The Permanent Problem of Liberalism
13th September 2026
Every time I use the word liberalism — as it has been commonly used in the United States for decades, describing the belief system associated with the Democratic Party — some pedant will invariably show up in the comments to scold me with a lecture about “classical liberalism” as if I’m an ignorant schoolboy in need of their tutelage, which I am not. Nobody needs to teach me about John Locke, Adam Smith, et al., whose books have been on my shelves for 30 years. Nor am I ignorant of the fact that most young left-wingers nowadays make a point of scorning liberals, instead referring to themselves as progressives or socialists.
I always use the term ‘proglodyte’, a convenient amalgam of ‘progressive’ and ‘troglodyte’ that is true in almost every case.
What struck me was how, 25 years later, we’re still stuck with the same problem — the decadent elites haven’t changed, except insofar as they’ve gotten worse. And, in point of fact, the problem hasn’t really changed since before I was born.
Except to get worse.
If liberalism means anything, it means a commitment to equality — or Equality, with a capital “E,” denoting its quasi-religious status in the liberal mind. The liberal is unable to say that Islam (or Communism) is wrong and bad, because the Muslim or the Communist must be treated as an equal. The fact that an avowed enemy seeks to kill us — well, who are we to say that he is wrong for this? Instead, the liberal believes, we must critically examine ourselves to see what we have done to provoke the enemy’s murderous rage. Of course, it’s lunacy to think like this, but the liberal never breaks down his arguments into the form of a syllogism, with the premises clearly delineated and the structure of the argument made evident. Instead, his fanatical commitment to Equality is an unexamined prejudice from which every error of his belief emerges.
And that’s where I break with the Declaration. “All men are created equal…” Nope, they demonstrably are not.
Liberals are so certain of their moral and intellectual superiority that, even when their errors are pointed out with the utmost precision — as Buckley did — they refuse to acknowledge they have been proven wrong. No matter how skillfully you deploy facts and logic to contradict them, nothing can persuade them to admit their mistake or change their policy, because this would be tantamount to confessing that they are not actually so superior.
Hence the accuracy of the ‘troglodyte’ component of ‘proglodyte’. They live in a cave of their own creation, guessing about the nature of the objects passing by outside, but never able to looks directly at reality because of the chains that tie them down, invisible but unbreakable.