escape the doom spiral of immiseration, fraying social fabric, and the march toward authoritarianism—suggests that our current thinkers and architects, if we have any, are making the same core mistake.
This is the story of how the Democratic Party surrendered inside that water—in three parts. First, the destruction: how a fully-formed ideological machine obliterated the party of FDR. Second, the capitulation: how Democrats responded by joining what they couldn’t beat. Third, the diagnosis: why the philosophical framework Democrats operated within—liberalism itself—left them structurally incapable of fighting back, and what must be built upon it.
If you think this is just a matter of constraining the extraction of the wealthy, or of party politics, I challenge you to feel the same way by the time we’re done here.
Let me be clear about what this series is not. This is not a call to fight along the lines of race, religion, or class. Those are the machine’s chosen axes—the battlefields it has trained for, the conflicts it knows how to exploit. This is a call to stop fighting on terrain that advantages extraction and start fighting extraction itself. Stick with me to the end and you will see precisely how we do that.
Reader Advisory
This series is written more like a short book released in parts than a set of blog posts. Each installment is long, dense, and (at times) dark.
That’s not because the goal is despair. The goal is clarity—because hopelessness thrives when the pattern is felt but never named.
Please pace yourself. Read in chunks. Stop when you need to. Come back when you’re ready.
If you stick with it (even in chunks), this is what you’ll get:
A usable map + real receipts — the story of how the system was built, with specific “wait… what?” facts you can verify, share and even change minds with.
Pattern recognition that changes how you see the present — so chaos stops feeling random and starts looking like the predictable output of incentives and institutions operating as designed.
Language for hard conversations — a way to understand how ordinary people get pulled into harmful narratives (explanation, not justification) without instantly collapsing into partisan/culture-war traps.
Grounded hope + a strategy frame — proof the system is bendable, and a clearer sense of where leverage actually is: what must be constrained, what must be rebuilt, and what a real solution looks like if we actually want out of the extraction loop.
The Destruction
What is Liberalism?
To truly understand what happened in the 1980s—how the Powell Network achieved total capture of American society—we need to talk about liberalism. Because the Powell Network came with a plan—institutions, funding, coordination, and a clear vision of what they wanted. Democrats came with liberalism. That asymmetry explains everything that follows.
Not “liberal” as Americans typically use the word (meaning left-of-center, Democrat-leaning). I mean liberalism as political philosophy—the framework that has shaped Western democracy since the Enlightenment and that forms the foundation of our Constitution. Specifically, I’m talking about procedural liberal institutionalism as it’s practiced in modern American governance—not every philosophical branch that carries the name.
Liberalism emerged in the 17th and 18th centuries as a revolutionary challenge to the divine right of kings. Its founding theorist, John Locke, argued that individuals possess natural rights—life, liberty, property—that exist prior to government, and that government’s legitimacy derives from protecting those rights.1 This was genuinely radical. It gave us constitutional government, religious toleration, the rule of law, separation of powers, and the expansion of individual freedoms. These aren’t small achievements. They’re the foundation of everything we call democracy.
But here’s what’s critical to understand: liberalism is fundamentally procedural.
It tells you how decisions should be made—through neutral processes, fair procedures, equal treatment under law—but not what those decisions should achieve. It promises that if you follow the right procedures—free elections, free speech, free markets, rule of law—good outcomes will naturally emerge.
This neutrality is presented as a virtue. Liberalism doesn’t impose a vision of what society should look like. It creates a framework where people with different values can coexist, pursuing their own definitions of flourishing through neutral institutions. The system doesn’t pick winners; it just ensures fair play.
That’s what liberalism claims to be. To understand the Democratic surrender, we need to see what liberalism actually led to—especially in the decades leading up to Reagan.
The State of Post-War American Liberalism
The New Deal era had planted something remarkable in American soil.
For a brief window—roughly 1933 to 1970—America actually invested in human flourishing. Public works built infrastructure. The GI Bill opened education. Social Security provided dignity in old age. Labor protections empowered workers. The government constrained extraction and distributed gains broadly. The result? The middle class—that thing we now treat as natural but was actually built—came into existence.
This project was deeply flawed—we documented in Part II how it was built on racial exclusion, how it required compromises with Southern segregationists, how it left Black workers outside its protections. Those compromises would have devastating consequences. But the method worked: intentional investment in human flourishing produced human flourishing.
This wasn’t liberalism as procedure. This was something different: active government intervention to achieve specific outcomes. Investment in people. Constraint on capital. A nascent recognition that prosperity doesn’t just happen—it has to be constructed.
But this seed never fully developed. It never articulated itself as a coherent vision of what America was for. It never said: “This is what we believe. This is what we’re building. This is how we’ll spread it.”
So when America turned to face the Cold War, liberalism—the procedural framework, not the New Deal substance—resumed as the operating system. And into that vacuum stepped the same force that had always been there: the extraction machine.
Remember what we documented in Part II: the extraction class didn’t disappear after slavery. It adapted. Sharecropping. Convict leasing. Company towns. Wage suppression. The methods changed; the function remained. Extraction at this point is not an ideology—it’s a mode of operation. It takes whatever forms the current system allows.
And liberalism, with its procedural neutrality, its refusal to define what society should be for, provided the perfect cover.
Consider what we actually did to “defeat Communism.”
We didn’t fight it by building something better and showing the world what flourishing looked like. We fought it by destroying things—and by extracting:
Iran, 1953: Overthrew a democratically elected government to protect oil interests
Guatemala, 1954: Toppled a democratic reformer on behalf of United Fruit Company
Vietnam, 1955-1975: Fifty-eight thousand Americans dead. Millions of Vietnamese dead. A lost war that shattered national confidence.
Chile, 1973: Helped overthrow Salvador Allende, installed Pinochet’s brutal dictatorship
Countless others: Proxy wars across three continents, destabilization campaigns, support for dictators who served our interests
Notice the pattern. Iran wasn’t about democracy—it was about oil. Guatemala wasn’t about freedom—it was about protecting a fruit company’s profits. Chile wasn’t about human rights—it was about preventing a socialist government from nationalizing copper mines owned by American corporations.
The rhetoric was “spreading democracy.” The reality was spreading extraction with a democratic veneer.
Liberalism provided the language—freedom, democracy, free markets—while the extraction machine did what it always does. The procedures were neutral; the outcomes served capital. That’s not a coincidence. That’s what happens when you have a ruleset without an anchor. Whoever has the most power gets to decide what the ruleset is used for.
If the New Deal had become a coherent ideology—with clear values, with a commitment to building flourishing—our Cold War strategy would have been obvious:
Build the thing worth spreading.
Demonstrate that investment in people produces flourishing. Show the world what shared prosperity looks like. Let the results speak for themselves. Compete with Communism by being better, not by being equally brutal with different flags.
Instead, we exported extraction. And the blowback devastated us at home.
The OPEC oil shocks didn’t happen in a vacuum. They emerged from a context shaped by decades of meddling in Middle Eastern politics—overthrowing Iran’s democratically elected government in 1953, backing authoritarian regimes across the region, treating the area as a resource colony rather than a place where people lived. When those countries finally gained leverage, they used it. The gas lines of the 1970s were consequences, at least in part, of the foreign policy that preceded them.
Vietnam didn’t just cost 58,000 American lives and hundreds of billions of dollars. It shattered the national consensus that government could be trusted to act competently and morally. The credibility gap—the growing awareness that leaders had lied systematically about the war—poisoned faith in institutions for a generation.
The stagflation that economists couldn’t explain? Compounded by the fiscal strain of funding a war we couldn’t win while maintaining domestic programs we couldn’t afford to cut. Guns and butter, except the guns were pointed at peasants in Southeast Asia and the butter was spread increasingly thin.
By the late 1970s, Americans were suffering real pain:
Stagflation: The impossible combination of high inflation and high unemployment
Energy shocks: Gas lines, rationing, the humiliation of OPEC holding America hostage
Vietnam’s aftermath: A lost war, shattered confidence, fiscal hangover
Urban decay: Cities hollowing out, crime rising, the social fabric fraying
This wasn’t random misfortune. And it wasn’t liberalism causing the damage—liberalism doesn’t cause anything; it’s a set of procedures, not a driving force. It was the extraction machine operating freely within liberalism’s vacuum, using liberalism’s procedures as tools, while liberalism provided no resistance because it had no anchor to resist with.
The New Deal had briefly constrained extraction. But liberalism couldn’t maintain those constraints because it didn’t understand them as constraints—it understood them as temporary crisis measures, not as permanent features of a society committed to flourishing.
And the people paid the price.
Extraction Becomes an Ideology
This is where the Powell Memo network enters.
Until the 1970s, extraction had operated as a mode—an unarticulated default, the thing capital does when nothing stops it. But the coordinated response we documented in Part II—the think tanks, the legal networks, the media infrastructure, the academic capture—produced something beyond a political strategy. Whether or not it was their explicit intention, what the Powell Network built was an actual ideology.
To understand what they built, we need to identify the components.
The Philosophy: Libertarianism
Libertarianism provided the justification—the language and the moral framework. According to its mainstream proponents—the Cato Institute, the writings of Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises—libertarianism rests on noble-sounding principles:2
Individual liberty: The dignity and autonomy of each person
Property rights: Security in what you own, including your own body and labor
The non-aggression principle: No one may initiate force or fraud against another person or their property
Limited government: State power is dangerous and must be constrained
Free markets: Voluntary exchange between free individuals, without government interference
This sounds appealing. Who opposes individual dignity? Who favors aggression? The language is deliberately universal—freedom, liberty, voluntary exchange. It positions itself as defending the individual against coercion.
The Outcome Metric: Shareholder Primacy
But libertarianism as philosophy had existed since Hayek and Mises in the 1940s without conquering American politics. It needed something more—a way to measure success, a concrete metric that would guide action.
In 1970, Milton Friedman published an essay in the New York Times that would reshape American capitalism: “The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits.”3 His argument was simple: corporate executives have one duty—maximizing returns to shareholders. Any other consideration—workers, communities, the environment, the public good—is a betrayal of their fiduciary responsibility.
This gave the philosophy its outcome metric—how you know if you’re winning.
Executives had always cared about profits. But Friedman’s essay transformed a tendency into a doctrine—and doctrines get taught, reinforced, and enforced. What had been one concern among many became the only legitimate concern, and anyone who thought otherwise was violating their fiduciary duty.
