The Death of Liberal Mythology

A meditation on technocratic surrender

Photo by Pierre Blaché on Unsplash

The technocratic left disarmed itself mythically while the right kept its mythic weapons loaded.

Reagan could say “shining city on a hill” and people felt something. JFK’s “we choose to go to the moon” wasn’t an argument about resource allocation—it was mythic summoning. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I have a dream”—pure mythopoetry operating at maximum effectiveness.

But somewhere between New Atheism (circa 2006) and the rationalist ascendancy, the center-left decided that kind of speech was beneath them. Irrational. Manipulative. The province of demagogues and priests. Smart people use data. Evidence. Peer-reviewed studies.

Footnotes and citations. Rigor. Empirically tested propositions. The serious stuff.

So when Obama tried mythopoetic language (”yes we can,” “hope and change”), the wonks in his own coalition treated it as marketing copy wrapped around the real work of policy. They didn’t understand it was the real work—that politics is fundamentally about meaning-making, not optimization.

And then they’re shocked when Trump’s “Make America Great Again”—pure mythopoetry, completely divorced from policy coherence—steamrolls their carefully constructed white papers.

Because you can’t fight myth with footnotes.

“Trust the experts!” they scream.

Fact checking!

Deplatform the epistemically irresponsible! Do it now, before it’s too late!

This is the death rattle of a movement that forgot how to speak to human beings. It’s pure technocratic panic. “Why won’t you just accept our authority?!”

But authority without mythic legitimation is just naked power. And people resist it.

Even now, some of my friends complain that my mythic writing undermines its seriousness. That my arguments should stand without flourish.

Flourish. Surely, dry reason would be more effective at changing minds. Oh, wait.

They still don’t understand that hearts move before minds. That people don’t calculate their way into courage or optimize their way into resistance. That meaning-making happens in the space where reason and passion meet, not in the sterile laboratory where reason pretends it can operate alone.

Hume tried to tell us this centuries ago. Reason is the slave of the passions, not their master. Reason can check our thinking, refine our arguments, expose contradictions. But it cannot tell us what to care about. It cannot generate the values that make political action meaningful. It cannot, on its own, move a single human being to stand up and resist.

Mythology is greatly misunderstood. To employ it in our speech is not to lie. It’s to embed deeper meaning—emotional truth—within our language. It is to signal why some description of reality is important. Why it matters. Not just what it is.

Sophistication, apparently, means analytical or ironic detachment. To stand outside the human experience. To float in the empty void—a view from nowhere. Here, they say, objective reality can be apprehended.

Trust the experts.

There is no “wire”. There is but the material world, and rational choices about how to spend time and resources!

Facts don’t care about your feelings.

I agree. And that’s the problem, isn’t it?

But this is itself mythology. Materialist metaphysics pretending to be neutral observation. A metaphysical claim about the nature of reality dressed in the language of science. The insistence that only matter is real, that consciousness is epiphenomenal, that meaning is illusion—these aren’t empirical findings. They’re philosophical commitments. Articles of faith in a particular worldview.

And this bad mythology—this denial of the tragic dimension, this pretense that human beings are just meat-machines making rational resource allocation decisions—is why you keep losing.

The powerful play goes on, Whitman said. The shared story of human existence.

So QAnon filled the gap. And you are perplexed how this happened. It happened because you evacuated meaning from public life. So the nihilists offered a corrupt substitute.

You did this. Your sophistication, your detachment, your insistence that myth was beneath serious people—you created the conditions for conspiracy to flourish. You left people starving for meaning in a world you’d optimized of everything except material accumulation. And then you’re shocked, shocked, when they reach for any story that gives their existence significance, even a grotesque one.

So here we are. Sitting among the wreckage of our hubris. The shared story collapsed. The empty souls walk the landscape. But somewhere, beneath the wreckage, the shared human heart still beats.

You rise. Not out of defiance. But in awakening.

The city still stands. The barbarians are inside the gate. But its defenders still fight. Street by street. Block by block.

The world looks on. The city. Once shining. Now burning. But not yet burned down.

The captains of industry would have its citizens become machinable. Gears in an optimized machine. And they collaborate with the invaders, planning for a new future. One unbounded by the inefficiencies of popular sovereignty which once stood as example. That once gazed with welcoming eyes upon the lost pilgrims looking for home.

