“A core feature of liberal philosophy and politics is recognition of the arbitrariness of almost every border. This runs as a golden thread in considerations not only of the political understanding of borders—primarily national borders—but of any existing differentiation, distinction, boundary, and delineation, all of which come under suspicion as arbitrarily limiting individual freedom of choice. All such ‘borders’ are interrogated for their arbitrariness, and few can ultimately withstand the pressure of such interrogation—even those that are not arbitrary but are nevertheless limiting. Borders and boundaries based in geography, history, and nature must increasingly be erased under the logic of liberalism…Liberalism’s logic seeks to eliminate not only borders as we normally consider them—through political and economic globalization—but also the ‘boundaries’ that exist in nature. Today’s emphasis upon issues of identity—especially arising from the sexual revolution—arise equally from the liberal abhorrence of ‘forms’. The human form above all that requires elimination is sexual difference, a goal advanced by increasingly aggressive efforts to secure state-funded birth control, abortion, and artificial forms of fertilization and gestation of children. The people most committed to protecting and preserving the environment and the technological manipulation of nature are often the most fervent in support of eliminating every evidence of natural differentiation between men and women, through chemical and technological manipulation.”

“At the heart of liberal theory and practice is the preeminent role of the state as agent of individualism.”

“Building on liberalism’s successes means recognizing both the legitimacy of its initial appeal and the deeper reasons for its failure. It means offering actual human liberty in the form of both civic and individual self-rule, not the ersatz version that combines systemic powerlessness with the illusion of autonomy in the form of consumerist and sexual license.”

“One of the key differences between ‘conservatives’ and ‘progressives’ today is over whether liberalism can and should see its primary locus as the nation or the world. Both sides share the view that liberalism is a universalist philosophy, but they differ over how best to advance that universalism. Mainstream conservatives have sought to advance liberal universalism through the vehicle of the nation, primarily through globalized economic policy and aggressively interventionist and even imperialist militarism. Liberals believe the nation state must eventually be superseded by global governance, best represented today by the European union. Both sides of this project—the two faces of liberalism—have failed.”

“Our main political choices come down to which depersonalized mechanism will purportedly advance our freedom and security—the space of the market, which collects our billions upon billions of choices to provide for our wants and needs without demanding from us any specific thought or intention about the wants and needs of others; or the liberal state, which establishes depersonalized procedures and mechanisms for the wants and needs of others that remain insufficiently addressed by the market.

Thus the insistent demand that we choose between protection of individual liberty and expansion of state activity masks the true relation between the state and the market: that they grow constantly and necessarily together. Statism enables individualism, individualism demands statism.”

“Thus the two sides of the liberal project wage a ceaseless and absorbing contest over means, the ideal avenue for liberating the individual from constitutive relationships, from unchosen traditions, from restraining custom. Behind the lines, however, both have consistently sought the expansion of the sphere of liberation in which the individual can best pursue his or her preferred lifestyle, leading to mutual support of the expansion of the state as the requisite setting in which the autonomous individual could come into being. While ‘conservative’ liberals express undying hostility to state expansion, they consistently turn to its capacity to secure national and international markets as a way of overcoming any local forms of governance or traditional norms that might limit the market’s role in the life of a community. And while ‘progressive’ liberals declaim the expansive state as the ultimate protector of individual liberty, they insist that it must be limited when it comes to enforcement of ‘manners and morals,’ preferring the open market place of individual ‘buyers and sellers,’ especially in matters of sexual practice and infinitely fluid sexual identity, the definition of family, and individual choices over ending one’s own life. The modern liberal state consistently expands to enlarge our self-definition as ‘consumers’—a word more often used today to describe denizens of the liberal nation-state than ‘citizens’—while entertaining us with a cataclysmic battle between two sides that many begin to rightly suspect aren’t that different after all.”

“What is supposed to allow us to transform our world is instead transforming us, making us into creatures to which many, if not most of us, have not given our ‘consent’. It is making us ever more into the creatures that liberalism supposed was our nature in that ‘state of nature’ that existed before the coming of civilization, law, and government. Ironically, but perhaps not coincidentally, the political project of liberalism is shaping us into the creatures of its prehistorical fantasy, which in fact required the combined massive apparatus of the modern state, economy, education system, and science and technology to make us into: increasingly separate, autonomous, nonrelational selves, replete with rights and defined by our liberty, but insecure, powerless, afraid, and alone.”