American Families were swept up by a rogue wave made by wealthy Americans
The Rise of Libertarianism and the Decline of the American Family and Community: How Post-War Ideology broke the social contract.
Introduction
Humans are group animals that adapt to the prevailing environment. The environment is a product of human institutional design. Adaptive institutional structures produce altruism and high trust societies. Maladaptive institutional structures produce selfishness and antisocial behaviors and low trust.
Twenty-Seven girls were killed by Libertarianism
Ideology has destroyed government capacity in the wake of the Libertarian assault on reason and modern knowledge and science. This month it killed twenty-seven girls at a youth camp in Texas. A camp where young girls did their best to form community despite their State’s failures to build functional institutions and infrastructure. The girls’ camp is located in an area where indigenous people have never and never would build anything permanent because it is a flood plain. Texas is too dysfunctional to manage to provide the County where the camp was located a mere million dollars to install flash flood warning sirens. Too eaten up by self-sufficiency ideology to cooperate proactively on even the most basic level.
A rogue wave killed twenty-seven innocent girls. A wave that has killed millions of Americans since 1945.
Quantifying the human cost of Libertarianism
The cumulative human cost of these policy choices is staggering. Conservative estimates suggest that 3.5-5.5 million Americans have died utterly unnecessarily since 1945 due to healthcare system failures and firearms policies that diverge from evidence-based approaches used successfully in other developed nations.
This represents more American deaths than all US military conflicts combined since 1945, yet these deaths receive little public attention because they occur individually rather than in highly visible events. Each represents a life cut short, a family devastated, and human potential unrealized. And that does not include death and injury caused by failure to modernize infrastructure and public services.
Ideology prevents clear thinking and autonomy
The evidence overwhelmingly demonstrates that community-focused approaches to healthcare and firearms policy enhance rather than restrict individual freedom. By removing economic constraints, reducing fear and anxiety, enabling job rather than labor mobility, creating safer and sustainable communities, and improving health outcomes, these policies create the conditions necessary for individuals to make truly free choices about their lives and futures.
The United States faces a choice: continue accepting preventable death and injury on a massive scale or learn from the successful knowledge-based policy experiences of peer nations that have achieved better outcomes while enhancing individual freedom. The evidence suggests that the path forward requires not less community-focused policy, but more—implemented with the same evidence-based rigor that has proven successful in reducing preventable deaths while enhancing quality of life in other developed nations.
The 3.5-5.5 million preventable deaths since 1945 represent not just statistics, but a moral imperative for policy reform based on the best available evidence from modern knowledge and peer-reviewed science and international experience.
The Fatal Conceit of Individualism
In the aftermath of World War II, as Americans celebrated their collective triumph over fascism through unprecedented cooperation and shared sacrifice, a paradoxical transformation began to take shape. The very nation that had demonstrated the power of unity and collective action would soon embrace an ideology that elevated individual freedom above all else. Today I examine how wealthy White Men created what might be called America's new secular religion, propagated through well-funded think tanks and lobbying efforts by the nation's wealthiest families. This ideological shift, driven by what Jamelle Bouie aptly termed "small business tyrants" alongside billionaire elites, has fundamentally altered the American social fabric, replacing cooperation with radical individualism and leaving in its wake a broken social bargain and the loneliest and depressed generation in human history.
The story of this transformation is not merely one of political philosophy but of deliberate social engineering no different than what Fascists and Communists did in the early 20th century.
Concentrated wealth and power systematically reshaped American values, institutions, and ultimately, the very nature of human relationships in our society. The value space was violently forced away from community and intimacy.
The consequences of this decades-long project are now starkly visible: fractured families, atomized communities, and a nation starving for the very connections that libertarian ideology has caused us to distrust or abandon. It is no accident that this new religion has produced whole new forms of antisemitism and racism that uses Jews and Blacks and Latinos and undocumented immigrants as pawns to cut taxes for the rich in service of the dogma of personal responsibility.
Self-deception is the source of all hypocrisy. The assumption that reason cannot improve upon tradition is itself a fatal conceit.
