Understanding Anti-“Liberal Consensus”

& the War Against Reason

To extend the train of thought from my prior Substack article on the contrived left–right false duality—where traditionalists (aka conservatives) decided to put on a cap that reads “Right,” convincing anyone in disagreement to wear their own cap labeled “Left” as a derivative—I want to expand here on what lies at the core of the issue.

What we’re dealing with in today’s regressive world is not a war against progress, or against human rights, or even against things like environmental sustainability.
It is a war against reason.

Now, you might think to yourself, “Well, that sounds trite and cliché—almost arrogant—to dismiss those who fall under the umbrella of ‘conservatism.’ Surely, those involved in such a traditional and static way of thinking must still regard themselves as being interested in reason and even progress, but only by their own standards, right? They’re not at war with reason—they’re simply opposed to what they don’t believe to be true!”

Well, as with everything, there’s always a half-truth. But by the end of this article, I hope to make clear that beneath the surface of traditionalist and ultimately regressive thinking lies not an interest in truth whatsoever—but an attitude fundamentally opposed to the very concept of objective knowledge and understanding itself.

And the gravity of that reality should terrify everyone who has the basic interest to see human life sustain itself and avoid absolute violent chaos.

---

I. Origins: William F. Buckley and the Birth of the Counter-Enlightenment Right

In 1951, a young Yale graduate named William F. Buckley Jr. published God and Man at Yale: The Superstitions of “Academic Freedom.” What seemed at first a petulant critique of his university soon proved to be the founding text of the post-war conservative revival. Buckley accused his professors of preaching “collectivism” and secularism—forces that, in his view, eroded both Christianity and capitalism. “I believe that the duel between Christianity and atheism is the most important in the world,” he declared, “and the struggle between individualism and collectivism is the same struggle reproduced on another level.”

In Buckley’s reasoning, quite simply, academic freedom itself was a superstition, because free inquiry had led to conclusions—social democracy, welfare economics, civil rights—that voters repeatedly endorsed. Rather than question his ideology, Buckley concluded that the method of rational deliberation was at fault.

Yes, you read that right.

In short, by elevating traditionalist strongholds like faith and hierarchy above evidence, Buckley inverted the Enlightenment. Truth was no longer what reason uncovered, but what preserved the moral order. Facts that contradicted that order became “liberal propaganda.” This intellectual sleight of hand gave rise to a durable epistemology of grievance: to protect conservatism, one must discredit reason itself.

You may think to yourself, “Well, this is obviously the ranting of a fringe weirdo that couldn’t possibly have struck a chord in contemporary society since such a conclusion is clearly madness, right?”

Wrong. Buckley’s invocation of an essentially faith-based static reality is what dominates the world today and continues to literally regress the world at an accelerating rate, in fact, reversing the progress of the Enlightenment itself.

---

II. Institutionalizing Delusion: From Goldwater to Trump

The Buckley thesis matured through the 1960s and ’70s into a full-scale political doctrine in the United States. Barry Goldwater’s 1964 campaign—with Buckley’s National Review as its ideological engine—reframed liberal governance not as a competing philosophy but as moral corruption. Evidence-based policy was portrayed as elitist social engineering.

By the time Ronald Reagan came to power in 1981, this posture had hardened into orthodoxy. Reagan fused free-market fundamentalism with moral traditionalism and a genial distrust of expertise. “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m from the government and I’m here to help,” he quipped—an aphorism that distilled the new creed: the state, science, and journalism were suspect; the market and private virtue were sacred.

Reagan’s administration dismantled regulations, slashed taxes for the wealthy, and celebrated market outcomes as moral outcomes. Environmental science was subordinated to corporate interest, while economists who questioned deregulation were marginalized. The media, once a public trust, became framed as an adversary to “the people.”

The result was not just policy change but a cognitive realignment: the belief that moral righteousness could substitute for empirical governance. Problems requiring collective rationality—climate policy, healthcare, poverty—were treated as moral tests, not analytical challenges.

By the 1990s, Newt Gingrich’s “Contract with America” and right-wing talk radio amplified the idea that objective journalism was itself partisan. Political communication shifted from deliberation to narrative warfare.

This culminated in today’s Trump era, as a natural gravitation, where Buckley’s inversion of reason has no doubt achieved its most advanced form. Donald Trump’s movement did not merely reject liberalism; it rejected fact as a category of discourse. “Truth” became a function of loyalty. Climate change, pandemic science, election results—all could be dismissed as conspiracies of the “deep state” or the “fake news media.”

In Trumpism, Buckley’s anti-liberal epistemology mutated into a populist theocracy of perception: belief as power, reality as consensus within the tribe. The Enlightenment ideal of public reason—Habermas’s Öffentlichkeit—collapsed into echo chambers where affirmation replaced evidence.

---

III. The Global Mirror: Beyond America

While the United States always exists as the canary in the coal mine of what’s to come when its policies harden, this anti-intellectual, pro-delusion pathology is not uniquely American. Across the Atlantic, Margaret Thatcher’s Britain and later neoliberal Europe echoed the same creed. Thatcher’s dictum—“There is no such thing as society”—sacralized markets as the natural order, delegitimizing collective reasoning as socialist interference.

In the decades that followed, European “liberalism” ironically helped fuel the very populist backlash that now threatens it. The 2008 financial crisis discredited expert management, and nationalist demagogues capitalized by reviving the old Buckley formula: portray factual critique of inequality or climate policy as elitist manipulation.