The data shows the inflection point clearly. From the mid-1940s through the 1970s, CEO compensation grew at a sluggish rate of just 0.8 percent per year—a stability that economists find “particularly surprising in view of the economic prosperity of the 1950s and 1960s.”³ Then came the doctrine’s deployment: business schools teaching it, boards enforcing it, compensation packages rewarding it. From 1978 to 2023, CEO compensation grew 1,085%—an average of 5.6 percent per year, seven times the pre-Friedman rate. (Some scholars argue Friedman merely articulated trends already emerging. Perhaps. But the data is clear: the inflection point comes right around Friedman’s articulation—when the idea became a doctrine.)
That’s the power of articulation. Before Friedman, capitalism was just an economic system—it could serve different ends. The New Deal was capitalist: private ownership, markets, profit motive—but with rules designed to distribute gains broadly. After Friedman, capitalism had a purpose: maximize shareholder value. Everything else was illegitimate. The corporate raider era, hostile takeovers, union-busting, and offshoring followed. Shareholder value became the scoreboard—and the inequality we documented in Part I is the score.
The Arena: Liberalism
The third component was already in place: liberalism’s procedural framework. Free speech to spread the message. Free markets to operate within. Courts to capture. Elections to win. A political system that assumed good faith from all participants and provided no mechanism to resist coordinated ideological assault.
Liberalism provided the battlefield—and it always favors whoever is willing to actually fight.
The Synthesis: Neoliberalism
Libertarian philosophy + shareholder primacy capitalism + liberal proceduralism = neoliberalism.
Now, you’ve probably heard “neoliberalism” a million times. The term has been thrown around so carelessly that it’s become almost meaningless—a generic insult for “capitalism I don’t like,” a way to signal leftist credentials, a catchall for any policy that prioritizes markets. When everything from Bill Clinton’s welfare reform to your city’s bus schedule gets called “neoliberal,” the word loses its power to explain anything.
But here’s why precision matters: you can’t fight what you can’t name, and you can’t name what you don’t understand.
The ideology we’ve just described isn’t a vague attitude toward markets. It’s a specific synthesis—libertarian philosophy providing justification, shareholder primacy providing the success metric, liberal proceduralism providing the battlefield—that was deliberately constructed and systematically deployed. Understanding this precisely is essential to understanding why Democrats were so thoroughly demolished by Reagan’s coalition—why a coordinated ideology steamrolled a party armed with nothing but procedures—and why our social fabric keeps fraying no matter which party wins.
Call it neoliberalism, extractionism, Powellism—labels vary. I’m naming the functional stack that won. For clarity going forward: I’ll use extractionism when talking about the default mode of exploitation that has existed in America since its founding—the 400-year tendency that operates whenever nothing stops it. I’ll use neoliberalism when talking specifically about the ideology built and deployed since Powell—the intellectual and institutional infrastructure that gave extractionism its modern justification and coordinated power. (What would you call it? The comments are open.)
This is the actual ideology that the Powell Network built—whether or not they used that name. Scholarly definitions of ideology vary in emphasis, but they converge on a set of core components. Neoliberalism has all of them:
An anchor: Libertarian philosophy—a vision of society organized around individual “freedom” (defined as absence of government coercion), sacrosanct property rights, and voluntary exchange
Intentionality: The Powell Memo’s explicit plan for institutional capture
A systemic approach: Coordinated action across academia, media, courts, and politics
A theory of power: Use liberalism’s procedures as weapons; they are tools to be molded and wielded, not consistent constraints to be followed
Commitment to outcomes: Shareholder primacy—measure success by profit and extraction, not by human flourishing
This is what defeated the Democrats. Not just Reagan’s charisma. Not just clever campaign tactics. An ideology—complete, coherent, and ruthless.
The Logic of Extraction
Now watch what happens when you follow neoliberalism’s logic.
The sleight of hand is elegant. Libertarian philosophy defines “aggression” as only the initiation of physical force or fraud. Taxation is aggression—the government taking your money at gunpoint. Regulation is aggression—the state telling you what you can do with your property. Union organizing that disrupts business is suspect; environmental rules that constrain profit are tyranny.
But leverage, however extreme, is never aggressive so long as it is not applied by force. The landlord collecting rent from tenants who have nowhere else to go isn’t aggression; it’s voluntary exchange. The employer paying poverty wages to workers who’ll starve otherwise isn’t coercion; it’s freedom of contract. The corporation polluting a community’s water isn’t aggression (no direct physical force); it’s just an externality.
See the trick? “Non-aggression” protects those who already have power and property. “Freedom” means freedom for capital to extract without obstacle. “Voluntary” exchange includes every transaction where the alternative is destitution.
And some libertarians are honest enough to follow this logic to its conclusion.
Walter Block, a professor at Loyola University New Orleans and senior fellow at the Ludwig von Mises Institute, has spent decades arguing that “voluntary slave contracts” should be legally enforceable.4 His reasoning is airtight within libertarian premises: if you own yourself, you can sell yourself. If contracts are sacred, a contract to enter permanent servitude is valid. If the only criterion is “no initiated force or fraud,” then a slavery contract signed under economic desperation—but without a gun to your head—is legitimate.
Block writes: “There is all the world of difference between voluntary and coercive slavery... The only problem with real world slavery was that it was compulsory; the slave did not agree to take on this role.” ⁴
Read that again. The only problem with slavery was that the slaves didn’t sign a contract first.
Block admits this is a minority position among libertarians. Most recoil from it. But here’s the thing: Block isn’t distorting libertarian philosophy. He’s following it honestly. If property rights are absolute, if contracts are sacred, if “aggression” means only initiated physical force, then voluntary slavery is just another market transaction. The “moderate” libertarians who reject Block’s conclusion are the ones being inconsistent. They want the premises without accepting where those premises lead.
But Block’s honesty points us toward a deeper question: what does shareholder primacy actually require?
If your measure of success is maximum profit, you don’t just want to win today’s negotiation—you want to ensure future negotiations are tilted in your favor. You want workers with fewer options. Communities with no alternatives. Desperation. Because desperation is leverage.
Think about it: every dollar of profit comes from a transaction where you got more than you gave. The wider that gap, the greater the profit. And what maximizes that gap? Power imbalance. The more desperate the person across the table, the worse the terms they’ll accept.
A system designed for maximum extraction doesn’t just tolerate human immiseration—it requires it.
Block’s “voluntary slavery” isn’t an extreme hypothetical. It’s the logical endpoint: a worker so desperate they’ll sign away their freedom is a worker with zero negotiating power. That’s maximum leverage. That’s the system working as designed.
You don’t need literal contracts of slavery to operationalize slavery-like leverage. We’re already on the spectrum. Forced arbitration clauses strip workers of their right to sue, funneling disputes into private tribunals that favor employers. Healthcare tied to employment means losing your job can mean losing your cancer treatment—try negotiating a raise when that’s the alternative. Each mechanism does the same thing: it increases the cost of saying no, which increases your employer’s leverage, which widens the gap between what you produce and what you’re paid. Block’s voluntary slavery is just the end of a road we’re already traveling.
And if maximizing leverage over desperate people is your operating principle—then any tool that creates such desperation becomes acceptable.
Including white supremacy. Including Christian nationalism.
If you can divide the working class against itself along racial lines, workers can’t organize collectively. Their leverage drops. Your profits rise.
If you can convince millions of people to vote against their economic interests because they’re terrified of cultural change, you’ve neutralized democratic opposition to extraction. Their leverage drops. Your profits rise.
If you can make people blame immigrants, or Black welfare recipients, or secular humanists for their declining fortunes—instead of the extraction system actually causing them—you’ve redirected the anger that might otherwise threaten you. Their leverage drops. Your profits rise.
And if achieving all this requires spreading fake science like eugenics, twisting the Bible into a weapon, or burying history under revisionist myths—that’s fine too. Liberalism protects your right to lie, and you measure success by profit, not truth.
This is what neoliberalism actually is, underneath the noble language of libertarianism: freedom for the powerful to extract from the powerless, with “voluntary contract” providing the same moral cover that “property rights” once provided for chattel slavery itself.
And notice the continuity with Part II. The extraction class has always used whatever legitimating framework was available:
Divine right and racial hierarchy to justify chattel slavery
“Freedom of contract” to justify debt peonage and sharecropping
“Right to work” to justify union-busting
“Shareholder value” to justify wage suppression and wealth transfer
White supremacy and Christian nationalism to divide and conquer
Neoliberalism is just the latest version—extraction dressed up in the language of liberty. And race and religion aren’t aberrations or contradictions. They’re features—tools to achieve maximum extraction by ensuring maximum leverage.
The results of the last forty years aren’t failures of the system. They’re the system working exactly as designed.
The Powell Memo made neoliberalism operational. It wasn’t enough to have the philosophy; they needed to spread it, normalize it, make it seem like common sense. They needed to capture the institutions that shape public opinion. And they needed mass support for an economic agenda that could never win on its own merits.
So they did what the extraction class has always done. The slaveowners of the antebellum South weaponized Christianity and racial hierarchy to maintain their system. The Powell Network would do the same thing with the same tools.
This brings us to Reagan.
The Deployment
The Powell Network saw an opportunity.
The anxiety was real. The pain was real. The extraction machine operating within liberalism’s vacuum had created the crises—Vietnam, stagflation, energy shocks—and now that same machine could channel the resulting anger. Not toward the corporations and capital interests that had actually profited from the chaos, but toward racial scapegoats and religious crusades.
And they built a machine to do it systematically.
Remember the timeline from Part II:
1971: The Powell Memo lays out the blueprint for ideological transformation
1973: Joseph Coors funds the Heritage Foundation and ALEC; Television News Inc. begins incubating what will become Fox News
1978: The Iowa Senate race proves abortion can be weaponized to mobilize evangelical voters
1979: Paul Weyrich and Jerry Falwell found the Moral Majority
1982: The Federalist Society launches at Yale
By 1980, the infrastructure had been under construction for nearly a decade. The think tanks were operational. The legal networks were forming. The religious coalition was mobilized. The media strategy was tested.
Ronald Reagan was their candidate. Not a political genius who invented a winning formula—the candidate the machine selected to wield weapons that had already been forged.
In 1980, Reagan won 489 electoral votes to Jimmy Carter’s 49.5 He carried 44 states.
In 1984, he won 525 electoral votes—the highest total ever received by a presidential candidate.⁵ He carried 49 states. Walter Mondale won only Minnesota—by 3,761 votes—and D.C. Reagan came within 4,000 votes of a 50-state sweep.
This wasn’t just a loss. This was an extinction-level event.
