Maine’s “Popular Government” and the Liberal-Elitist Tradition

Liberalism and the Uses and Abuses of History

“Another triumph for classical liberalism?” – Nigel Carlsbad

The arrival of Imperium Press’ edition of Henry Sumner Maine’s ‘Popular Government’ is an interesting, albeit quite peculiar, addition to the array of works that they, among other publishers such as Antelope Hill and Taxiarch Press, have released with the aim of edifying Rightist discourse. Part of Imperium Press’ ‘Studies in Reaction’ series, ‘Popular Government’ is out of place when juxtaposed to the series’ other texts, such as ‘The Present Time’ by Thomas Carlyle.

Carlyle is forceful in his condemnation of individualistic liberalism and incredulous when faced with almost every dogma of the modern age. The caustic effect of his work is especially palpable for the contemporary reader, accustomed as he is to the school-derived assurance that the viewpoints of the aforesaid are simply an expression of retrograde ignorance; upon reading Carlyle, not even most arrogant and pompous liberal would deign to assert this hackneyed prejudice.

Maine, in contrast, is a representative of 19th century high-Liberalism. Lacking Carlyle’s reactionary bona fides, it is tempting to cast off Maine’s political contribution as a half-germinated liberalism; that it is certainly saner, but rife nevertheless with insidious tenets and priors – destined to result in our contemporary national and civilisational malaise once its internal inconsistencies were liberated from the lucid latencies that still permeated Maine’s era.

This assumption implicitly attributes a telos to ideas. As per this schema Ideas progressively lose their accidental (or non-essential) aspects and concomitantly accrue greater internal consistency; the end result of this progression is the final crystallisation of the idea’s essence, shorn of all non-cardinal trappings.

To illustrate: from the post-liberal perspective, the essence of liberalism is volitional individualism (the consent principle), and its 19th century liberal-elitist formulation is thus regarded as a half-realised antecedent variant.

This is how an autiste, whose forte is the abstract, contemplates conceptual matters. Owing to his mental peculiarity, he is impelled to discover the core of an idea – this allows him to understand it properly vis-à-vis other ideas; is the autiste not the quintessential systematiser?

Likewise, conversing in a dialectical manner, with a single or multiple interlocutors, indubitably requires a settled, agreed upon set of definitions if the dialogue is to be efficacious – how can one proceed beyond the stage of disputed definitions without a shared understanding of what you’re speaking about? Consequently, a definition will inevitably be sought that captures the core, rather than peripheral, aspects of the idea.

But ideational history does not mutate in conformity with the outcome of a Socratic dialogue, nor with the meditations of an insular autist. Ideology is mediated by prevailing conditions, group enmities (domestically and inter-state), patronage, censorship and memory-holing, conceptual baggage, a nation’s prevailing mythos, and so on. And thus, it is erroneous to claim that 19th century high-liberalism inevitably results in hoes getting abortions and meatheads who resemble Jocko Willinks claiming to be women.

Those who ascribe a liberal character to our era must reconcile the historical contractual tradition and anti-statist orientation of liberals with our experience of scamdemic lockdowns or the crackdown on truckers by the Canuck regime – to call this tenuous would be a gross understatement. In ‘After Liberalism’, Paul Gottfried convincingly charts the usurpation of the liberal tradition by a coterie of social engineers who’ve aimed to re-shape society, and who thereby aimed liberate man from traditional strictures and identities, via government intervention and the pathologisation of “hate”.

Nigel Carlsbad’s recent essay on the mutation of the term ‘Empowerment’ vindicates Gottfried’s contention. In it he highlights that much of our discourse is underpinned by terminological innovations that occurred mid-century, and that said innovations were spurred on by the emergence of a post-liberal current in western society — a current which radically oscillated the prior meaning of words.

The following extract from an article I penned last summer should suffice to explain the viewpoint of these social engineers, and to highlight their divergence from liberalism proper:

“For the Swedish political scientist and advocate of social democracy, Bo Rothstein, the ‘state is held up as a positive institution because of its mission to individuals, whom it liberates from an archaic past and assists toward self-actualization’. His ideological peer, Leif Lewin, is in agreement with Rothstein: ‘State authorities ought so to change society as to make it possible for the many to experience the feeling of freedom’.”

