Our future is a ‘mafiacracy’

If the nightmare of anticommunists during the cold war was an endless future of totalitarian terror, the nightmare of today’s critics of liberalism is an endless future of constant social upheaval and atomisation as a result of unchecked markets and radical individualism. Not a boot stamping on a human face forever, but a high-tech appliance in need of the latest upgrades – forever.

What many critics as well as defenders of liberalism tend to overlook is the possibility that liberalism – in the economy, in politics, and in culture – will prove to be unstable and self-liquidating. To put it another way, a liberal social order tends to be an ephemeral transition between one nonliberal system or regime and another.

The ideal of most contemporary liberals, I think it is fair to say, is a vision of society as three self-correcting markets: an economic market, a political market, and a cultural market. I use the term ‘market’ for all three spheres because today’s liberals in practice are guided more by the vision of self-correcting markets in academic economics than by the philosophies of John Locke or John Rawls.