The “Reagan Revolution” wasn’t a revolution. It was the deployment of a coordinated institutional project that had been building since Powell wrote his memo.
And the weapons worked—because the wound was already open.
The Weapons That Worked
Reagan deployed a devastating two-pronged formula: racial resentment and weaponized religion. Neither weapon was new. But the Powell Memo network had systematized them, scaled them, and coordinated their deployment across every domain of American life.
The Welfare Queen
His first weapon: the racialized myth of the “welfare queen.”
“In Chicago, they found a woman who holds the record,” Reagan told audiences during the 1976 campaign. “She used 80 names, 30 addresses, 15 telephone numbers to collect food stamps, Social Security, veterans’ benefits for four nonexistent deceased veteran husbands, as well as welfare. Her tax-free cash income alone has been running $150,000 a year.”6
The woman was real. Her name was Linda Taylor. She was, in fact, a criminal—convicted of welfare fraud for stealing $8,000 (not $150,000). She was also suspected of kidnapping and possibly murder.⁶ She was an outlier, a sociopath, entirely unrepresentative of the millions of Americans who relied on public assistance.
None of that mattered.
Reagan never said her name. He never explicitly said she was Black. He didn’t have to. “The woman from Chicago who drove a Cadillac while collecting welfare checks” was understood by white audiences exactly as intended. She was the face of the undeserving poor—the people stealing your tax dollars while you worked hard and played by the rules.
By 1978, 84% of Illinois voters considered welfare fraud a matter of “grave concern.”⁶ The archetype Reagan created was powerful enough to help propel him to the White House, where he worked to cement the belief that the problem with government was people getting something for nothing—people who looked a certain way, lived in certain places, voted a certain way.
This was the psychological wage, updated for the television age. Poor whites weren’t being offered explicit racial superiority anymore. They were being offered righteous resentment—the sense that their struggles weren’t caused by the system, but by those people gaming the system.
It worked. Spectacularly.
Lee Atwater, Republican strategist, explained exactly how in a 1981 interview that wouldn’t become public until after his death:7
“You start out in 1954 by saying ‘n****r, n****r, n****r.’ By 1968 you can’t say ‘n****r’—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff...”
The explicit racism became implicit. The slurs became code words. But the function remained the same: keep white working-class voters aligned with capital against their own economic interests by giving them a racial enemy to blame.
“Welfare queens.” “Law and order.” “Inner-city crime.” “Illegal aliens.”
Each phrase is a variation on the psychological wage. Each one says: You may be struggling, but at least you’re not THEM. At least you’re on the right side. Vote for us, and we’ll keep those people in their place.
The God Weapon
But Reagan’s coalition wasn’t built on racial resentment alone. He had a second weapon—one that would prove even more durable: weaponized Christianity.
Here’s a story you probably don’t know.
In 1971, the Southern Baptist Convention—the largest Protestant denomination in America—passed a resolution on abortion. It called for legislation allowing abortion “under such conditions as rape, incest, clear evidence of fetal deformity, and carefully ascertained evidence of the likelihood of damage to the emotional, mental, and physical health of the mother.”8 When Roe v. Wade was decided in 1973, many Southern Baptists welcomed it. A Baptist Press article days after the decision called it an advancement of religious liberty.⁸
Read that again. The Southern Baptist Convention supported abortion access. They reaffirmed this position in 1974.
Evangelicals considered abortion a “Catholic issue.” They were, at most, indifferent.
So what changed?
In 1976, the IRS revoked the tax-exempt status of Bob Jones University because of its racially discriminatory policies—including a ban on interracial dating.9 This is what actually galvanized conservative evangelical leaders. Not abortion. Not prayer in schools. Segregation.
Paul Weyrich, co-founder of the Heritage Foundation, later admitted it: “What galvanized the Christian community was not abortion, school prayer, or the ERA... What changed their minds was Jimmy Carter’s intervention against the Christian schools, trying to deny them tax-exempt status on the basis of so-called de facto segregation.”⁹
But segregation was a losing issue. The country was moving on. Weyrich and his allies needed something else—a moral cause that could mobilize evangelical voters without the baggage of explicit racism.
They found it in Iowa.
In 1978, Democrat Dick Clark was the incumbent Senator, heavily favored to win reelection—every poll showed him ahead by at least 10 points. On the final weekend of the campaign, pro-life activists, primarily Catholic, leafleted church parking lots across the state.⁹ Two days later, Clark lost to his Republican pro-life challenger.
Weyrich saw this. According to historian Randall Balmer, who reviewed Weyrich’s papers at the University of Wyoming, the correspondence between Weyrich and evangelical leaders after the 1978 elections “fairly crackles with excitement.”⁹ Weyrich had found the issue that would mobilize grassroots evangelical voters.
In 1979, Weyrich and Jerry Falwell founded the Moral Majority. They took the Catholic anti-abortion tactic and expanded it to Protestant evangelicals—the same evangelicals whose denominations had supported abortion access just five years earlier.
The rebranding was complete. Abortion was now a “Christian” issue. Voting Republican was now a religious duty. And millions of white evangelicals who had never particularly cared about abortion became single-issue voters for the GOP.
This wasn’t organic. It wasn’t a grassroots awakening of moral conscience. It was a manufactured political weapon—engineered by the same Powell Memo network that built Heritage and ALEC, specifically designed to replace segregation as the mobilizing issue.
The Southern Baptist Convention didn’t formally adopt a pro-life position until 1980. In 2003, the SBC passed a resolution lamenting and renouncing “statements and actions by previous Conventions and previous denominational leadership that offered support to the abortion culture.”⁸ They apologized for... themselves. For the position they’d held just two decades earlier.
The memory hole had done its work. By 2003, no one remembered that evangelicals had ever been anything other than pro-life. The manufactured history had become the only history.
And the coalition it built—white evangelicals voting as a bloc for Republicans—would deliver Reagan the presidency, reshape the Supreme Court, and ultimately overturn Roe v. Wade itself in 2022, nearly fifty years after it was decided.
Weyrich’s gambit worked beyond his wildest dreams.
The Combined Assault
Together, these weapons were devastating. The welfare queen gave white working-class voters permission to resent government programs that might help them—because those people were gaming them. The manufactured abortion crusade gave white evangelicals a moral imperative to vote Republican—forever. Racial resentment captured the working class; religious fervor captured the faithful. Both groups voted against their own economic interests, and both felt righteous doing it.
This was a coordinated assault: think tanks, legal networks, religious organizations, media infrastructure—all deployed through a telegenic candidate. An ideological machine with action across every domain of society.
And what did Democrats have to fight it with?
They had the makings of something real. The New Deal era had planted something that could have grown into a competing ideology:
An implicit anchor: human dignity and material security
Some intentionality: active government intervention to achieve specific outcomes
Elements of systemic thinking: coordinated policy across labor, finance, housing, infrastructure
A nascent theory of power: recognition that capital needed to be constrained
But it was incomplete. It was reactive (responding to the Depression) rather than proactive (building toward a vision). It was compromised from the start (excluding Black workers to appease Southern Democrats). And crucially—it never articulated itself as an ideology. It never said: “This is what we believe. This is what we’re building. This is what we’ll defend.”
So when the Powell Memo counterattack came, there was nothing to defend. The New Deal’s achievements were treated as accidents of history rather than products of intentional construction. Liberalism inherited the outcomes and worshiped them as natural byproducts of neutral procedures—never understanding that they were built, that they required maintenance, that they had enemies.
The extraction machine understood what Democrats didn’t: the New Deal wasn’t just a policy package. It was the beginning of a competing ideology. That’s what the Powell Memo was designed to destroy. That’s what Heritage, ALEC, the Federalist Society, the Moral Majority, Fox News—all of it—was built to do. Not to defeat liberalism (liberalism was never the enemy; it was a tool and a cover). To bury the seed before it could fully grow.
What Democrats actually brought to the fight was the same hollow liberalism that had allowed for the crises Reagan exploited.
They had procedures. They had faith in fair process. They had confidence that voters would respond to reason, that facts would defeat lies, that going high when they went low would eventually be rewarded.
They had no anchor—no compelling vision of what America should be. They had no theory of power—no understanding that they were in an ideological conflict, completely disarmed but for their procedures. They had nothing to say beyond “trust the institutions” to voters whose trust in institutions had been shattered by Vietnam, Watergate, and stagflation.
The Powell Network brought an ideology to an ideological fight. Democrats brought the ruleset neoliberalism had been designed to exploit.
It wasn’t a contest.
This was the beginning of a new wave of weaponized Christianity and racial anxiety deployed to divide the poor—the same tools, updated for a new era. But they would not stop at race and religion, as they would also use class by inoculating the wealthy.
While producing the myth of the “welfare queen” and the abortion crusade, they would also mainstream the Prosperity Gospel—the doctrine that wealth is a sign of God’s favor, that the rich are rich because they deserve to be.10 On the secular side, business schools would go on to spend fifty years teaching future executives that their sole obligation was to maximize shareholder value—and boardrooms would prove it by tying CEO compensation to stock prices. CEO pay would rise 1,085% from 1978 to 2023, while typical worker pay rose just 24%. The ratio would go from 21-to-1 to 290-to-1.¹⁰
The strategy was elegant: convince the poor that other poor people are the enemy, and convince the rich that their success is moral virtue rather than a system working as designed. And in doing so, they made class warfare the third leg of the stool for neoliberalism’s division strategy—ensuring they would have an immediate advantage in any conflict based on race, religion, or class.
Reagan offered a story—false, manipulative, but coherent—about why Americans were suffering and who was to blame. He had a vision: government is the problem, free markets are the solution, morning in America awaits if you just get the bureaucrats and welfare queens out of the way. It was wrong. It would make things worse. But it was a story, with heroes and villains and a promised destination.
Democrats offered... process. Nuance. Explanations. The problem: the side that’s explaining is losing. Let’s be clear about what this means—because it’s not an indictment of facts or expertise. It’s an indictment of having nothing but facts and expertise.
People don’t just need to understand why their lives are hard. They need a vision of what could make their lives better. They need to know what you’re fighting for, not just what you’re fighting against. They need a reason to believe that your side—if it wins—will actually deliver something tangible. They need an ideology: an anchor, a direction, a commitment to outcomes they can see and feel. And they need a story—one that collectivizes their struggle, that transforms individual pain into shared sacrifice, and that ends with them as the heroes who win.