The Brexit campaign epitomized this anti-rational revolt. When confronted with expert warnings, Leave strategist Michael Gove sneered, “People in this country have had enough of experts.” Similar movements in Hungary, Poland, Italy, and France’s far right have recast pluralism, evidence-based policy, and media independence as cosmopolitan conspiracies. Across the West, the Enlightenment’s tools are being caricatured as instruments of oppression.

Thus, the American “war against reason” has globalized: an emotional rejection of complexity, a longing for simplicity in a world made intricate by technology and interdependence.

---

IV. The Present Crisis — Free-Market Theology and Civilizational Stasis

Today, free-market ideology functions not as an economic model but as a religion of inevitability. Its catechism insists that all social problems—poverty, environmental collapse, even democratic decay—will self-correct if we remain faithful to competition. Any attempt to regulate, redistribute, or plan is treated as blasphemy, and the “devil” to be recognized is, in essence, the idea of government regulation—or worse, democracy itself, which is seen as an illegitimate intrusion into the sacred operations of the market.

This theology insists that the invisible hand of commerce possesses moral and corrective powers once reserved for divine providence. The market becomes a cosmic adjudicator, presumed omniscient and self-balancing, while human reason, collective planning, and ethical governance are cast as arrogant attempts to interfere with a perfect natural order. When crises emerge—financial collapse, environmental degradation, pandemics—the faithful do not question the system but rather accuse the heretics: regulators, scientists, or reformers who dared to doubt the market’s omnipotence.

The results are visible everywhere. In the 1980s, Reagan and Thatcher’s neoliberal revolutions sanctified deregulation and privatization as paths to freedom, dismantling public housing, gutting unions, and defunding environmental oversight. The consequences—rising inequality, speculative finance, and ecological neglect—were rebranded as temporary “adjustments” in the sacred process of growth. In the 1990s and 2000s, Clinton, Blair, and the technocratic centrists absorbed the same orthodoxy, declaring that globalization and financial innovation were unstoppable “forces of nature.” When the 2008 financial crisis exposed the fraudulence of that faith, the high priests of the market were not punished—they were bailed out, and the system was declared “too big to fail.”

In the developing world, IMF structural adjustment programs repeated the same sermon: privatize your water, cut your schools, and worship at the altar of fiscal austerity—and prosperity will trickle down from the heavens of international finance. In practice, these policies crippled social systems, deepened poverty, and transferred public wealth to multinational elites.

Meanwhile, climate change accelerates while governments debate whether acknowledging it is “anti-business.” The fossil fuel lobby funds denialism and pseudo-science, echoing Buckley’s tradition of sanctifying ignorance when knowledge threatens power. Public lands are sold to private investors under the euphemism of “efficiency.” Corporations claim the right to self-regulate as if morality and profit were synonymous. Billionaires launch vanity space projects while the planet burns, presenting consumption itself as progress.

All the while, the public is trained to see this paralysis as freedom—to believe that government inaction is virtue, that inequality is meritocracy, and that suffering is the natural price of liberty. The myth persists because it offers psychological comfort: it replaces the anxiety of complexity with the simplicity of faith. If the market is infallible, then no one is responsible; morality dissolves into mechanism.

Thus, the theology of the market perpetuates ignorance not by accident but by design. It disables reason by converting critical inquiry into apostasy and paralyzes democracy by redefining collective decision-making as tyranny. What began as an economic doctrine has metastasized into a metaphysical system that cannot be questioned without inviting accusations of heresy.

---

Conclusion: Is Reclaiming Reason Even Possible?

The anti-liberal consensus is not simply a political stance; it is an epistemic collapse. It reduces truth to tribal identity and converts ideology into metaphysics. It tells us, implicitly, that if facts threaten our worldview, then the facts must be wrong.

Yet the challenges before humanity—ecological stability, technological disruption, equitable distribution—cannot be met with faith in markets, nostalgia for hierarchy, or belief in a paternal deity. They demand a renaissance of reason: the humility to test ideas, the courage to revise them, and the moral maturity to prioritize evidence over comfort.

It is sobering to look at current trends and realize that, even in an age of endless information flows, we are not seeing intellectual progress at the level of societal self-realization. While we may advance technology and deepen our understanding of human biology, we seem increasingly to ignore fact-based understandings regarding civilization’s sustainability and, ultimately, its stability.

In a world where all planetary boundaries have been exceeded by notoriously irresponsible economic behavior and all life-support systems are in decline; in a world where power consolidation and socioeconomic inequality are accelerating—indeed, regressing what was once a progressive march for civil and human rights—we must realize that whatever we activists and forward thinkers believe we are doing in the hope of seeing a new age of reason and solutions to our massive societal problems, we are, without doubt, failing miserably in our current practice.

We must face the fact that an enormous percentage of the human population has been conditioned to believe, to one degree or another, that intellectual-scientific advancement and evidence-based truth itself are not in their interest. And the tragic reality is that there is now a very high probability that those of us who can see beyond this detrimental, insulated, and irrational dogma will be taken down—holistically speaking—by what is essentially a vast human-subculture religious conservative cult that is, objectively, clinically insane.
~Peter Joseph

Peter Joseph it's a filmmaker, author and activist. You can support his podcast, future media works, and this Substack through his Patreon.