Knowing our Liberal Friends

because Sun Tzu

Chinese military expert Sun Tzu says:

If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles.

And since Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt advises that the political is the distinction between friend and enemy, it seems to be important for US politics that we “non-liberals” understand both ourselves and our “liberal friends” — who are indeed our political enemy.

In reality, of course, I would say that the political distinction in the US today is between the liberal ruling class plus its dedicated supporters versus the rest of us.

So how do we go about knowing ourselves and knowing our liberal enemy?

I judge that first, we need to understand our liberal enemy, because really, our understanding of ourselves begins with the injustice that our lives suffer under the unjust rule of our liberal friends.

But liberal injustice didn’t come from nowhere; it came, I propose, from Voltaire and Rousseau.

Grok says this about Voltaire:

Voltaire’s philosophy, deeply rooted in the Enlightenment, centered on the supreme power of reason as the primary tool for human progress and the relentless critique of superstition, dogma, and arbitrary authority. He championed religious tolerance, freedom of speech, and the separation of church and state, fiercely attacking the Catholic Church’s influence and clerical intolerance while advocating deism—a rational belief in a distant creator rather than organized religion.

Grok says this about Rousseau:

Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s philosophy centers on the belief that humans are born naturally good, free, and equal, endowed with a compassionate “amour de soi” (healthy self-love) and a simple, uncorrupted existence in the state of nature, but become alienated, unequal, and morally degraded through the development of society, private property, civilization, and artificial dependencies that foster destructive “amour-propre” (vain, comparative self-love).

Then let’s do a jump to Marx:

Karl Marx’s philosophy, often called historical materialism, centers on the idea that the economic base of society—specifically the mode of production and class relations—fundamentally shapes history, culture, politics, and consciousness... Marx viewed capitalism as inherently unstable and exploitative, generating crises, inequality, and alienation while simultaneously creating the conditions for its overthrow through proletarian revolution, leading toward a classless communist society where production serves human needs collectively rather than private profit, ultimately enabling genuine human freedom and self-realization beyond material scarcity and domination.

Now, today we experience our liberal ruling class as being a lot more Marx than Rousseau, and not very much Voltaire. From Voltaire, our liberal friends assume that they are on the side of reason and are heroic in their “critique of superstition, dogma, and arbitrary authority.” From Rousseau they imagine a perfect world where they are champions of a “compassionate.. and… simple, uncorrupted existence“ and fighting against the “alienated, unequal, and morally degraded” world of racist-sexist-homophobes.

IIn practice, liberal politics aligns most closely with the framework of Marx. They view racist patriarchal “capitalism as inherently unstable and exploitative, generating crises, inequality, and alienation”, and it is their determination, through the political agenda of Allyism, to fight for the oppressed peoples against the white male oppressors, and eliminate exploitation, inequality, and alienation of capitalism by substituting collective programs to rectify the exploitation and inequality of unfettered capitalism.

Obviously, from the non-liberal point of view, something has gone wrong with this program in the US, whether we believe it all started with the Pendleton Act of 1883 that established administrative government, or whether we believe it started with the New Deal.

My analysis is that it is not true that “reason [is] the primary tool for human progress.” Information, from Claude Shannon, is “surprise.” It is not true that capitalism that is “inherently unstable and exploitative, generating crises, inequality, and alienation”, but life itself. And I suspect that in creating a politics to create stability, eliminate exploitation, avoid crises, eliminate inequality and alienation, you generally make things worse. I believe that:

• if you muck around with capitalism’s price system you create crises and reduce prosperity;

• if you try to direct traffic with administration you have a “knowledge problem” and the administrators never have enough information to fix things;

• if you regulate capitalism you create “regulatory capture” of the regulatory apparatus by the regulated institutions.

Christopher Rufo describes how this system has fared in California:

unsustainable finances, endemic fraud, chronic homelessness, union corruption, DEI racialism, unchecked crime, and a web of NGOs that siphon taxpayer money toward partisan ends.

Now I believe, from Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt, that the problem with politics is that it always reduces any issue, any problem, to the fight of the friends against the enemy. The reality of human society as a complex interactive network of cooperating and competing individuals and institutions gets reduced to the fight against the enemy. And in the fight against the enemy the question of what will benefit people, what will work, what will spread prosperity, what ideas work and what will not work, gets buried in the fight against the enemy and the natural instinct to reward friends in the battle to win the war against the enemy.

Now I believe that our liberal friends don’t see that. They know that capitalism is “inherently unstable and exploitative, generating crises, inequality, and alienation”. And they know that by legislating the right legislation and regulating the right regulation that they can replace “the frigidity of individualism with the warmth of collectivism.” If there is a problem, they know it is the result of exploitation or oppression by an evil actor, so the solution is to apply political power.

We have seen this liberal approach to the world up close and personal in the anti-ICE protests. Our liberal friends do not see that the federal government has the power and the legal right to pursue illegal aliens. Instead they see only that the federal government is mistreating “migrants” whose only crime is that they are seeking a better life. And they do not see that their “sanctuary city” policies create a safe zone for criminals and a safe harbor for drug cartels, and create the occasion for illegal aliens and drug cartels to reward politicians that turn a blind eye to their criminalities.

And finally, when you reduce human life to politics, then you reduce life to rewarding your friends — also known as corruption — and fighting your enemies — also known as lawfare.

Knowing all this about our liberal friends we should not need to fear “the result of a hundred battles.” Provided that we know ourselves.