Considering the above, it’s clear that however the western status quo is defined, it is not liberal. Yet, does that mean that a polemic against liberalism is moot? Even if liberalism’s ideological hegemony was diminshed at some point between the late 19th and mid-20th century, aspects of it nevertheless were conceptually latent – see the pervasiveness of concepts like bodily autonomy in the discourse relating to Abortion. And therefore, while the attribution of decadence to liberalism is certainly a passé error, a polemic against liberalism may nonetheless remain pertinent.

The Emergence of Contemporary Anti-Liberalism

“All modern philosophy converges to a single point – the overthrow of all government, the substitution of the untrammelled “Sovereignty of the Individual,” for the Sovereignty of Society, and the inauguration of anarchy. First domestic slavery, next religious institutions, then separate property, then political government, and, finally, family government and family relations, are to be swept away.” – George Fitzhugh, ‘Sociology for the South’

Communal dialogue has a marked tendency to memory-hole. This may owe to the short attention span of humans; a shoddy time preference that predisposes us toward the novel, and a simultaneous forgetfulness of genesis. Yet the repudiation of the past may also derive from hyper-fixation upon a particular topic.

If, in a given discourse, an area of interest is subject to intense and frenzied attention, there is a danger that the raison d'être for examining this issue in the first place will be lost from men’s purview; one is left in a position analogous to that of a late-medieval scholastic, debating ‘how many angels can dance on the head of a pin’, bereft of any awareness of how the debate began.

Is this not the state of anti-liberalism today? A conversation that’s outpaced the ambit of the original question that started it. To the point that now, for many political commentators, enmity toward liberalism is the defining aspect of their ideological outlook, rather than conceiving of liberalism simply as one political and conceptual obstacle among others.

In other words: the purification of one’s ideological outlook SHOULD be the aim of an illiberal line of thought on the right. The problem however, is now that being against liberalism IS increasingly the entirety of the ideological outlook – see the rise of the ‘Post-Liberals’.

Thus, it is cardinal, if one is to place illiberalism on a firm basis, to articulate the original motivation that underpinned the contemporary rightist critique of liberalism. A motivation which I regard as healthy, irrespective of the present errors that unfortunately abound.

Everyone, in our lamentably Anglophone world, who self-identified as right wing in the period between the mid-2000s to the early 2010s was a libertarian. There are exceptions, – Kerry Bolton, E Michael Jones, Matthew Raphael Johnson – but libertarianism was undeniably the predominant conceptual disposition of the right during this era.

The predominance of libertarianism, as well as more tepid ideologies that are reminiscent of 19th century bourgeois liberalism, throughout this juncture derives from a multiplicity of factors, too many to give a comprehensive account of here. But to put it briefly, the victory over Germany was cardinal to right-liberalism and libertarianism’s post-war efficacy among the scholarly strata of the right.

Germany’s defeat was a core causative factor in the displacement of older, more primordial and essentialist forms of rightist thought, as was evinced by the attitude of William F. Buckley toward certain figures who penned for National Review at its genesis, such as Revilo P. Oliver. Oliver, whose politics were the diametric inverse of every anti-fascist verity, was cancelled by Buckley. He was replaced by Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn – an Austrian monarchist with libertarian sympathies, who took on the informal role of the publication’s ‘out-there’ member.

To buttress my point further, it is fruitful to consider the opposition to civil rights. Upon closer examination, one finds an ideological cleavage among the camp that opposed the government’s enforcement of anti-racism at the barrel of a gun. In the public eye, Barry Goldwater was the eminent stalwart of the states-rights line of argumentation against civil rights.

A supporter of the Civil Rights Acts of 1957 and 1960, and a member of the NAACP, Goldwater was opposed to Title II of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, believing it to be a federal encroachment upon Southern State’s rights and individual liberty; the Title of said act prohibited discrimination in public accommodations, including hotels, restaurants, and concerts – thereby, quashing one’s right to dissociate on racial grounds.

However, the tepid approach of Goldwater et al. possessed neither a rhetorical nor discursive monopoly. The critique of this anti-racist revolution from above had a more radical janus face. For many, the opposition to civil rights was motivated by racial concerns, rather than qualms related to individual liberty and states’ rights.

Its chief representative, politically, was George Wallace - infamous for his phrase, "segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever". Carleton Putnam, Anthony Julius Gregor, and Ernest van den Haag (ironically, he was an anti-fascist and a staunch opponent of Mussolini during his youth) were the intellectual standard bearers of this position.