When all you offer is explanations—”the economy is complicated,” “the other side is lying,” “trust the process”—you’re asking people to vote for management when they’re desperate for meaning. And when the other side is promising a better future (even falsely), choosing the false promise over the non-promise is rational. At least the promise might pay off. The non-promise doesn’t just guarantee nothing—it breeds the rot that lives between nihilism and despair: the slow conviction that nothing will ever change, that no one is fighting for you, that politics itself is a game played by others at your expense.
Reagan promised an ideology that would make their lives better. Democrats explained. Reagan won.
This was the destruction: not just an electoral defeat, but the revelation that Democrats—operating within liberalism’s procedural framework, armed with nothing but its tools—were structurally incapable of fighting back against an enemy that had built an actual ideology. Neoliberalism was designed to exploit the arena Democrats were standing in. And exploit it, it did.
The question is what they did next.
The Capitulation
The Fork in the Road
By 1985, the Democratic Party faced a choice.
They could have recognized what had just happened: that they’d been defeated by an ideology, not just a candidate or a campaign. They could have asked why liberalism’s procedures had failed to protect them, why their faith in process had been no match for coordinated conviction. They could have looked back at the New Deal—at what had actually worked, at the seed of something that could have grown into a competing ideology—and asked how to finish what Roosevelt started.
They could have tried to build something real.
They didn’t.
Instead, a group of centrist Democrats chose adaptation. They founded the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC)—led by white, male, mostly Southern politicians11—arguing that the party had moved too far left in the 1960s and 1970s. To win back white working-class voters—especially in the South—Democrats needed to shed their image as the party of welfare, crime, and social liberalism.
The DLC’s prescription: become more like Republicans.
Accept the basic premises of Reaganomics. Embrace free markets and deregulation. Distance yourself from labor unions. Talk tough on crime. Reform (meaning gut) welfare. Prove you’re not beholden to the “special interests” (meaning Black voters, unions, and the poor).
The strategy had a name: the “Third Way.” And it had a champion: Bill Clinton.
But here’s what the Third Way actually meant: Democrats would adopt neoliberalism—the very ideology that had just defeated them. They wouldn’t build a competing vision. They wouldn’t finish the New Deal project. They would accept neoliberalism’s premises and try to execute them with a friendlier face.
Clinton ran in 1992 promising to “end welfare as we know it,” supporting the death penalty, and positioning himself as a “New Democrat” who had broken with the party’s liberal past.¹¹
He won. And Democrats learned the lesson: capitulation works.
At least electorally. For the people they claimed to represent, it was a different story.
Clinton: Wielding Reagan’s Weapons
Bill Clinton delivered on his promises. He ended welfare as we knew it—and as millions of poor families desperately needed it.
The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 was, in Clinton’s words, a fulfillment of his campaign promise.12 It was also a cornerstone of Newt Gingrich’s “Contract with America”—Republican legislation that a Democratic president signed into law.
Three assistant secretaries at the Department of Health and Human Services resigned in protest. Peter Edelman called it a destruction of the safety net.¹²
The results were predictable. In 1996, for every 100 families with children living in poverty, 68 received cash assistance. By 2014, that number had fallen to 23.¹² The welfare rolls shrank—and millions of poor families were simply cut off, left with nothing.
Research later confirmed what should have been obvious: the racial composition of welfare caseloads was the single most important predictor of how harshly states implemented the new rules—stricter time limits, more punitive sanctions, tighter eligibility requirements.¹² The racial weapon Reagan forged was now being wielded by a Democratic president, with predictably racist outcomes.
The Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994 was the largest crime bill in American history.13 It provided $9.7 billion for new prisons. It created a federal “three strikes” mandatory life sentence. It expanded the federal death penalty. It put 100,000 new cops on the streets.
Today, 6.7 million Americans are under correctional control.¹³ The system Clinton expanded disproportionately imprisons Black and brown people—the very communities Democrats still claim to represent.
This wasn’t Republicans forcing Democratic hands. This was a Democratic president, with a Democratic Congress, choosing to implement Republican priorities. The surrender was complete.
Obama: Foam the Runway
When Barack Obama took office in January 2009, he inherited a financial crisis that threatened to become the Second Great Depression—for reasons not entirely dissimilar to the first. The housing market had collapsed. Banks were failing. Millions of Americans were losing their homes.
Obama had a choice. He could save the banks by saving the people—using bailout funds to restructure mortgages, as FDR had done with the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation.14 Senator Hillary Clinton, to her credit, had proposed exactly this approach. The mechanism was proven. The precedent existed.
Obama chose differently.
The banks got $245 billion. AIG got $68 billion. Homeowners were promised $50 billion—and only $31 billion was ever spent.¹⁴
The Home Affordable Modification Program (HAMP) was supposed to help 3-4 million families. In five years, it helped about one million—while 10 million were at risk.
Why did it fail? Because it wasn’t designed to succeed.
Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner told Elizabeth Warren that the homeowner program’s purpose was to “foam the runway” for banks—to spread out foreclosures so banks could absorb losses gradually, not to actually keep families in their homes.¹⁴
Read that again. The Obama administration’s homeowner relief program was explicitly designed to help banks manage foreclosures, not to prevent them.
Millions of Americans—disproportionately Black and brown—lost their homes. Black homeowners with negative equity increased twenty-fold, from 0.7% to 14.2%.15 The foreclosure crisis destroyed $2.2 trillion in property values, with half occurring in communities of color.¹⁵
Not a single Wall Street executive went to prison for the fraud that crashed the economy.
The cruelest irony: helping homeowners would have helped the banks too. Mortgages that don’t default don’t destroy balance sheets. But the Obama administration chose to save the banks while letting the people drown—as if the suffering were a necessary sacrifice rather than an unnecessary cruelty.
The Affordable Care Act: A Republican Healthcare Plan
And then there was healthcare—Obama’s signature domestic achievement.
Here’s a story you probably don’t know: the individual mandate at the heart of the Affordable Care Act was originally a conservative idea. The Heritage Foundation—the same Powell Memo think tank co-founded by Paul Weyrich, who weaponized Christianity alongside Jerry Falwell, the same Heritage Foundation that produced Project 2025, the blueprint for DOGE’s demolition of the federal government—proposed it in 1989 as a market-based alternative to single-payer healthcare. Republican Senator John Chafee introduced legislation built around it in 1993, with nearly half the Republican Senate caucus as co-sponsors. Mitt Romney implemented it in Massachusetts in 2006, with Heritage Foundation assistance, and called it “a model for the nation.”
Obama had sixty votes in the Senate—the largest Democratic majority since the 1970s. He could have pursued single-payer healthcare, the system that works in every other wealthy nation. He could have at least fought for a public option that would give Americans a government-run alternative to private insurance.
Instead, he adopted the Heritage Foundation’s framework. Single-payer was never seriously considered. The public option was bargained away to appease Joe Lieberman—a senator from Connecticut, the insurance capital of the world, who had received years of campaign contributions from the industry he was protecting.
The result? The ACA preserved the for-profit insurance industry rather than replacing it. It mandated that Americans buy private insurance products—and subsidized those purchases with taxpayer dollars.
The market responded exactly as you’d expect. Since the ACA passed, America’s largest health insurers have raked in more than $371 billion in profits.¹⁴ More than $9 trillion in revenue has flowed to the country’s largest insurance companies. Insurance company stocks rose over 1,000% from 2010 to 2024—four times faster than the S&P 500.¹⁴ The industry wasn’t defeated. It was enriched.
Did the ACA help people? Yes—millions gained coverage, and pre-existing condition protections were real. But even Obama’s biggest “victory” operated entirely within neoliberal constraints: preserve private profits, subsidize private industry, never question whether healthcare should be a market commodity at all.
The Debt Trap
And here’s where the extraction logic closes into a perfect loop.
We hear constantly about the national debt—$29 trillion held by the public as of 2025. Politicians warn about “borrowing from China” to fund our spending. But who actually owns most of that debt?
Americans do. Domestic creditors hold more than two-thirds of it—roughly $20 trillion.¹⁴ Foreign holders, including China, Japan, and the UK combined, hold about $9 trillion—less than a third.¹⁴ China specifically holds around $760 billion, just 2.6% of the total.
But which Americans hold the debt? About 80% of directly-held Treasury securities are owned by households in the top 10% of the wealth distribution.¹⁴ The same people who benefited from decades of tax cuts—Reagan’s, Bush’s, Trump’s—now earn interest on the money the government borrows because it cut their taxes.
Think about what this means for the ACA: the subsidies that flow to insurance companies are financed through deficit spending, because revenue was gutted by tax cuts for the wealthy. That deficit spending means borrowing. And who buys Treasury bonds? The wealthy—who now have more money to lend precisely because their taxes were cut.
So they get paid twice. Once through insurance industry profits. Again through interest on the debt used to fund the subsidies. Privatized profits, socialized costs—and the wealthy collect on both ends.
Sure, your grandmother might own some Treasury bonds in her retirement account. But if the system forces her to liquidate that retirement to pay for long-term care—because we don’t have universal healthcare—then it doesn’t matter that working people technically hold some government debt. At the end of the day, only the wealthy get to keep it. Everyone else is just passing through.
Biden: The Pattern Continues
Joe Biden’s presidency revealed the pattern most clearly—because even at his most ambitious, the absence of ideology was unmistakable.
The Build Back Better agenda was the most progressive policy platform in decades: climate investment, childcare, elder care, education, expanded healthcare. But look at what it was: a list. A collection of policies, each designed to appeal to a different constituency, with no unifying vision connecting them. Climate for environmentalists. Childcare for working parents. Elder care for the sandwich generation. Student debt relief for young voters.
There was no story. No anchor. No “this is what America should be and we’re going to fight for it.” Just a policy menu—and when Manchin gutted it, there was nothing to defend except the individual line items. No outraged base demanding the vision be protected, because no vision had ever been articulated. Just interest groups mourning their particular provisions.
The Supreme Court, captured by the Federalist Society after decades of coordinated effort, stripped away abortion rights, gutted environmental regulation, and undermined voting protections. The response? Strongly worded statements. Appeals to vote harder. No structural reform, no court expansion, no hardball tactics.
When Republicans refused to raise the debt ceiling, threatening global economic catastrophe, Biden negotiated. When Republicans blocked judicial nominees, Democrats sought compromise. When Republicans violated norms, Democrats appealed to decorum.
The pattern established in the 80s continued for four decades: when Republicans attack, Democrats accommodate. When the extraction machine advances, Democrats negotiate the terms of retreat. And when Democrats try to do something good, they offer a shopping list instead of a movement—and wonder why no one fights for it when it gets taken away.