But the defenders remember what was promised. They remember the story that was always truer than the technocrats’ sterile models, deeper than the authoritarians’ dark mythology.

The Liberal Story

The liberal story—the real one, not the technocratic accountancy that replaced it—goes like this:

We are free people who govern ourselves. Not because we’re perfect or wise or without error. But because the alternative—rule by those who claim superior qualification—is the death of what makes us human.

We walk a wire stretched across the abyss. Every choice carries shadow. Every shadow deepens the light. We could fall. Others might not follow. But meaning lives only in the space where we could fail, and we walk it anyway because the view is worth the risk.

We make meaning together. Not discovered in nature or handed down from authority, but constructed through the courage to act despite uncertainty, through the choice to bring light against the void.

We honor the tragic dimension. We don’t eliminate it through authoritarian force or rationalist management. We navigate it. Together. Citizen beside citizen. Conscious being beside conscious being.

This is not naive optimism. It’s not pretending the monsters aren’t real or the shadows aren’t dark. It’s clear-eyed recognition that we’re standing on something precarious, built something fragile, and must defend it anyway because there’s nothing else worth defending.

The technocrats wanted to eliminate the tragic dimension through perfect systems. The authoritarians want to eliminate it through perfect control.

But the liberal knows: the tragic dimension is home. And we defend it by walking forward together, bringing light, making meaning, refusing to become the machines they would have us be.

The Rearming

So the liberal tradition must rearm itself mythologically.

Not by abandoning rigor. We can do the math. We can cite the studies. We can construct the formal arguments. We can show our compound probabilities and structural constraints.

But we must also speak to hearts. We must tell the story of who we are and what we’re defending. We must give people not just analysis of what’s wrong, but vision of what’s worth saving.

We must speak of the wire we walk together. The city we defend. The light we bring. The meaning we make.

We must stop being embarrassed by meaning.

The right never forgot how to speak mythologically. They just shifted from Reagan’s optimistic “morning in America” to Trump’s dark “American carnage.” But always operating at the mythic register. Always giving people stories about who they are, what’s been lost, what could be restored.

Their mythology is resentful, authoritarian, built on grievance and strongman worship. It promises to eliminate the tragic dimension through force and control.

Our mythology is truer. It honors tragedy instead of trying to abolish it. It calls people to courage instead of submission. It makes citizens instead of subjects.

But we have to speak it. Out loud. Without embarrassment. With the full force of meaning-making integrated with analytical precision.

What The Moment Requires

The city burns. The defenders fight street by street. The collaborators plan their post-democratic future. The world watches.

And every conscious being faces a choice about what story they’re living in.

The story where you’re a machine being optimized? Where facts don’t care about your feelings and neither should you? Where meaning is illusion and only matter is real? Where the experts should manage everything because complexity exceeds democratic capacity?

Or the story where you’re a citizen walking the wire? Where you bring light through conscious choice? Where meaning is made through courage despite uncertainty? Where free people govern themselves because the alternative is unthinkable?

The technocrats offered the first story wrapped in sophistication. And people rejected it. Not because they’re stupid or irrational, but because it’s a story about their own irrelevance, their own mechanical nature, their own unfitness for self-governance.

The authoritarians offer dark mythology. And people take it, not because it’s true, but because at least it treats them as meaningful actors in a meaningful drama, even if the drama is resentful and the meaning is corrupt.

We must offer better. Truer. Deeper.

The liberal mythology that says: You are free. You are capable. You can govern yourself. Not perfectly, but well enough. And the wire you walk—precarious, uncertain, demanding—is exactly where freedom and meaning live.

This isn’t marketing copy. This is the work itself.

The powerful play goes on.

The city still stands.

The heart still beats.

And we rise. Not out of defiance alone, but in awakening to what was always true:

We are more than machines. More than subjects. More than data points in someone else’s optimization.

We are the light-bringers. The wire-walkers. The citizens who refuse to surrender our agency to those who promise to think better thoughts than we can think.

The technocratic left died because it forgot this.

The liberal tradition lives if we remember.

Rearm yourself. Not just analytically, but mythologically.

The city needs both.

The moment demands both.

And history will judge whether we were brave enough to speak the language that actually moves human beings, or whether we clutched our footnotes while everything burned.

The wire still holds.

Walk it.

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Go Deeper into the Circus

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