I HURT MYSELF TODAY, TO SEE IF I STILL FEEL:

The Fire of Stupidity Cannot Be Contained (David French, 5/31/26, NY Times)

[M]illions upon millions of people are enduring democracy as “the worst form of government” without the necessary balanced understanding (that citizens in the mid-20th century had gained through firsthand observation) of “except all those other forms that have been tried.”

So even fascism and communism — for some people, at least — are no longer avatars of atrocity, but dynamic alternatives to a sclerotic present. In their frustration, all too many people are attracted to the theoretical benefits of authoritarianism, and they don’t have the experience or the education to understand its actual and inevitable defects.

They do not understand the link between their fashionable and transgressive ideologies and the oceans of blood that fascism and communism spilled across the globe.

In this ahistorical context, even political violence can seem justified — perhaps even a bit daring and romantic — unless you’ve lived through, say, the riots that swept American cities in the 1960s, a cataclysm that was far more violent, deadly and prolonged than anything that happened in the United States in 2020.

The compromises and restraints of diplomacy, which can often mean granting painful concessions to terrible regimes, can seem like a fool’s errand, unless you’ve witnessed the indescribable horrors of world wars.

The problem is rather different than Mr. French describes: it is the atavism of the Last Men. Life is so affluent and boring, thanks to the triumph of liberalism, that these people are willing to embrace violence just to make their lives more exciting.

HUMAN EXISTENCE IS THE STRUGGLE BETWEEN SECURITY AND FREEDOM:

The Future of Dynamism with Virginia Postrel (hosted by G. Patrick Lynch, Law & Liberty Podcast)

Virginia Postrel :
[T]he basic distinction is between dynamism, which is open-ended discovery and progress that is driven by bottom-up problem solving, bottom-up problem defining, innovation, and feedback, also. So not every new idea is a good idea, not every idea of how to solve a problem actually solves the problem. And there is this constant process of discontent also, because whatever you have, you see what could be better about it. And that’s one reason that this progress is open-ended, but it’s very much an idea of discovery, sort of a liberalism that centers discovery and curiosity and learning. “Learning” is what I say in the book. On the other side, you have what I call stasis and I talk about two different forms. One, which is the easier to understand, is people who really center stability. Their ideal society is one that doesn’t change and often they have an ideal located somewhere in the past.

It could be the Middle Ages, it could be the 1950s, it could be before the agricultural revolution. There are many different forms of that type of stasis, which I call reactionary in the book. The other form of stasis is more subtle, and much more pervasive, which is the idea of, no, we like change, we like progress, we like discovery, but we want it to look exactly the way we want it to look. And this is what I call technocracy. So this is a form of stasis that is about control. So it’s not about “nothing changes,” it’s about very directed change. And since at least the beginning of the twentieth century, technocracy has dominated liberal democracies. There was a rise of thinking that, “Wow, look at all these great things that railroads and steel mills, all these corporations that have to plan these giant enterprises, we should plan the economy the same way.”

And obviously looking back on it and especially through the lens of some of Hayek’s work, this seems obviously wrong, especially in the forms that you find it in the early twentieth century or late nineteenth century where it really is like every single bit of the economy would be planned, but it wasn’t stupid. It wasn’t stupid people saying this. It was people drawing the wrong lessons from the world that they were living in. And so I see this continuing struggle between ideals of an open-ended discovery-oriented society that is very bottom up also. So no one is in charge, no one is in control. It doesn’t mean you have no rules. You need rules, but they need to be very general and you need to be able to have nested levels of rules so that McDonald’s can say every menu has to be the same, and somebody’s one-off restaurant can have different food every night depending on what’s fresh in the market.

The genius of liberalism is republican liberty, which allows us to balance the two by granting exactly as much freedom to others as leaves us secure ourselves.

INFORMATION WANTS TO BE FREE:

The ‘warrior ethos’ promises victory — history says it leads to defeat (John Broich, May 21, 2026, The Conversation)

Democracies don’t necessarily fight clean wars. During World War II, the Allies firebombed cities, created internment camps and dropped atomic bombs.

What distinguishes fascist powers from democracies is their contempt for rules based on their sense of superiority. In 1933, Adolf Hitler’s propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels announced that the Nazis would claim the absolute right to override democratic constraints. “This contemptible parliamentarianism … is gone,” he said.