The Throughline
Let’s be clear about what happened across these forty years.
Reagan’s coalition didn’t just win elections. It established the terms of debate. It defined what was politically possible. It moved the “center” so far right that Democratic “victories” meant implementing Republican policies with a friendlier face.
Clinton won by promising to gut welfare and build prisons—Reagan’s agenda with Democratic branding.
Obama won on hope and change, then staffed his administration with Wall Street allies who prioritized banks over homeowners.
Biden won promising transformation, then governed within constraints he refused to challenge.
This wasn’t a series of isolated failures. It was a consistent pattern: Democrats responding to a coherent ideological project with incoherent accommodation.
The extraction machine had a vision of what society should look like. Democrats had... electability strategies. The machine had coordinated action across every domain. Democrats had siloed interest groups competing for attention. The machine understood that some fights must be won, not compromised. Democrats believed in finding common ground with people who wanted to bury them in it.
The result was forty years of rightward drift, where even Democratic “wins” advanced the extraction agenda, just more slowly than Republican wins would have. And for forty years, neoliberalism strengthened itself by forcing us to view every problem through the lens of conflict—race, religion, class—so that we’d never stop fighting on terrain it controls and start fighting extraction itself.
The question is: why? Why couldn’t Democrats fight back? Why did they keep surrendering? Why, when they held power, did they wield it so timidly while Republicans wielded it ruthlessly?
The answer lies deeper than strategy or tactics. It lies in the philosophical framework Democrats operated within—a framework that left them structurally incapable of the fight required.
The Non-Ideology
Why Liberalism Failed to Contain Neoliberalism
The Diagnosis
We’ve now seen liberalism in action across five decades.
We’ve seen how it failed to build on the New Deal’s achievements—how it defaulted to spreading empty procedures rather than the substance of human flourishing. We’ve seen how that failure contributed to the crises of the 1970s that the Powell Network exploited. We’ve seen how Democrats, armed only with liberalism’s faith in process, were obliterated by a coordinated ideological machine. And we’ve seen how, for forty years afterward, Democrats responded to each defeat by accepting more of the extraction agenda—always accommodating, never fighting, never offering a competing vision.
Now we need to understand why.
Why did liberalism produce these outcomes? Why couldn’t it defend itself? Why did Democrats keep surrendering? The answer requires us to examine what an ideology actually is—and whether liberalism qualifies.
The Test of an Ideology
An ideology, properly understood, requires:
Anchor: foundational values from which all else derives, and the means through which they’re implemented—not prescribing personal outcomes, but establishing baseline conditions that must be guaranteed: boundaries and floors for what the rules are allowed to produce.
Intentionality: an explicit commitment to building toward the anchor over time (not merely reacting to crises).
Systemic approach: coordinated action across domains (law, education, media, labor markets, courts, elections, civil society), not isolated policies.
Theory of power: an account of how power actually works (coalitions, incentives, veto points, capture, enforcement, narrative) and how it must be wielded.
Commitment to outcomes: the anchor materialized throughout society, with processes to measure progress and iterate toward it—success defined by whether system-level floors and constraints are realized in practice.
Note: Some scholars use “ideology” more broadly; here I mean a power-competitive program aimed at a substantive target state, with a strategy for enforcing it.
Let’s run a few ideologies through this test.
Christian Nationalism:
Anchor: America as a Christian nation, ordained by God, with biblical law as the foundation of government
Intentionality: Explicit project to “reclaim” America for Christ—school boards, legislatures, courts, all targeted
Systemic approach: Coordinates across churches, homeschool networks, legal organizations (ADF, Liberty Counsel), media (CBN, TBN), think tanks (Heritage, Family Research Council), and political campaigns
Theory of power: Understands that cultural power precedes political power; builds from the ground up through families, churches, and local institutions before capturing state power
Commitment to outcomes: Measures success by abortion bans, prayer in schools, religious exemptions, judicial appointments—not by whether the process was fair
Christian Nationalism passes the test. It’s a coherent ideology.
White Supremacy:
Anchor: Racial hierarchy with white people at the apex, preserved through segregation, immigration restriction, and institutional control
Intentionality: Explicit project to maintain or restore white dominance—from the Klan’s terrorism to the Council of Conservative Citizens to today’s “great replacement” rhetoric
Systemic approach: Coordinates across media ecosystems (from talk radio to social media), political networks (CPAC, state legislatures), legal strategies (voter suppression, gerrymandering), and cultural institutions
Theory of power: Understands that demographic change threatens political power; fights on every front—immigration, voting rights, criminal justice, education—to preserve advantage
Commitment to outcomes: Measures success by who holds power, who gets incarcerated, who gets to vote, who gets to be American—not by whether the rules were followed fairly
White Supremacy passes the test. It’s a coherent ideology.
Liberalism: (procedural liberal institutionalism, as practiced in modern American governance)
Anchor: None. Procedures only—elections, courts, markets, free speech—but no shared substantive vision of what those procedures are for.
Intentionality: None. Responds to crises rather than building toward goals.
Systemic approach: None. Treats each policy domain as separate; no coordinated strategy.
Theory of power: None. Assumes good faith from all participants; believes fair process naturally produces good results.
Commitment to outcomes: None. Mistakes process for outcome; treats procedural fidelity as success when process is only a means to pursue ends.
Liberalism has moral language—rights, equality, rule of law—but in practice these function as constraints on process, not a binding destination. They don’t specify a shared, enforceable substantive target state, and they don’t supply a strategy for enforcing one. That’s why liberal procedure has historically been able to administer radically different regimes—including slavery—so long as the regime is rendered lawful and the circle of “rights-bearers” is politically bounded. An ‘anchor’ that cannot reliably bind outcomes under adversarial power isn’t an anchor; it’s a legitimacy vocabulary.
So when I say liberalism has no anchor, I’m not saying it has no ideals. I’m saying it lacks the thing ideologies need to win power struggles: a substantive end-state that constrains what the rules are allowed to become, and a willingness to fight to keep them constrained.
Liberalism fails the test.
What do you call a belief system with no anchor, no intentionality, no theory of power, and no commitment to outcomes?
You don’t call it an ideology. You call it a vacuum—a placeholder where an ideology should be.
Here’s the devastating irony: Christian Nationalism and White Supremacy—morally bankrupt as they are—are more coherent, more intentional, and more strategically sophisticated than the liberalism Democrats have been relying on as a substitute for ideology. These ideologies that neoliberalism deploys as “subordinate” tools for emotional manipulation have everything liberalism lacks: vision, commitment, coordination, and a willingness to fight.
Liberalism didn’t lose the ideological war. It was never a contender to begin with.
The Consequences
This isn’t philosophical hairsplitting. It has devastating practical consequences.
Liberalism can’t defend itself.
If liberalism is committed to neutrality between “comprehensive doctrines,” it cannot distinguish between actors operating within the shared framework and actors using the framework’s protections to destroy it. It must extend tolerance even to those who would abolish tolerance. It must protect the free speech of those organizing to end free speech. It must give procedural legitimacy to movements seeking to delegitimize procedures.
The philosopher Karl Popper identified this in 1945 as the “paradox of tolerance.”16 But it’s not really a paradox—it’s a design flaw. A system with no anchor cannot identify threats to its own existence, because it has no criteria for what “threat” means beyond procedural violation.
Liberalism can’t fight.
What do you do when your opponent is lying? If you’re a liberal, you fact-check them. You explain that the “welfare queen” was an outlier, that fraud rates are actually low, that most recipients are working families. You present data. You appeal to reason.
And you lose. Because you’re explaining. And as we saw earlier, the side that’s explaining is losing—not because facts don’t matter, but because people need vision, not just correction. They need to know what you’re fighting for, not just what the other side is getting wrong.
What do you do when your opponent is using racial resentment to divide the working class? If you’re a liberal, you take the high road. You refuse to engage with race-baiting. You talk about unity and shared values. You trust voters to see through the manipulation.
And you lose. Because while you’re going high, they’re meeting people where they are—validating anxieties, offering narratives, promising a future. Voters follow whoever speaks to what they feel.
Liberalism isn’t even a competitor. It’s the arena.
Here’s what that means: some ideas are mutually exclusive and can only prevail by defeating one another. Extractionism and human flourishing cannot coexist at scale. White supremacy and multiracial democracy cannot coexist. Theocracy and secularism cannot coexist. These aren’t “perspectives” to be balanced through neutral procedures—they are competing visions that require one to win and the other to lose.
Liberalism refuses to acknowledge this. It treats all “comprehensive doctrines” as legitimate participants in a neutral procedural arena. But the actors who understand that ideological conflict is zero-sum simply use liberalism’s procedures as weapons.
The Powell Memo network didn’t attack liberalism as an enemy ideology. They used liberalism—its tolerance, its proceduralism, its neutrality, its good-faith assumptions—as cover while they built an empire. They weaponized free speech to flood the discourse with propaganda. They weaponized religious liberty to build theocratic political power. They weaponized free markets to accelerate extraction. They weaponized the courts to entrench minority rule.
This isn’t history. It’s the playbook still running today.
Watch the two parties operate. Republicans steal a Supreme Court seat by refusing to hold hearings for a Democratic nominee, then ram through their own nominee days before an election. Democrats respond by... expressing disappointment and hoping voters notice. Republicans gerrymander states so aggressively that they win supermajorities with minority vote shares. Democrats respond by... calling for bipartisan redistricting commissions. Republicans use the filibuster to block everything, then eliminate it for their priorities when they hold power. Democrats respond by... defending the filibuster as an institution worth preserving.
In 2025, California finally punched back—passing Proposition 50 to counter Texas's Trump-backed gerrymander. That this single reactive move was treated as a breakthrough tells you everything about how rarely Democrats fight.
One party understands it’s in an ideological conflict. The other keeps proposing compromise with people who view compromise as weakness to exploit.
When Mitch McConnell declared his top priority was making Obama a one-term president, he wasn’t being uncivil—he was being honest about the nature of the conflict. When Democrats kept reaching across the aisle anyway, they were being principled—and that’s exactly what Republicans expected. Democrats would fight for the process, not for the people. They would defend bipartisanship while Republicans used it as a weapon. Their principles made them predictable, and their predictability made them exploitable.
The asymmetry is structural, not personal. Republicans operate as though ideological victory is the goal. Democrats operate as though bipartisan process is the goal. These aren’t equivalent strategies with different styles—they’re one side fighting to win while the other is happy with a participation trophy as long as the rules get followed.
The Incentive Trap
Here’s another way liberalism as ideology fails: it creates an incentive structure that necessarily strengthens extractionism over time.