Putnam opined that his moderate peers erred in their reliance on states’ rights as an argument against civil rights. The moderate conservative omission of racialism from their argumentative arsenal was borne, in Putnam’s view, from the Southern people’s “innate kindness”. Putnam, in contrast, did not mince his words:

“The South must win the battle for the mind of the North on moral, not on legal, grounds. It must convince the North that integration is morally wrong because it is destructive of the white civilization of the South. If it fails to do this, then the moral issue immediately moves to the Northern side, and injustice to the Negro becomes the dominant question”.

Such examples are merely a choice selection, highlighting the demarcation between the post-war radical right and more tepid "rightist" forms, whether they be of a neoconservative, conservative, or libertarian bent. That Ben Shapiro can critique civil rights legislation in a manner reminiscent of Goldwater's arguments suffices to prove which side continues to subsist within the ambit of mainstream acceptability.

Contemporary rightist illiberalism emerged against this prevailing liberal tepidness and moral sheepishness. Many of the commentators - naming them all and the origins of their political outlook would be exhaustive - were inclined toward abstract matters, and consequently attracted to New Atheism and/or libertarianism.

Yet within a few years, due to the paucity of positive racial relations during the Obama era and the pervasiveness of perverse sexual identities, one witnessed a noteworthy development, rarely mirrored in the post-war Anglosphere: the re-emergence of an intellectually sophisticated right wing.

Sure, Paul Gottfried had advanced a trenchant critique of post-war therapeutic anti-fascism; Rothbard was an apt historical revisionist; Hoppe's aside against democracy was readily imbibed. Yet despite their incisive takes, their fleshed out political worldview was irreconcilable with an ultra-nationalist political vista, now buttressed by a coterie of autists – to whom internal contradiction (and mass immigration!) was anathema.

Initially opposition was articulated on pragmatic grounds. Libertarianism was charged with being implicitly universalistic. Its proponents bizarrely posited that their abstract conception of man mirrored the tangible counterpart that we encounter daily.

Reciprocal respect for property rights, a state which is severely circumscribed or abrogated entirely, the non-aggression principle, as well as quasi-liberal ideas in the cultural sphere, such as a belief in widening the scope of acceptable thought – it was naïve to believe that these ideas would endure being in long-term proximity to population groups whose characteristics are starkly dissimilar to Europeans.

Moreover, “oppressed” populations are incentivised, owing to the material and status benefits they stand to accrue, to act in a unilaterally beneficial manner vis-à-vis the native populace. Such groups will, if cognisant of their group-interest, efface their nakedly cynical, ethno-narcissistic motivations with an appeal to human rights or a classically liberal verity like freedom of speech, whilst simultaneously calling for the derogation of such impartial, liberal standards when they stand to gain at their enemy’s (our) expense. Thus, pursuing a charitable, liberal course of action becomes an insane, scratch that, suicidal course of action for host groups.

The re-discovery of certain rightist theorists thereafter signified a further shift from the libertarian outlook of the dissident right’s political nascency. Where once Hoppe and Rothbard prevailed, new names gradually supplanted their predominance. The right’s corpus now encompassed stalwarts of illiberalism: Carl Schmitt, Fracis Parker Yockey, Alain de Benoist, Werner Sombart, among others.

This period was marked by a critique of liberalism that cut to the bone. The pragmatic faults now receded to a mere ancillary position. A conceptual critique of liberalism’s perceived tenets, its vision of the world and its mistaken assumptions, now occupied the foreground of the dissident right’s polemic – which was a critique of the ideological opposition as much as it was an internal critique of implicit liberal ideas that had to be expunged.

Drawing on Schmitt, liberalism’s vaunted value-neutrality was cast as a pernicious pretence which was a terminably vulnerable target for groups still in possession of a vital will-to-power. The charge, advanced by men like Yockey and Spengler, that liberal parliamentarism, and the hostility to a potent executive this included, was emblematic of a society ruled by high finance was readily accepted.

The egocentricity of liberal capitalism was contemptuously scathed by Alain de Benoist; George Fitzhugh foresaw its inevitable supplantation by socialism. The only solution, according to Werner Sombart, was the adoption of a novel arrangement: against egoistic avarice (viewed as the common denominator of capitalism and marxism), Sombart called for a socialism of duty to reign— obligations that follow from one’s station, not class war nor the capitalist’s self-interest, should prevail within a social order conceptualised along organicist lines.

