Excerpt

That liberals can be populist and authoritarian is not new. What might be novel is the collusive convergence of liberal ideology with the politics of sophistry and even neo-fascist ideas. The reason is that liberalism's anthropological pessimism and techno-scientific optimism are disconnected from reality in ways that require an ever-greater voluntarist pursuit of power combined with wealth and social status. As a result we are now seeing an ultra-liberal ideology that slides into an absolutism always lurking in the liberal logic since Thomas Hobbes and John Locke—the violent state of nature that supposedly warrants an all-encompassing sovereign or self-ownership that…