Think about the asymmetry. On one side, you have neoliberalism—an ideology actively working to mold the rules to benefit extraction. On the other, you have liberalism—committed only to ensuring rules are followed, whatever those rules happen to be. No counterbalancing force pushing back against extraction. Just procedural neutrality.
What happens in that environment? Rational actors optimize for extraction, because that’s where the rewards are and there’s no ideological opposition to stop them.
Consider what we’re watching right now. A president who, in his first term, refused to divest from his businesses while foreign dignitaries and wealthy individuals funneled money to his properties. In his current term, it’s exponentially worse. Billions of dollars flowing into his cryptocurrency. Direct donations to projects of personal interest. Settlements of frivolous lawsuits that would collapse if challenged. All of it serving the same purpose: to gain favor with the most powerful person on the planet—a man who controls the full apparatus of the U.S. government and has proven himself highly vindictive.
And it works. Tariff exemptions. Regulatory relief. Protection from a government that punishes enemies and rewards friends.
The question is: why shouldn’t they?
The moral case is obvious. But liberalism can’t make the moral case—it can only point to procedures. And if the procedures say this is legal (because the rules have been molded to make it legal—via a captured Supreme Court for example—or because no one with power will enforce them), then liberalism has nothing to say. The people paying tribute to power aren’t violating any rules. They’re following the incentives the system created.
And what about those who refuse? You’re asking them to overcome an objectively justifiable fear of retribution. To put their livelihoods in jeopardy. To pick a fight against the most powerful person on Earth. For what? Some ethereal “morality” that liberalism itself can’t articulate or defend because it refuses to take sides?
That’s not a reasonable expectation. It’s an absurd one.
And so the ratchet turns. Each cycle, the rules get bent further toward extraction. Each cycle, the incentives to comply grow stronger. Each cycle, the cost of resistance grows higher. Liberalism watches it happen and shrugs—because the procedures are being followed.
This is how you get a society where extraction becomes not just tolerated but rational. Where the only people who resist are those willing to sacrifice everything for principles the system itself won’t defend. Where “playing by the rules” means feeding the machine.
An ideology of human flourishing wouldn’t just name this or aspire to some ethereal morality—it would make this incentive structure impossible. It would anchor the rules themselves to outcomes, ensuring that no amount of procedural manipulation could make corruption profitable or resistance ruinous. The rules would exist within a domain where capitulation to extraction leads to financial and legal ruin rather than reward—where the incentives point toward flourishing because the system is designed to make them point there.
Liberalism as ideology makes this impossible. Its commitment to procedural neutrality—the very thing it considers its greatest virtue—prevents it from constraining what the rules can become. It can administer any ruleset, even one designed to devour it. And so it does.
The Discrediting of Everything Good
The tragedy goes deeper than liberalism’s inability to defend itself. When liberalism fails to wield tools with intention, things with genuine potential for good get discredited.
Free trade can improve lives. Comparative advantage, specialization, expanded markets—the theory isn’t wrong. But without an anchor to guide implementation or a theory of power to constrain who captures the gains, free trade becomes extraction’s weapon. The gains concentrate. Workers get abandoned. Communities hollow out. And people become cynical—rationally so. They associate free trade with devastation because that’s what they experienced.
Capitalism can serve human flourishing—and we know this because it did, during the New Deal era. Private ownership, markets, profit motive, entrepreneurship—all present, but operating within rules that distributed gains broadly and constrained extraction. The middle class wasn’t built by socialism. It was built by capitalism under constraints that prioritized human outcomes.
But Friedman’s shareholder revolution transformed capitalism from tool into religion. Now people see capitalism and extraction as synonymous. The left wants to abolish it; the right defends its worst excesses. Both sides have forgotten that capitalism under the New Deal looked nothing like capitalism under shareholder primacy.
Multiculturalism can enrich society. But liberalism lets it be weaponized—H1B visas importing exploitable labor, undocumented immigrants harvested for poverty wages then scapegoated for the problems extraction causes, “diversity” becoming corporate branding while material conditions worsen. People come to see other cultures as threats. That reaction, however ugly, responds to something real—not to multiculturalism itself, but to multiculturalism deployed as extraction’s cover story.
Science can guide policy toward better outcomes. But liberalism lets science be captured, defunded, or weaponized depending on who holds power. People watch “the science” shift with political winds, serve corporate interests, and contradict lived experience. Their distrust isn’t irrational—it’s earned.
Democracy itself can translate collective will into collective action. But when you tell people to trust democracy decade after decade and their lives keep getting worse—when they vote and nothing changes, when they elect Democrats who govern like Republicans, when their preferences get polled and studied and ignored—they stop believing democracy works. And when people stop believing democracy can deliver for them, they start wondering if maybe they should try something else. That’s not ignorance or irrationality. That’s the rational conclusion from lived experience.
And next: AI. Without an anchor or intentionality, liberalism will let AI be weaponized too. The gains will concentrate. Workers will be displaced without support. And another tool that could serve flourishing will become another instrument of extraction.
This is what liberalism as ideology leads to. It allows for things with genuine potential for good to be used for extraction—while promising they’ll deliver flourishing. Every cynical voter who rejects “free trade,” “multiculturalism,” “science,” or “expertise” is responding rationally to their experience of these things being weaponized against them. Liberalism, in the absence of a full ideology, doesn’t just fail to deliver its promises. It poisons the very concepts that could make good on them.
What We Build Instead
The Weight of the Default
If you’ve read this far, you’re probably angry. Good. The devastation is real. The coordination was deliberate. The suffering was preventable. Your anger is justified.
But anger alone won’t build what we need—and misdirected anger will guarantee we fail. So before we talk about what to do, we need to understand what we’re actually up against.
Extractionism isn’t an aberration. It’s the default. It’s the way human societies have operated for millennia—slavery, serfdom, feudalism, colonialism, wage exploitation. Hierarchy and extraction are the water we swim in, so pervasive we often can’t see them as choices at all.
From ancient Rome to the British colonies in 1619 to the founding fathers declaring equality while holding slaves. From the failure of Reconstruction to convict leasing to mass incarceration. From sharecropping to the wage stagnation we documented in Part I. The surface changes. The extraction continues.
Here’s what every attempt to overcome extractionism has had in common: they were policy changes without ideological transformation.
Consider how liberalism itself emerged. The shift from divine right to natural rights wasn’t just swapping kings for elections. It was a fundamental reconceptualization of where legitimate authority comes from. Once that shift happened in enough minds, monarchy couldn’t survive—not because of any single policy, but because the framework for understanding power had changed. The old system became illegitimate in a way no reform could fix.
We’ve never done that with extraction. Every policy victory—abolition, labor laws, civil rights—operated within a framework that still treated extraction as legitimate, natural, inevitable. So the policies get rolled back, circumvented, or simply evolved around. Slavery becomes sharecropping becomes convict leasing becomes mass incarceration. Exploitation doesn’t end; it adapts.
Overcoming extractionism isn’t a policy choice. It’s an evolutionary step—a conflict between who we are and who we ought to become.
What’s stopping us from moving forward isn’t just the malice of the powerful. It’s that we’re fighting the wrong battles.
As we saw at the beginning most people operating within the extraction system have no idea where it came from. They swim in ideological water whose origins they’ve never examined. Every identity—political, religious, economic, racial, national—carries with it a framework for understanding the world. Each framework identifies enemies, prescribes solutions, and promises that victory for their side will finally fix things. But none of these frameworks yet contain the answer we need. None of them constitute a complete ideology of human flourishing.
Until a complete ideology exists, every battle among incomplete frameworks only benefits extractionism—because these battles are expenditures of effort inherently incapable of changing the status quo. We’re all fighting each other while the extraction machine hums along, indifferent to which incomplete framework temporarily prevails.
The alternative has to exist before people can choose it.
Which brings us to the hardest case: billionaires.
Everything in this book could be misread as class warfare—as saying the wealthy are the enemy and we need to defeat them. But getting this wrong leads to strategies that backfire.
Start with a distinction that matters: accumulation is not the same as extraction. The drive to accumulate wealth is part of human nature—one of the engines of progress when properly channeled. Extraction is something different: using leverage to take from others in ways that leave them worse off. The malignancy isn’t in human nature. It’s in the ideological environment that channels human nature toward predation rather than production.
The New Deal proves this. People were just as ambitious, just as hungry for success. And yet we got actual human flourishing—however flawed, however incomplete. The Powell Network didn’t change human nature. They just delivered an ideology that channeled accumulation toward extraction instead of shared prosperity.
You can’t blame a fish for not walking. And you can’t defeat someone into having a capacity they lack. Until a complete ideology of human flourishing exists, people will operate within the frameworks available to them—and right now, neoliberalism is the water they swim in.
The strategic response isn’t class warfare. It’s proportional responsibility: those who benefit most from the system have the greatest obligation to maintain it. This isn’t punishment; it’s reciprocity. Wealth doesn’t emerge from individual genius alone—it emerges from infrastructure, education, legal frameworks, and social stability that others built and maintain.
“Billionaires shouldn’t exist” and “eat the rich” are broad attacks on the drive for accumulation—part of human nature—that plays directly into neoliberalism’s framing of class warfare rather than focusing on the extraction that is the actual problem. “Success comes with proportional responsibility” reframes the conversation entirely: it’s grounded in fairness, in reciprocity, and it offers the wealthy an off-ramp to be on the right side of history.
Here’s the strategic upside: building an ideology that welcomes the wealthy as part of the solution will cause a split among them—between those who genuinely want to be seen as benefactors and those who just want to exploit society. This isn’t about letting billionaires have their way, or about mercy. It’s about strategy: this is how we take control of the framing. Neoliberalism’s power rests in part on keeping the wealthy consolidated into a single bloc. Playing into the class warfare framing only strengthens that consolidation. The constraints on extreme wealth will come, framed within an ideology supported by the wealthy, if done correctly. We’ll explore what this looks like in Part V, including a specific mechanism (The Meritocracy Tax) for operationalizing proportional responsibility in a way that honors achievement while ensuring it serves everyone.
And here’s the biggest trap in focusing on class warfare.
Framing the problem this way lets everyone else off the hook. As long as we’re not billionaires, we can cling to our own incomplete frameworks and tell ourselves we’re on the right side.
We’re not.