Yet the astuteness of rightist illiberalism was, lamentably, not destined to last. Its ossification occurred the moment when liberalism was transfigured as a scapegoat; a fall guy, liable for all and every instance of national and civilisational decay. Concurrent with this hyperbolic attitude was an obsessive search for liberalism’s origins, as if discovering its prototypical generative form would reveal the secret to reverse our decline.

The problems inherent in this endeavour were elucidated in the first section. The purpose of the second section was to trace the emergence of rightist illiberalism over the past 70 years, and thus to contextually articulate its rationale. This was necessary due to how trite and tiring the polemic against liberalism has become— I wanted to correct the misconception that this has perennially been the case.

Based Liberalism? A Brief Survey of the Liberal Elitist Tradition

“Can one be a liberal who hates the people?” – Nigel Carlsbad

Throughout this essay, I’ve mentioned and alluded to a more lucid variant of liberalism. High-liberalism, or liberal elitism, can be differentiated from the standard model on grounds of its sceptical attitude toward the masses. In practice, its adherents advocate for a limited franchise.

Moreover, high liberals possessed conservative sensibilities. Among their strata it was pervasively posited that liberty was contingent on an extant bourgeois culture that placed a premium on austereness, reason, rugged self-sufficiency, and the individualism of the frontier (in America, at least).

The indulgence (and now celebration) of mentally illness and sexual deviancy since the mid-twentieth century by therapeutic states, whose redemptive ends include the eradication of hate and its purveyors (you and I, allegedly), would be held to be bizarre and insidious by 19th century liberals.

The liberals of that era explicitly treated liberty and equality as separate concepts. John C. Calhoun, a figure whose political views are a testament to the sheer gulf between 19th century liberals and their purported progeny, asserted that liberty and equality are not inherently bound: “There is another error, not less great and dangerous, usually associated with the one which has just been considered. I refer to the opinion, that liberty and equality are so intimately united, that liberty cannot be perfect without perfect equality”.

Thomas Macaulay concurred with Calhoun, noting in a letter addressed to an American interlocutor: “I have long been convinced that institutions purely democratic must, sooner or later, destroy liberty, or civilization, or both.”. Given its bourgeois origins, liberalism’s hostility to the equalitarianism of mass democracy was unsurprising. Lord Acton voiced his view on the class realities that impinged on the division between the stalwarts of liberty and equality: “Liberty was the watchword of the middle class, equality of the lower”. De Tocqueville worried that mass democracy had the potential to re-produce the purported despotism of early-modern absolutism: “The absolute monarchies have dishonoured despotism; let us be careful that the democratic republics do not rehabilitate it”.

Closer to home, the Anglo-Irish historian and political theorist, William Lecky, was equally ready to savage democracy for its illiberal consequences; consequences partly borne from an intrinsic fidelity among the lumpen and ignorant alike to demagogues: “To place the chief power in the most ignorant classes is to place it in the hands of those who naturally care least for political liberty, and who are most likely to follow with an absolute devotion some strong leader”.

Along with the fear of demagogues arising on foot of a plebiscite, there was widespread anxiety that the extension of the franchise to the masses, a populace subject to proletarian immiseration by 19th century laissez-faire, would result in the abrogation of private property. At the very least, a more intrusive and overarching state would indubitably emerge, either through the election of politicians whose economic policies they stand to benefit from or through established parties increasing the scope of the state’s role in the economy for fear of proletarian revolution – see the Lassalle-Bismarck alliance.

The quotes in this section demonstrate the sentiments that prevailed among 19th century liberals, whose views, regrettably, are largely memory-holed. The citation of their views on the masses and democracy was done with the aim of correcting the distorted view of anachronistic liberalism, shared by both right wing critics and contemporary liberals alike.

Maine’s Liberalism: An Appraisal

“Democracy, then, in the centralizing, pattern-making, absolutist shape which we have given to it is, it is clear, the time of tyranny's incubation.” – Bertrand de Jouvenel, ‘On Power: The Natural History of Its Growth’

Henry Sumner Maine was one of the foremost jurists of the 19th century. He was the progenitor of the classic, ‘Ancient Law’, a work which went through 12 editions throughout his lifetime, and a text that still garners attention and recognition today as a landmark of 19th century legal history.

