# The real problem with liberalism
Date: 2026-05-29

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### The real problem with liberalism

Yuval Noah with Ezra Klein and they seem to mean well, but still reach a completely wrong conclusion that must be called out as propaganda.

> And we, the founding fathers, for instance, think that slavery is OK, but in the strange situation that maybe somebody in the future will think it’s not OK, they have an amendment mechanism.

> Now, you compare that to religion, and let’s take the example of the Bible or the Ten Commandments. The Ten Commandments starts not with: “We the people of Israel.” It starts with “I am the Lord your God,” and it has no amendment mechanism because of that.

> If you look carefully, you will see that the Ten Commandments endorses slavery. The Tenth Commandment: Thou shalt not covet. What shouldn’t you covet? It has a list of things you shouldn’t covet, like your neighbor’s field and your neighbor’s ox and also your neighbor’s slaves. The Ten Commandments tells people it’s OK to have slaves. It’s just not right to covet the slaves of somebody else — then God will be angry.

> There is just no mechanism to change that because it pretends to not be a human creation but a divine revelation.

> **I think there’s an interesting tension in there, and you can make a critique of liberalism, or at least where it is now, that it is good at building mechanisms, institutions, rules, bureaucracies, and it is intrinsically bad at creating enduring stories — in part because, at least in its modern form, it often is fairly secularized.**

> **Religion has been a tremendous source of cooperation, keeping people bound together both at a moment and then working toward a future that they may not even live to see.**

> **There are questions of nationalism and the national story, which liberalism as a self-correcting ideology often creates critique of, and then you lose some of that national coherence as you’re arguing about the past of your country and what it has done right and wrong.**

> **You are a person who thinks very deeply about stories. To you, is this a weakness of advanced, secularized, liberal democracies? Are they losing the cohesion that keeps them, in the long run, competitive to ideologies that maybe can’t build bureaucracies, maybe cannot govern effectively? But they sure as hell can tell a story.**

> Yes, this is a central problem of liberalism.

Yet here is an [1813 letter](https://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/v1ch15s61.html) from Thomas Jefferson to John Adams telling a liberal story that also pretends to not be a human creation, and this story rules every advanced secularized country on the planet.

> For I agree with you that there is a natural aristocracy among men. The grounds of this are virtue and talents. Formerly bodily powers gave place among the aristoi. But since the invention of gunpowder has armed the weak as well as the strong with missile death, bodily strength, like beauty, good humor, politeness and other accomplishments, has become but an auxiliary ground of distinction. There is also an artificial aristocracy founded on wealth and birth, without either virtue or talents; for with these it would belong to the first class. The natural aristocracy I consider as the most precious gift of nature for the instruction, the trusts, and government of society.

So in going from the racist pedophile prick Jefferson to the racist pedophile prick Trump, with his destroy DEI to preserve “natural aristocracy”, there is one long line of unbroken liberal shame.

“Natural aristocracy” must always [leverage racism and poverty](https://medium.com/the-polis/are-impoverished-americans-a-caste-c06850244f04), because **there is no natural aristocracy**. So India has

> Today, 49.5% of seats at the IITs are reserved for these disadvantaged groups, up from 22.5% pre-2008.

and China has its 2021 double reduction policy that

> Banned profit-making curriculum tutoring, limited homework, and restricted capital flows.

[John Adams wrote to Jefferson first](https://www.abbevilleinstitute.org/jefferson-v-adams-on-the-natural-aristocracy/) making a similar but importantly different point:

> *The five Pillars of Aristocracy, are Beauty Wealth, Birth, Genius and Virtues. Any one of the three first, can at any time over bear any one or both of the two last.*

> The argument in each letter is the same: an appeal to experience.

> 1. Good birth and wealth have together ever prevailed over virtue and talent [in all social matters, political included].

> 2. So, good birth and wealth will ever prevail over virtue and talent [in all social matters] (1).

> 3. So, there cannot be any workable political system without inclusion men of good birth and wealth (2).

So in Adams’ version there is a “natural aristocracy” of people endowed with virtue and talent, but that natural aristocracy must share power with the children of the wealthy.

Let’s be very clear about what nature has given us “for the instruction, the trusts, and government of society” — nothing. Nature has not given us any resource of humans that can be trusted to rule society.

Even though Yuval Noah Harari has a Doctor of Philosophy from Oxford, we cannot simply take his sermon on liberalism at face value. Even though Ezra Klein graduated high school with a 2.2 GPA ([says](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ezra_Klein) Wikipedia), he should not be locked out of prominence or have his opinions dismissed without logic.

The reason Adams and Jefferson are exchanging pseudo-scientific bullshit ideas in a liberal debate is that liberalism was never built on logic. Liberalism was based on the idea of a market of ideas where good ideas eventually win, but that could take centuries or millennia to happen.

In the meantime liberalism tells stories and the story of society capable of filtering out those most deserving of power and granting it, is the story that has broken down. As much as we’d all love to defend that story from a horde of ignorant MAGA devotees, according to liberalism we can’t defend a lie forever.

So when Harari says

> You have these people who constantly read all these conspiracy theories and fake news and so forth, and they don’t trust anybody. They don’t trust the government. They don’t trust the traditional media. They don’t trust science and the universities. These are all conspiracies to deceive us.

it’s incredibly tone deaf.

As shocking as it maybe for all of us Epstein happened; the government was for years covering up an enormous pedophile ring. As shocking as it maybe for all of us there is something like a 50/50 chance that science created the COVID pandemic; very reasonable, very learned people can argue about what happened.

As shocking as it maybe to all of us the “science” (not) of economics sold us down a river that led to the global 2008 financial crisis. As shocking as it maybe to all of us the automation apocalypse isn’t a Luddite conspiracy.

The real problem of liberalism is that it stopped working hard to gain everyone’s trust and just demanded it. Yes liberalism has had great success but that doesn’t mean we can hold pat with our current liberal stories and just smugly wait for everyone to regain their senses.

![See something wrong with this picture?](https://disrael.github.io/blogs/assets/the-real-problem-with-liberalism-6ff9cfa40e.png)
*See something wrong with this picture?*