The liberal who defends procedures without realizing liberalism is the arena neoliberalism was designed to exploit—not a competitor that can challenge it. The socialist who frames solutions as redistribution or class warfare, playing directly into the division strategy that keeps the extraction machine’s beneficiaries consolidated. The atheist who attacks religion wholesale, ignoring that religious traditions contain genuine wisdom about caring for the poor and the stranger—and forcing potential allies into the arms of those who would weaponize faith against flourishing. The theocrat who insists their path is the only path, blind to the fact that secular and religious frameworks have both produced means to flourishing and means to destroy it.
And that’s just to name a few.
Each framework contains something valuable, and yet none of them is complete. Treating any of them as the whole answer pushes away potential allies, silos our efforts, and plays into exactly the divisions extractionism needs to survive.
Rather than playing into the conflicts designed by neoliberalism—race, religion, and class—we need to build an ideology aimed at human flourishing that has room for people from within all of these groups. An ideology where the division isn’t between races, religions, or classes—but between those who want flourishing and those who cling to extraction. That’s the line we draw.
And when we draw it there, we can finally do what the Powell Network did: build—think tanks, legal organizations, media institutions, academic programs, a coordinated presence across every domain of society. Not to win a single election, but to make extraction as unthinkable as monarchy.
But building infrastructure requires something to build around. The Powell Network had neoliberalism. We need an ideology of human flourishing. That’s what the rest of this book is for.
And this is why the work ahead requires more than good policies or winning elections. It requires deliberate, persistent, generational commitment—not to defeat enemies, but to complete an idea. The Powell Network did it. So can we. The only question is whether we’ll get to work.
The Proof of Possibility
And here’s the thing: we’ve already done the hardest part. We’ve proven it’s possible.
The remarkable thing isn’t that extractionism persists. It’s that we’ve proven—repeatedly, empirically—that alternatives are possible.
In the 1930s through 1960s, the New Deal proved something concretly: extractionism is not inevitable. Not theoretically. Empirically. When you invest in people, they flourish. When you protect workers, wages rise. When you constrain extraction, the middle class expands. The metrics don’t lie. We built it. We lived it. We measured it.
The Powell Memo network didn’t destroy that proof. They couldn’t. You can roll back policies, shatter coalitions, erase memories, distort history—but you cannot un-prove what was proven. The demonstration of possibility persists.
And it persists beyond our borders. Look at Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland. They’re not utopias. They have problems. But they absorbed the lesson of the New Deal era even if they never articulated it as ideology. They demonstrate daily that modern economies can deliver broad prosperity, that extraction isn’t the only operating system available, that human flourishing isn’t a fantasy.
The Nordic countries are living proof that the seed planted in the New Deal didn’t die. It migrated. It grew elsewhere. It’s still growing.
And here’s the irony the Powell Memo network never anticipated: their total victory gave us the control group.
By so thoroughly capturing American society—by rolling back the New Deal, immiserating the working class, fraying the social fabric, returning us to tribalism—they created the perfect experiment. And it’s not even a fair comparison: the United States emerged from World War II as the global hegemon. The superpower. Virtually untouched by the destruction that devastated Europe and Asia. We had the factories, the scientists, the capital, the infrastructure. The entire world looked to us as the guiding light. The Nordic countries were small, resource-limited, rebuilding from the wreckage of war.
We had every advantage. They had almost none.
And now? We rank at or near the bottom among wealthy nations in life expectancy, infant mortality, inequality, social mobility, happiness, healthcare outcomes, educational achievement.17 They rank at or near the top. Same species. Same era. Same global economy. They built flourishing with less. We built misery with more.
The extraction machine won so completely in America that it demonstrated its own evolutionary limits. The chaos we’re living through now—the deaths of despair, the political breakdown, the turn toward authoritarianism—isn’t a bug in extractionism. It’s the destination. They’ve shown us, more clearly than any argument could, that even when given every possible advantage and opportunity to succeed, extractionism can only lead to social collapse.
The choice has never been more visible. The proof has never been more stark.
So where does that leave us?
What’s missing isn’t evidence that human flourishing is achievable. What’s missing is an ideology committed to achieving it.
There’s more below, but first: If this work—documenting how liberalism failed and what might replace it—feels worth having in the world, please consider supporting The American Manifesto. Paid subscriptions make it possible to keep telling truths that neither party wants you to hear.
The Way Out
We have the proof. We have the control group. We know human flourishing at scale is possible—we built it once, and others are building it still.
What’s missing is the ideology to guide us there.
The project the New Deal started has to be completed. Not as a policy platform. Not as a coalition of interest groups. As an actual ideology—with an anchor, with intentionality, with a theory of power, with a commitment to outcomes over process.
This doesn’t mean abandoning what liberalism built. The procedures it developed—constitutional government, rule of law, separation of powers, protected rights, democratic participation—are genuine achievements of human civilization. They’re tools that, properly wielded, can serve human flourishing. We keep them.
But tools need a purpose. A hammer isn’t a philosophy of carpentry. Elections aren’t a vision of the good society. The problem was never the ruleset—it was elevating the ruleset to be the ideology, as though having good procedures were the same as having good outcomes. Liberalism is necessary—but it is not sufficient.
The ideology we must build incorporates liberalism’s procedures while adding what liberalism lacks. That means:
An anchor: A substantive vision of human flourishing that we’re willing to name and defend. Not “neutral procedures” but specific commitments about what society should look like.
Intentionality: Not responding to crises but building toward goals across decades. The Powell Memo network planned for fifty years. We need to think on the same timescale.
A systemic approach: Not silos but coordinated action across every domain—economics, culture, media, law, religion, education. The extraction machine fights everywhere simultaneously. We need to do the same.
A theory of power: Not assuming good faith but understanding that some ideologies must be defeated, not debated. Extractionism and human flourishing cannot coexist. One must win.
Commitment to outcomes: Not worshiping process but measuring success by whether people are actually flourishing. If the procedures produce misery, the procedures need to be changed.
This isn’t a call to abandon democracy or civil liberties. It’s a call to recognize that democracy and civil liberties require defense—active, intentional, systemic defense by people who understand what they’re defending and why.
If we want to live in a world not governed by religious fundamentalism, racial hierarchy, or maximum extraction—if we want the things liberalism promised but couldn’t deliver—then we need to build a competing ideology and to accept it cannot coexist with extractionism.
What the Defenders Will Say
This section makes claims that will provoke predictable objections. Let’s address them.
“This is just class warfare dressed up in fancy language.”
Then you missed the point. The entire second half of this section argues that class warfare is a trap—a framing the extraction machine designed precisely because it knows how to win that fight. “Billionaires are the enemy” unifies all the wealthy into a single bloc of resistance. “Success comes with proportional responsibility” splits them. The goal isn’t to wage war on a class; it’s to build an ideology that makes extraction—not accumulation—the thing we constrain.
“You’re flattening racial harm into some universal framework.”
No. Uneven harm is real. Race has been deliberately weaponized for four centuries, and the damage is not distributed equally. This section says so explicitly. What we’re arguing is that racial conflict—like religious conflict and class conflict—is a battlefield the extraction machine has trained for. Fighting on that terrain doesn’t mean the fight isn’t real; it means the extractors know how to exploit it. The goal isn’t to erase racial harm but to stop fighting in ways that strengthen the machine causing it.
“You’re saying class doesn’t matter—this is just centrism.”
Material power is real. Constraints must be enforced. Some actors will refuse every off-ramp and must be constrained anyway. None of that is in dispute. What we’re rejecting is the framing of class warfare—the idea that treating all wealthy people as enemies is strategic rather than self-defeating. Neoliberalism wants you to fight that war because it consolidates the wealthy against you. We’re proposing a split: welcome those who want to be stewards of shared prosperity, isolate those who cling to extraction.
And if you think this is soft on wealth: the Meritocracy Tax we propose in Part V would result in higher taxation at the highest levels of wealth than anything ever proposed by the most progressive voices in American politics. The difference is that it’s built on meritocracy and reciprocity rather than resentment or punishment—which means virtually any argument against it sounds untenably immoral. That’s not centrism. That’s how you actually win.
“You’re being naive about power. The wealthy will never accept constraints.”
Some won’t. That’s why we said explicitly: “The constraints will come.” The point isn’t mercy—it’s coalition mechanics. If you declare war on all billionaires as a class, they spend as a bloc. If you offer an off-ramp framed as reciprocity and status, you split them—between those who genuinely want to be seen as benefactors and those who just want to extract. The ones who refuse get constrained. The ones who accept become proof that the system works. That’s not naive. That’s how you avoid creating a unified enemy with unlimited resources.
Notice the pattern: every objection assumes we’re fighting their preferred battle—class war, race war, or centrism. We’re not. We’re refusing to fight on terrain the extraction machine controls. The real question isn’t which axis to fight along. It’s whether we’re ready to build something that makes all of those fights obsolete.
In Part IV, we’ll document the consequences of this bipartisan failure: the deaths of despair, the fraying social fabric, and the turn toward authoritarianism when people lose hope that the system can serve them.
And in Part V, we’ll provide the map forward—what an actual ideology of human flourishing might look like, and how we begin to build it.
Your Move
This section argues that liberalism isn’t a weak ideology but isn’t an ideology at all—and that this is why Democrats keep losing to opponents who actually have one.
Does this critique of liberalism resonate with your experience of Democratic politics?
Did the history here—the Powell Memo, the weaponization of Christianity, the origins of the ACA—change how you understand what’s happening now?
Can you see neoliberalism operating in places you didn’t notice before?
How do we build coordinated action across domains when the left is so fragmented?
Which incomplete framework do you find yourself clinging to? What would it take to let go of it?
What’s one domain—law, media, academia, religion, local government—where you could contribute to building something?
The comments are open. This is a conversation about what comes next.
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Liberalism“, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2024.
Comprehensive academic overview of liberalism as a political philosophy, its Enlightenment origins, core commitments to individual rights and limited government, and the distinction between procedural and substantive liberalism.
Cato Institute, “Key Concepts of Libertarianism“, Cato Institute, 1999.
The Cato Institute’s official articulation of libertarian principles, including individual liberty, property rights, the non-aggression principle, limited government, free markets, and peace. Presents libertarianism as defending individual dignity against coercion, emphasizing that “no man or group of men may aggress against the person or property of anyone else.”
Milton Friedman, “A Friedman Doctrine: The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits“, The New York Times, September 13, 1970. See also Martin Lipton, “The Friedman Essay and the True Purpose of the Business Corporation“, Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance, September 17, 2020; Carola Frydman and Raven E. Saks, “Historical Trends in Executive Compensation, 1936-2003“, Stanford Center on Poverty and Inequality, 2005; and Josh Bivens, Elise Gould, and Jori Kandra, “CEO Pay Declined in 2023“, Economic Policy Institute, September 19, 2024.