Italian dictator Benito Mussolini said it more bluntly in 1936: “We do not argue with those who disagree with us, we destroy them.”

But rules of engagement function as a control system that ties tactical decisions to strategy, law and the risk of escalation. Discarding them tends to produce the atrocities and strategic blowback that lose wars.

Democratic procedure does similar work: Political scientists who studied 197 conflicts from 1816 to 1987 found that democracies won about 76% of their conflicts and non-democracies 46%, in large part because accountable leaders and public access to information force a government to notice when a plan isn’t working.

A fascist regime that treats democratic constraints as obstacles is likely to decide inconvenient information is an obstacle too. Because of this, in fascist governments, loyalists rank higher than experts. Fascist systems don’t remove people for being wrong; they remove them for insufficient loyalty. The man who tells the leader what he wants to hear rises. The man whose report contradicts the leader’s views endangers himself.

Maybe the silliest trope of the 60s/70s was that democracies had inherent disadvantages in fighting totalitarian regimes when the exact opposite was true. It has always led folks to wildly overestimate the strength of our opponents, as witness in Iraq, Ukraine, etc. Disastrously, it led to a prolonged Cold War rather than simply settling the USSR’s hash immediately.

ILLIBERALISM IS NOT A VIABLE ALTERNATIVE TO THE eND OF hISTORY:

It may not feel like it, but hope is on the horizon: Trump, Netanyahu and Putin’s powers appear to be waning (Simon Tisdall, 5/17/26, The Guardian)

Intense negativity characterises European and, to a lesser degree, North American political sentiment. In France, 90% of people questioned by Ipsos believed their country is on the wrong track. In Britain, it was 79%; in Germany, 77%; in the US, 60%. Europeans feel similarly glum about the bigger, global picture, unlike the Chinese, Saudis and Nigerians who are broadly upbeat, according to a GlobeScan survey.

Pew Research Center polling in 25 countries last year found that the US, Russia and China are seen, by most but not all, as the biggest international threats.

OPEN THE BORDERS:

Make Trade, Not War: How Capitalism Creates Peace: Open markets lead to closed battlefields. (Walker Wright, 5/15/26, Human Progress)

While the liberal peace theory remains influential, a growing wave of empirical research over the last three decades suggests that markets may play a bigger role than the ballot box. This shift in consensus toward what’s known as the capitalist peace theory posits that trade openness and economic interdependence are among the primary forces that mitigate war. Of course, scholars continue to debate over how much trade and economic freedom contribute to peace. But liberal peace theorists now include economic interdependence as an essential element within the broader liberal peace project. Economic interdependence is “part of the glue that cements the ‘liberal peace’ together.”

More Reagan/Bush, less Trump/Biden.

FUKUYAMA WINS AGAIN:

Why postliberalism failed: Orbán’s warning to the Right (Samuel Mace, 4/20/26, CapX)

This result does not even spell the beginning of the end of our own populist moment, but the failure of Fidesz and the scandals which brought down Orbán’s illiberal regime represent an overdue reckoning with reality for the postliberal dream.

That dream imagines postliberalism as a new and more effective way to govern, delivering conservative priorities through state power and institutional and civic dominance. Fidesz exposed the practical limits of this vision in Hungary, but the problem is far more fundamental.

As Paul Kelly writes in ‘Against Postliberalism’, postliberalism operates as a negative ideological force fighting against the dominance of liberalism and liberal ideals. Even when it arrives in power, it is trapped by this focus into antagonistic political gestures lacking genuine innovation.

Despite the efforts of authors like Adrian Vermuele and Patrick Deneen, the postliberals have had little success imagining something new. Postliberalism remains just the latest intellectual reaction created by the success of liberal democracy, rather than a serious rival to replace it.

THE eND OF hISTORY IS UNDEFEATED:

The Rise And Fall Of ‘Petty Tyrants’: History shows that bad leaders can successfully undermine democracy — but the story always ends the same way. (Danny Hillis, April 23, 2026, NOEMA)

Once in power, every leader, good or bad, faces difficulties. The fork in the road is how they choose to handle unwelcome realities. For vain leaders, admitting difficulties would mean admitting personal failure. The psychological stakes of honest assessment are unbearable, so they take the path that avoids it.

