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I think it was Sir Charles Dilke who warned against ‘lies, damned lies, and statistics’. I live in a small, fairly isolated neighborhood of about 100 houses on the Connecticut side of Long Island Sound. Most of my neighbors seem to be trying out for the part of Prince Prospero in The Masque of the Red Death. Our neighborhood association issues frequent, increasingly shrill bulletins. Most appeal to the authority of the CDC, warning us and our children to stay at home, wear a mask and, should we dare to venture out, to keep at least six feet apart from one another. We are forbidden from congregating in public spaces. We are discouraged from socializing with friends inside.

Faced with the coronavirus pandemic, Donald Trump declares ‘I’m a wartime president’, echoing George W. Bush after 9/11. For both men, the jaw-jutting self-flattery was absurd as both had been draft dodgers during the Vietnam war. W. used the family name and connections to secure a place in the Texas Air National Guard, Trump getting a draft deferment because of bad feet (a condition that was never so debilitating as to slow down his golf game). 9/11 did produce two real wars, in Afghanistan and Iraq, so W. had some claim to the title. But should we really be talking about a war against a virus? It’s a strange kind of war that drafts you to stay at home playing Xbox and watching the shopping channel from your couch.

The COVID-19 pandemic came along just as Cold War Two was getting under way between the United States and the People’s Republic of China — the superpowers of our time — with the European Union and a good many other US allies quietly hoping to be non-aligned. Far from propelling Beijing and Washington towards détente in the face of a common enemy, the new plague has only intensified the Cold War. For the first time, China’s campaign of disinformation has been on a Russian level, with wild anti-American conspiracy theories being disseminated by senior Foreign Ministry officials.

Washington, DC At the end of March, about two weeks into the coronavirus emergency, I looked out my window onto the street below and saw something that made me uneasy about the future of the country. There was a commotion down there. Two white teenagers were standing in the street with their hands up. A man — who looked and sounded like an East African immigrant — had stopped his car in the middle of the road and sprung out. I squinted to see what it was he was holding in front of him that made the kids look so alarmed. It was a pizza. The kids had ordered it. The car was marked with a Domino’s insignia. ‘Whoa, whoa, man!’ said one of the kids. ‘Take it easy!’ He was grotesquely corpulent.

Any attempt to expound post-liberalism must begin by taking a view of what liberalism is. And liberalism can be viewed as a philosophy that enshrines freedom as its foundational principle. Freedom from what, though? That is a moving target. The pioneers of liberalism, whether they be John Locke or the Founding Fathers, wanted to be free from the tyranny of the minority, that is, from power exercised arbitrarily by a political sovereign. Two hundred years later, following J.S. Mill’s disdain for the craven conformism of late-Victorian social mores, liberals realized they wanted to be free from an empowered majority. That is, even if a majority want democratically to decide gambling should be made illegal, for liberals the practice should remain legal as long as one gambler remains.

We’re entering the post-liberal moment. From Trump to Brexit, Ireland to Brazil, we’ve seen a number of revolts at the ballot box that point to a mass vote of no-confidence in the economic and cultural status quo — in other words, in 21st-century liberalism. The liberals aren’t taking it lying down. They’re doing their best to define post-liberalism in language they are most comfortable with, calling it ‘fascist’ or ‘communist’ — and sometimes the criticism is spot-on. But other times it is wholly inaccurate. One of the glaring paradoxes of the post-liberal moment is that many of the people involved in it want to rescue liberalism from itself.

It’s widely agreed that Bernie Sanders fell short in the Democratic primary because he described himself as a socialist. As a movement, socialism has never had mass appeal in America. Even at its strongest, in 1912, it garnered fewer than one million votes for presidential candidate Eugene Debs, who was trounced by Woodrow Wilson. More often, Americans have used the word ‘socialism’ as a synonym for communism, to signify everything America doesn’t stand for. Pundits put Sanders’s failure down to his attempts to give the word a positive spin. On the other hand, a dispassionate glance at American history shows that Uncle Sam has already gone a long way down the road of democratic socialism.

This article is in The Spectator’s March 2020 US edition. Subscribe here.Spring term, 2170. Professor Hankins assigns an English translation from the 22nd century’s most authoritative historical survey, The Beijing Universal History. This week’s course reading is from Volume VIII: The Far Western Hemisphere — North Central American Province. Chapter 33 The Era of Impeachment, 2020-52 At this time the North Central American province was still independent and under the system of governance known as ‘liberal democracy’, described in Chapter 29.