The Last Rites of Liberalism: A Sinking Ship in the Tempest of the 21st Century
Populism, Gaza, and the crumbling myth of Western morality
Water pours through the hull of the ship Liberalism as she lists violently to starboard, her proud sails torn by the gale of populist revolt and multipolar resistance. The vessel that once sailed triumphantly across the seas of 20th century history, proclaiming universal rights and endless prosperity through financial capitalism, now wallows as waves crash over her deck. From the bridge, the officers of the liberal democratic establishment signal distress, while their careerist crew abandons ship, no longer willing to man the pumps for a vessel they suspect cannot be saved.
Nearly a century ago, Italian leader Benito Mussolini and philosopher Giovanni Gentile declared that liberal democracy lives by appearances: “The people are, from time to time, deluded into the belief that they exercise sovereignty, while all the time real sovereignty resides in ... irresponsible and secret forces.” In other words, the bridge never really gave orders; it relayed them. Liberal systems endure not through conviction but through a delicate combination of incentives and a marketplace where access to money, prestige, and influence purchases compliance.
Rewards, rather than coercion, do the work. Gentile saw through this; liberalism’s “false liberalism,” roots liberty in the isolated individual against the state, painting the state as a neutral referee even as real sovereignty is exercised by those mastering finance, media, bureaucracy, and law.
The Carrot Withers as the Stick Rises
Introduce real stakes—a hostile foreign power, a revolutionary movement, or a systemic shock—and the grifter class profiting from the liberal order begins to scurry. Liberalism requires a “safe zone,” where disagreement is amicable and consequences manageable. When risk enters, careerists evacuate. German jurist Carl Schmitt diagnosed this as liberalism’s refusal to face the friend-enemy core of politics.
Gentile argued that the liberal belief in numbers, majority rules, is an illusion: “Fascism denies that numbers, as such, can be the determining factor,” since ballots may measure passion but cannot constitute authority. When existential conflict erupts, liberal regimes either fail to act or act decisively, exposing the myth that process rules. Each escalation pushes them toward illiberal measures, validating Gentile’s claim that democracy’s sovereignty lies elsewhere.
The Soft Shield Crumbles Under Pressure
Knowing its weakness, liberalism from the outset specializes in soft tactics that preserve the illusion of consensus. Violence is viewed as barbaric and beneath civilized politics. Middle class anxieties about stability become bulwarks; symbolic concessions serve as pressure valves, offering just enough hope to redirect hostile forces back into the system’s framework. This pretend game works only as long as incumbent political actors believe their objectives can still be achieved within existing channels.
When faith in the market begins to fade, the mask slips and power reveals itself. Gentile believed this showed that separating the individual from the state only creates the illusion of freedom. Even if one does not fully accept his reasoning, the point remains clear: when governments deny their own authority, they simply hide it behind surveillance and censorship while pretending liberty endures.
The Populist Mutiny Below Decks
Across the West, populism is the endogenous proof that the strategy of liberal neutralization is beginning to fail. Voters treat the carrot game as counterfeit. From Donald Trump’s America First nationalism to Brexit’s rejection of European integration, from the Alternative for Germany’s surge to France’s National Rally, these movements share the recognition that the carrot game no longer offers meaningful rewards.
The populist critique strikes at liberalism’s four sacred pillars. Free trade, once hailed as the guarantor of prosperity, now appears to millions as a con game that enriches elites while destroying working-class communities. Mass migration, presented as both humanitarian necessity and economic benefit, triggers backlash from populations who see their racial cohesion and economic security under assault. Political correctness, the linguistic enforcement mechanism of liberal orthodoxy, provokes resentment among those who feel muzzled in their own societies. Perpetual war, disguised as humanitarian intervention, reveals itself as imperial adventurism that bleeds resources while creating new enemies.
French nationalist thinker Maurice Barrès anticipated this breakdown, arguing that liberal universalism dissolves organic national communities and authentic culture. The order’s attempted solutions generate more of the same problems. More inclusion produces more fragmentation and the eventual identitarian backlash. More conversations create more grievances. More money for technocrats and non-governmental organizations feeds the perception that the system serves its own rather than the people it claims to represent. Here Gentile’s warning still stings: “Democracy is a kingless regime infested by many kings,” meaning it has no single ruler but countless hidden ones. This hidden hand moving Western politics has invariable provoked major discontent among the public.
The Zio-Populist Containment Strategy
Though it should be stressed that the present populist era is a field of mixed signals and controlled backlashes, where establishment forces have learned to redirect genuine anger into channels that do not threaten the foundations of the order. As this author has argued elsewhere, a visible pattern has emerged, namely, Zio-populism. Movements that denounce globalism, mass immigration, and managerial power frequently align themselves with pro-Israel priorities and with the foreign policy architecture of the very system they claim to oppose.