The work traces the germination of law from its nascency, wherein it was characterised by custom, to its apotheosis: where contract reigns. This oscillation from custom to contract is analogous to Ferdinand Tönnies’ account of the move from gemeinschaft (society characterised by inherited, organic communities i.e the family) to gesellschaft (atomised and volitional). H. L. A. Hart, in his ‘The Concept of Law’, offers a counterfactual account of laws development from its earliest variant: custom— though still recognised as a type of law by Hart, is inherently stagnant and, among other deficiencies, this marks it as a retrograde phenomenon that was, from Hart’s perspective, thankfully overcome.

Like Hart, Maine, a standard bearer of Victorian liberalism, attributes positive normative weight to the emergence of contract and the consequent displacement of custom. However, rightists can nevertheless glean value from the text given Maine’s concession that volitional law (contract) proceeds from custom, which is entrenched in a linear, intergenerational social grouping. Maine’s admittance of this fact subverts the notion of a primordially liberal world— as posited by those who subscribe to social contract tradition, of whom Rousseau is a famous example. 

Maine elucidated his political outlook in a series of essays codified in 1885 as ‘Popular Government: Four Essays’. The thrust of the work is a critique of democracy, and an implicit defence of British constitutional monarchy. Like Friedrich List’s ‘National System of Political Economy’, Maine’s text smacks of the inductive method. Maine emphasises our historical experience with democratic experimentation, rather than assuming that democracy is a perennial good. Maine condemns those, among the legitimist and democratic camps alike, who "assume their principle to have a sanction antecedent to fact”.

Maine notes the repeated revolutions and coups, both by the mob and army, that have plagued France since its initial revolution. He remarks: “France, since she began her political experiments, has had forty-four years of liberty and thirty-seven of stern dictatorship”. Furthermore, he juxtaposes France’s rule by Bourbons with the more democratic rule of the Bonapartists:

“But it has to be remembered, and it is one of the curiosities of this period of history that the elder Bourbons, who in practice gave very wide room to political freedom, did not expressly admit the modern theory of popular government; while the Bonapartes, who proclaimed the theory without qualification, maintained in practice a rigid despotism”

Spain, similarly, was plagued with the symptoms of popular government in the nineteenth century: “As to the residue of her political history, my calculation is that between the first establishment of popular government in 1812 and the accession of the present King, there have been forty military risings of a serious nature, in most of which the mob took part”. He further notes that “that out of fourteen Presidents of the Bolivian Republic thirteen have died assassinated or in exile”.

Maine notes that fanfare for democratic rule is a relatively recent phenomenon. The established opinion heretofore was that “this form of government was of rare occurrence in political history, and was characterised by an extreme fragility”. The theorists of Hellenes were in agreement with Maine’s negative appraisal of the mass’s ascent: “the fact remains that the founders of political philosophy found themselves in the presence of Democracy, in its pristine vigour, and thought it a bad form of government”.

Moving past his list of evidence detailing democracy’s negative consequences, Maine turns his attention to democracy’s subject: the people. Maine queries: “For to what end, towards what ideal state, is the process of stamping upon law the average opinion of an entire community directed?”. And it is his critique of the masses’ disposition – toward matters of economics, science, religious belief, and so on – which makes Maine’s critique interesting.

For Maine, the true fault of the mob is not its wrath or capriciousness, which he acknowledges, but their conservatism and their attendant hostility to intellectuals and scientists. Put differently, Maine believes that democracy is inherently an CHUD paradise – government by the lowest common denominator.

He states: “thus the tendency of these governments, as they widen their electoral basis, is towards a dead level of commonplace opinion, which they are forced to adopt as the standard of legislation and policy. The evils likely to be thus produced are rather those vulgarly associated with Ultra-Conservatism than those of Ultra-Radicalism”.

Such evils, according to Maine, include an opposition to free trade, Jacobitism, enmity to the protestant reformation, nationalism, and a hostility to vaccines, which Maine repeatedly mentions throughout the text – Maine would have been a quadruple vaxxed and triple boosted Luke Bro had he lived to witness covid. It’s worth quoting his lament regarding the mass’s hostility to vaccines:

“Even in our day, vaccination is in the utmost danger, and we may say generally that the gradual establishment of the masses in power is of the blackest omen for all legislation founded on scientific opinion, which requires tension of mind to understand it and self-denial to submit to it”.

In contradistinction to the ignorant rabble who won’t get vaxxed, Maine praises the aristocracy as stalwarts of progress:

“the progress of mankind has hitherto been effected by the rise and fall of aristocracies, by the formation of one aristocracy within another, or by the succession of one aristocracy to another. There have been so-called democracies, which have rendered services beyond price to civilisation, but they were only peculiar forms of aristocracy. The short-lived Athenian democracy, under whose shelter art, science, and philosophy shot so wonderfully upwards, was only an aristocracy which rose on the ruins of one much narrower”.