Setbacks are blamed on the incompetence of subordinates. Those who insist on bringing up unpleasant truths are replaced with sycophants who reinforce petty tyrants’ exaggerated sense of genius. Eventually dissenters are frightened into silence.

To hide the truth from the outside world, petty tyrants must deceive and distract. Detachment from reality does not require stupidity, just the willingness to choose an appealing story over obstinate facts. So energies become focused on fabricating and supporting a convenient story and demonizing scapegoats. Institutions responsible for gathering objective information that might contradict the narrative are deliberately weakened. Critics are portrayed as traitors.

As the leaders and their associates concentrate their efforts on deceiving others, they begin to deceive themselves. To sustain the illusion, they must act as if they believe their own lies, as must those around them. Whether they actually believe becomes irrelevant. They are trapped in their own illusion.

As appearance replaces performance and loyalty replaces competence, the system begins to reward flattery rather than governance. Insiders learn to exploit the tyrant’s vanity, not only to stay in favor, but to advance their own agendas. Corruption becomes systemic. Extraction replaces stewardship and, as parts of the system become parasitic, the deterioration accelerates.

Once decisions are based on false premises, weaknesses are made invisible. But reality does not care. When Mussolini’s troops invaded in summer uniforms, winter still came.

As reality diverges from the fabricated narrative, the functional damages — the military defeats, the economic collapses, the institutional failures — create catastrophes that cannot be hidden. The spell is broken not by some moral awakening, but by these concrete disasters. Once a sufficient portion of the loyal supporters realize they have been duped, the leader will eventually fall.

The energy required to deceive is unsustainable. Reality is relentless. The tyrant who chooses to fight it is doomed.

MORALITY CAN NOT BE DERIVED RATIONALLY:

Most of the world thinks differently to us: Universalism is based on irrational ideas about human nature (Daniel Dieppe, 17 April, 2026, The Critic)

The reality is that we can trace the philosophical cause of our weird Western thinking to Christianity. The fundamental equality of all human beings stems from the belief that all are “made in the image of God”. Welcoming the stranger is encapsulated in The Parable of the Good Samaritan. Our intrinsic sense of guilt is a word-for-word reading of the fall and the Christian doctrine of original sin from Genesis 3. As the historian Tom Holland concluded in Dominion:The Making of the Western Mind, we “are heirs to the same revolution: a revolution that has, at its molten heart, the image of a god dead on a cross.”

AT THE CENTER OF THE eND OF hISTORY:

PODCAST: Recovering the lost genius of liberalism, with Adrian Wooldridge (Geoff Kabaservice, 4/13/26, The Vital Center)

Adrian Wooldridge:

I think the primary thing that really defines liberalism is three things: one, individualism; second, tolerance; and three, a skepticism and worry about power. By individualism, I mean that the world starts with the individual and works upwards to the collective — the opposite of high Tory views and the opposite of socialist views. And by “the individual,” I don’t mean the notion of just allowing people the freedom to go shopping and to choose whatever they want in a free market. I think liberal individualism is a much richer and more profound philosophy than that. It’s about being our best selves. It’s about self-improvement, self-control, self-development. The essence of liberalism was to do with self-help, self-improvement, self-education. It’s a very questing, striving sort of notion of individualism.

Secondly, tolerance, that you must be tolerant of other people’s opinions. And the reason for that… It might sound like a nice thing to be, but the reason for that is a philosophy of knowledge: that we don’t know what is true, and we definitely don’t have the right to impose our theological views on other people. So the right thing to do is to be tolerant, is to be skeptical, is to be pluralistic about different knowledge claims.

And thirdly, and in some ways most importantly, is worry about power. If you’re a liberal, you’re saying that power is in itself a dangerous thing. It needs to be constrained, it needs to be disciplined, it needs to be governed by rules.

And so I think those are the three things. So you can have big state government; you can have a big-state liberalism, small-state liberalism. You can have nice liberalism, you can have tough liberalism. But you can’t have a liberalism that believes in strongmen, that believes in imposing religious beliefs on other people, and that believes that collectives matter more than individual self-development.

The genius though, is the way liberalism vindicates these concerns via republican liberty: so long as laws/rules are adopted in particapatory fashion and apply universally, we are all equally tolerated/free.