Friedman's landmark essay argued that corporate executives have only one legitimate responsibility: maximizing shareholder returns. Any consideration of workers, communities, or the public good constitutes a betrayal of fiduciary duty. As Lipton notes, Friedman's headline "became synonymous with shareholder primacy for 50 years" and catalyzed "an era of short-termism, hostile takeovers, extortion by corporate raiders, junk bond financing." The Frydman and Saks data shows the inflection point clearly: from the mid-1940s through the 1970s, CEO compensation grew at a "sluggish rate of 0.8 percent per year"—a stability the authors call "particularly surprising in view of the economic prosperity of the 1950s and 1960s." In 1965, CEOs were paid 21 times what a typical worker earned. The EPI data shows what happened after the doctrine's deployment: from 1978 to 2023, CEO compensation grew 1,085%, and by 2023 the CEO-to-worker ratio had reached 290-to-1. That 1,085% growth over 45 years works out to an average of 5.6 percent per year (our calculation)—seven times the pre-Friedman rate. Executives had always cared about profits; Friedman's essay transformed that tendency into a doctrine that got taught, reinforced, and enforced.
Walter Block, “Toward a Libertarian Theory of Inalienability: A Critique of Rothbard, Barnett, Smith, Kinsella, Gordon, and Epstein“, Journal of Libertarian Studies, Vol. 17, No. 2, 2003.
Block, a professor at Loyola University New Orleans and longtime senior fellow at the Ludwig von Mises Institute, argues that “voluntary slave contracts” should be legally enforceable under libertarian principles. He writes: “There is all the world of difference between voluntary and coercive slavery... The only problem with real world slavery was that it was compulsory.” Block acknowledges this is a minority position but argues it follows logically from libertarian premises about self-ownership and contract rights.
270toWin, “Presidential Election of 1984“, 270toWin, 2024.
Comprehensive electoral data from the 1984 presidential election. Reagan won 525 electoral votes—the highest total ever received by a presidential candidate—carrying 49 states while Mondale won only Minnesota (by 3,761 votes) and D.C. Reagan received 58.8% of the popular vote and won virtually every demographic group except African Americans.
NPR Code Switch, “The Truth Behind The Lies Of The Original ‘Welfare Queen’“, NPR, December 2013.
Investigative piece on Linda Taylor, the real woman behind Reagan’s “welfare queen” rhetoric. Taylor was convicted of stealing $8,000 (not the $150,000 Reagan claimed) and was suspected of far more serious crimes including kidnapping and possibly murder.
The Nation, “Exclusive: Lee Atwater’s Infamous 1981 Interview on the Southern Strategy“, The Nation, November 2012.
The full audio and transcript of Lee Atwater’s 1981 interview explaining how Republican strategy evolved from explicit racism to coded language.
Susan M. Shaw, “The history of Southern Baptists shows they have not always opposed abortion“, The Conversation, June 17, 2022.
Comprehensive historical analysis of the Southern Baptist Convention’s evolving abortion stance, documenting their support for abortion access in the early 1970s.
Randall Balmer, “The Real Origins of the Religious Right“, Politico Magazine, May 27, 2014.
Historian Randall Balmer’s landmark exposé of how the religious right actually formed around defending segregation, not opposing abortion. Based on Balmer’s research in Jerry Falwell’s archives at Liberty University and Paul Weyrich’s papers at the University of Wyoming, the article documents how the IRS’s revocation of Bob Jones University’s tax-exempt status in 1976 galvanized evangelical leaders—and how the 1978 Iowa Senate race demonstrated abortion’s potential as a mobilizing issue. Balmer writes that after pro-life activists leafleted church parking lots and defeated the heavily-favored Democratic incumbent Dick Clark, “Correspondence between Weyrich and evangelical leaders fairly crackles with excitement.” The article also includes Weyrich’s own admission: “I was trying to get these people interested in those issues and I utterly failed”—until he found abortion.
Kate Bowler, “Blessed: A History of the American Prosperity Gospel“, reviewed by Michael Parker, Presbyterian Outlook, June 6, 2014. See also Josh Bivens, Elise Gould, and Jori Kandra, “CEO Pay Declined in 2023“, Economic Policy Institute, September 19, 2024.
Bowler’s scholarly history documents how the Prosperity Gospel—the doctrine that wealth signals God’s favor—became mainstream during the same decades that produced the welfare queen and abortion crusade. The review describes it as “a sacralized version of Horatio Alger’s ‘rags to riches’ novels”—religious justification for extraction. The EPI report provides the secular parallel: from 1978 to 2023, CEO compensation rose 1,085% while typical worker pay rose just 24%, and the CEO-to-worker ratio exploded from 21-to-1 to 290-to-1. The report notes that “CEOs are getting paid more because of their leverage over corporate boards, not because of their skills or contributions”—they extract “economic rents” (income exceeding actual productivity). Business schools taught shareholder value maximization as doctrine; boardrooms proved the lesson true. Together, these sources document how the extraction machine inoculated the wealthy from both religious and secular directions—convincing them their success was earned virtue rather than a system working as designed.
The Nation, “How the Third Way Made Neoliberal Politics Seem Inevitable“, The Nation, 2021.
Comprehensive history of the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), founded in 1985 by centrist Democrats after Reagan’s landslide reelection. Documents how the DLC—led by white, male, mostly Southern politicians—explicitly sought to distance Democrats from unions, civil rights groups, and “special interests” (their term for Black voters and the poor). The 1990 New Orleans Declaration declared that “the free market, regulated in the public interest, is the best engine of general prosperity” and endorsed “equal opportunity, not equal outcomes”—a rejection of affirmative action. Clinton, as DLC chair in 1990-91, delivered his signature themes of “opportunity, responsibility, community” that became the basis of his 1992 campaign. The article notes that critics called the Third Way “warmed-over neoliberalism” or “Thatcherism with a human face,” and that its “most lasting legacy may well be its determination to consign the political left to the dustbin of history.”
Joe Soss, Richard C. Fording, and Sanford F. Schram, “Disciplining the Poor: Neoliberal Paternalism and the Persistent Power of Race“, University of Chicago Press, 2011. See also Center for Public Impact, “The 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act“, Centre for Public Impact, 2019.
Comprehensive analysis of welfare reform and its racialized implementation. Soss, Fording, and Schram’s landmark study finds that the racial composition of welfare caseloads is the single most important predictor of state and local policy choices regarding welfare governance strategies—more predictive than poverty rates, political ideology, or budget constraints. Their research demonstrates how neoliberal welfare policies systematically reinforce racial inequality even without explicitly racist intent. The Centre for Public Impact documents Clinton’s campaign promise to “end welfare as we know it,” the three assistant secretaries who resigned in protest (Peter Edelman calling it “the worst thing Bill Clinton has done”), and the dramatic caseload decline—from 68 families receiving cash assistance per 100 in poverty in 1996 to just 23 by 2014.
ACLU, “How the 1994 Crime Bill Fed the Mass Incarceration Crisis“, American Civil Liberties Union, 2019.
Analysis of Clinton’s crime bill—the largest in American history—and its role in mass incarceration.
Congressional Budget Office, “Final Report on the Troubled Asset Relief Program“, CBO, April 2024. See also Bill Moyers, “Obama’s Foreclosure Relief Program Was Designed to Help Bankers, Not Homeowners“, BillMoyers.com, February 2015.
The CBO’s final TARP report documents that banks received $245 billion, AIG received $68 billion, and mortgage programs received only $31 billion of $50 billion initially announced. The Bill Moyers investigation documents bailout inspector general Neil Barofsky’s testimony that Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner told Elizabeth Warren the homeowner program’s purpose was to “foam the runway” for banks—spreading out foreclosures so banks could absorb losses gradually, not to keep families in their homes.
Ryan Cooper and Matt Bruenig, “How Obama Destroyed Black Wealth“, Jacobin, December 7, 2017.
Comprehensive analysis using Survey of Consumer Finances data to track the evolution of Black wealth during the Obama presidency. Documents that Black homeowners with negative equity exploded twenty-fold from 0.7% to 14.2% between 2007 and 2013. A 2013 Center for Responsible Lending study found that properties in proximity to foreclosures shed $2.2 trillion in value—with half that loss occurring in communities of color. The authors conclude that “the first black president in American history was a disaster for black wealth” because his administration prioritized protecting the financial system over helping homeowners.
Wikipedia, “Paradox of Tolerance“, Wikipedia, 2024.
Overview of philosopher Karl Popper’s argument from The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945) that “unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance” if intolerant movements are allowed to flourish unchecked.
Multiple sources document America’s poor performance relative to peer nations across key metrics. The Peterson-KFF Health System Tracker reports U.S. life expectancy at 78.4 years versus 82.5 in comparable countries—a 4.1-year gap—while ranking 32nd of 38 OECD nations (“How does U.S. life expectancy compare to other countries?“). America’s Health Rankings shows U.S. infant mortality at 5.4 deaths per 1,000 live births versus Norway’s 1.6—over three times higher—ranking 33rd of 38 OECD countries (“2023 Annual Report: International Comparison“). The 2025 World Happiness Report ranks Finland #1 for the eighth consecutive year, with Denmark, Iceland, and Sweden in the top four, while the U.S. fell to #24—its lowest ranking ever—and #62 among people under 30 (“World Happiness Report 2025“).
Incredible synthesis of how procedural liberalism became the arena rather than the competitor. That distinction between liberalism lacking an anchor versus neoliberalism having libertarian philosophy plus shareholder primacy clarifies alot I've been trying to articulate for years. The point about Democrats offering policies instead of vision really hits, especially with Build Back Better, it was just a list of good things with no unifying story. That's why nobody fought for it when Manchin gutted it, there was no ideolgy to defend.
Part of the way out is to be skeptical of the media. (Easier said than done, because there are people doing their best to discourage this. "Trust me bro.") Media can in large part be blamed for what happened to the Democrat party. They, along with the constant chipping away by radical right-wingers, convinced the part to move more to the right out of fear for their jobs.
As a project in kolledge, I went to a public event & then bought 4 different newspapers (when there were 4 different newspapers to buy) to read their accounts of it. Of course there were differences in the articles, but some of the differences were real departures--not only from the other accounts, but from what I actually saw.
So what are we to believe? And who are we to believe? We can't be everywhere, which is the purpose of the media. We really need to sort out how to do this, or we'll turn into Russia.