Although Maine differs from Guizot, the French minister who savaged the indolence and alleged degeneracy of the ancien regime, while also expounding the virtues of the rational bourgeoisie, they are both in agreement that the entry of the masses into political life signifies the reign of ignorance, capriciousness, and violence.

And to some extent they’ve been vindicated. But the last 70 years, which has coincided with the predominance of liberal, democratic rule, has been largely peaceful, right? Yes, but the broader history of democratic rule indicates that another factor other than universal franchise is liable for relatively peace. Even the French Third Republic, which Maine concedes was a peaceful anomaly in the 19th century’s experience with democracy, was subject to incessant elections and inward strife, to such an extent that civil war was likely by the 1930s and 1940s had the Second World War not occurred.

Further, as European demographics mutate, leading to the numeric decline of the host populace, the system’s returns will increasingly diminish. It’s no surprise that the North, with its population split down the middle along ethno-religious lines, was the major exception to the period of relative comity post-war in Western Europe.

By importing a plurality of foreign ethnicities, we risk the transposition of atavistic racial and religious conflicts into our cities and towns; arcane hostilities that dopey western Europeans are scarcely cognizant of. Indeed, the city of Dijon in France was wracked by a violent conflict between Chechens and Algerians in 2020.

Moreover, the ideologies used to rationalise violence against Europeans, their property, their power, and so on – such as ‘Black Lives Matter’ – are undeniably post-liberal developments, at home in an age of mass democracy, widespread anti-fascist sentiment, and the belief that the state exists to correct and quash hate. From their destruction of property and mobbish tendencies, to the explicit calls by their representatives to delimit thought and speech, it’s transparent that they’re irreconcilable with Maine’s ideal vista.

However, I am reluctant to sanction high-liberalism as the appropriate conceptual path forward. Although tactically efficacious against those that endeavour to suppress our ability to disseminate our ideas, high-liberalism too closely parallels the technocratic, elitist, and transhumanist ideology of Schwab et al. for comfort— the condemnation of the masses as a repository of conservative ignorance, the conflation of the scientific method with naïve scientific optimism (Maine commits this error in a footnote), and anxiety in the face of populism are shared by Maine et al. and the Hararis and Schwabs of the world.

Conclusion: The Insufficiency of Liberalism

Preliminary remark: My eyes are crimson. My tiredness is beyond oral or written conveyance. It’s taken me a good hour to recall the purposes of this essay

“When night comes

 I will learn while they sleep

 To satisfy their failures” 

— The For Carnation, ‘A Tribute to’

This essay was impelled by a growing hostility among some groups in certain e-quarters toward those that incessantly attributed decay to liberalism. While much of their criticism of the illiberal right was apt, — the reproduction of social democratic and neo-conservative critiques of liberalism, illiberal blindness to the post-liberal character of our era, and so on — I nevertheless hold the view that a critique of liberalism, even if it eventually became excessive, was a positive development; an internal polemic aimed at ideological refinement and purity was necessary.

The latter half of the essay investigated the views of nineteenth century high-liberals. Again, this exploration was motivated by my lurking of peripheral rightist accounts on twitter. They frequently hold their post-liberal opponents at fault for their communitarian condemnation of liberal-elitism. Thus, I wanted to explore the views of this group, their virtues and vices, and most importantly: do liberal-elitists have any contemporary equivalents in the political sphere.

High-liberalism, to re-cap, was found to be incompatible with groups that typify the regime’s increasingly post-liberal character, such as black lives matter. However, it was found that there are significant parallels between it and contemporary technocracy. That said, the serious violation of civil liberties throughout the scamdemic, as well as a culture of guilt that emerged to combat opposition to said infringements, was clearly incompatible with a high-liberal opposition to property rights and both de jure and cultural pluralism. 

Although there may not be a genetic inheritance between nineteenth century liberalism and would-be technocrats, the parallels – anti-populism and scientism – between both suffice to demonstrate that high-liberalism is ill-equipped to confront transhumanism, as well as other, more tepid, elite-driven social engineering projects.

If high-liberalism was nullified by the rise of the masses in the 20th century, then covid cultism, transhumanism, and anti-populism may signify the ‘Revolt of the Elites’ in the 21st century.