Their rebellion stops at the waterline of acceptable dissent. This alignment produces a pressure valve, dramatizing outrage while leaving untouched the deeper structure of transnational Jewish influence. The first wave of Zio-populists reflects an attempt by elements of world Jewry to contain genuine gentile backlash. The main challenge is for the peoples of the West to see through these subversives and build authentic national movements that are rooted in local identity, material interests, and realist foreign policy agendas, rather than in abusive relations with the transnational criminal enterprise that is world Jewry.
The Multipolar Storm Breaks
As mutiny spreads below decks, rival fleets form on the horizon. Russia and China, no longer supplicate at the altar of liberal hegemony but instead offer competing visions of international organization. For Moscow, the appeal centers on sovereignty, tradition, and hard power in defense of their traditional spheres of influence, as evidenced by Russia’s recent intervention in Ukraine. For Beijing, development and stability provide an alternative to permanent crisis management. The Shanghai Cooperation Organization has become a platform for advancing multipolar options and creating a competing defense architecture to rival NATO. Emerging power centers from Turkey to India to Brazil hedge, while Francis Fukuyama’s end of history shatters.
Western plutocracy crumbles under the pressure of historical cycles as the age of debate gives way to the age of competing power blocs. The order now faces not tactical challenges, but existential alternatives. BRICS expansion, de-dollarization, and parallel institutions signal that rising powers will no longer accept a role written for their permanent disadvantage.
The Gaza Contradiction Exposes Liberal Hypocrisy
No episode exposes the hollow core of the liberal order like Israel’s brutal ethnic cleansing campaign in Gaza. A self-styled order of human rights and restraint has underwritten siege, starvation, and devastation under the banner of “self-defense,” forsaking the Collective West’s purported defense of human rights and free speech. Since October 7, 2023, between 67,000 and 68,000 Palestinians have been killed by direct violence, while an additional 170,000 have been wounded, with over ten percent of Gaza’s pre-war population killed or injured. Peer reviewed studies in The Lancet found the Health Ministry undercounted trauma related deaths by approximately 41 percent; estimates suggest 64,260 deaths from traumatic injury between October 2023 and June 2024, with projections exceeding 70,000 by October 2024 and possibly up to 186,000 or more deaths, direct and indirect, attributable to the war.
The crime is most visible in the deliberate targeting and killing of journalists. According to the United Nations and the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), 240 journalists and media workers have been killed in Gaza since October 7, 2023, overwhelmingly by Israeli fire, making this the single deadliest conflict for journalists since records began.
The CPJ called Israel’s campaign “the deadliest and most deliberate effort to kill and silence journalists ever documented,” stating, “By silencing the press, Israel is silencing those who document and bear witness to what human rights groups and UN experts agree is a genocide.” The CPJ confirmed, “More journalists were killed in the first three months of the Israel Gaza war than have ever been killed in a single country over an entire year.” Few contradictions are starker than Western liberal regimes, founded on universalism and human rights, standing behind a Jewish supremacist state engaged in the mass slaughter of civilians while silencing those who expose it.
The Marketplace of Careerists Empties
With the carrot machine sputtering and costs rising, the system’s supposed strong center proves a mirage. Gentile criticized the “conventional untruths of the old parliament of professional politicians,” which fits today’s committee hearings as theater and elections as mere temperature checks for managerial elites. When violence becomes real, the careerists depart; legitimacy is not earned by counting noses but is lost by hiding who the true sovereigns are. Liberal systems depend on consensus among professionals who abandon the game when the stakes are real. Only a crisis forces the state’s true nature into view.
The Ship Takes on Water
The existential crisis of liberalism is not an accident; it is the fulfillment of core contradictions. Liberalism is a vessel designed for fair weather, masking ruling interests under the veneer of process and consensus, operating on incentives and pretense rather than conviction.
As the storms of multipolarity, populist revolt, and geopolitical rupture intensify, cracks spread, and the vessel lists dangerously. To survive, it must either become openly combative, abandoning the mythologies of consensus and rights, or surrender to the rising tide of nationalism. The more it fights to maintain order, the more its own illiberalism is revealed, which comes with the increased probability of civil conflicts kicking off.
The game is nearly up; all the carrots in the world cannot buy a new hull when the water is rising fast. In that widening gyre, true partisans, nationalist, anti-imperialist, and revolutionary, circle and wait. Crisis creates opportunity. The old order sinks, while new forms of political organization emerge to fill the vacuum.
NEXT:
El Niño Speaks 119: The Disintegration of The Liberal Internationalist Order
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