The Post-War Paradox: From Collective Triumph to Individual Ideology
World War II represented perhaps the greatest example of American collective action in the nation's history. The war effort required unprecedented coordination between government, industry, and citizens. Millions of Americans accepted rationing, women entered the workforce en masse, and communities organized around shared sacrifice. The victory over fascism was fundamentally a triumph of altruism over the patriarchal hierarchies enforced by violence by the Axis powers.
Yet within this moment of collective achievement lay the seeds of its own undoing. The prosperity that followed the war created new opportunities for those already positioned at the top of America's economic hierarchy to consolidate and expand their influence.
Rather than viewing the success of coordinated action as a model for peacetime progress, wealthy elites saw it as a threat to their privileged position in the patriarchal hierarchy that has been the framework of our socio-economic system since . The specter of the New Deal, with its emphasis on collective bargaining, social insurance, and universal access to necessary goods and services funded directly by the Federal government in every American community, haunted those who had the most to lose from a more egalitarian society.
Truman and the American Administrative state became enemy number one of the most selfish and paranoid families in American history.
This fear motivated a systematic campaign to reshape American values. If the war had proven that Americans could work together for the common good, then the post-war project of the wealthy would be to convince them that such cooperation was not only unnecessary but fundamentally un-American. Libertarianism, with its emphasis on individual liberty, minimal government, spontaneous order, and unfettered markets, became the perfect vehicle for this transformation.
The Architecture of Influence: Think Tanks, Propaganda, and Political Capture
The rise of libertarianism as a dominant force in American life was neither organic nor accidental. It was the product of a deliberate, well-funded campaign orchestrated by some of the wealthiest families in America. The Koch brothers, the Olin family, the Scaife foundations, and others poured billions of dollars into creating an intellectual and political infrastructure designed to promote libertarian ideas and policies.
This infrastructure took many forms. Think tanks like the Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute, the Manhattan Institute, and the American Enterprise Institute were established or expanded to produce a steady stream of selective research, policy papers, and talking points that promoted libertarian solutions to every conceivable social problem. These institutions didn't merely engage in academic discourse; they actively worked to shape public opinion and political action. It is a propaganda machine no different from those of the Soviets and Nazis.
The maladaptive genius of this approach lay in its comprehensiveness. Rather than simply lobbying for specific policies, the libertarian movement sought to change the very terms of public discourse. Through strategic funding of university programs, scholarship funds, and academic chairs, they ensured that Libertarian perspectives would be well-represented in higher education. Particularly at Economics and Political Science Departments.
Media outlets were cultivated or created to amplify these messages, while grassroots organizations gave the appearance of popular support for policies that primarily benefited the wealthy.
This was not conspiracy but strategy—a patient, systematic effort to bend the arc of American values and culture away from the communitarian values that built the nation and had sustained the nation through depression and war, and toward a radical individualism that would leave citizens isolated and politically impotent.
The Small Business Tyrant: Libertarianism's Foot Soldiers
While billionaires provided the funding and strategic vision for the libertarian revolution, they found eager allies in what Jamelle Bouie has called "small business tyrants." These local elites—owners of car dealerships, real estate agencies, regional chains, and other enterprises—became the foot soldiers of the libertarian movement. Their motivations were both ideological and intensely practical.
For the small business tyrant, libertarianism offered a compelling narrative that transformed self-interest into virtue. Regulations that protected workers were recast as impediments to freedom. Taxes that funded public goods became theft. Unions that gave employees collective bargaining power were painted as corrupt special interests. Every constraint on their ability to maximize profit could be opposed not merely as inconvenient but as fundamentally immoral.
This class of local elites proved crucial in translating libertarian ideology from abstract philosophy into concrete political action. They funded local and state political campaigns, dominated chambers of commerce, and used their economic leverage to shape community norms. In small towns and suburbs across America, the small business tyrant became the voice of "common sense" economics, arguing that what was good for business was good for everyone.
The tragedy is that many of these individuals genuinely believed their own rhetoric. Indoctrinated by libertarian propaganda that equated their personal success with moral virtue, they could not see how their actions contributed to the atomization and impoverishment of their own communities. As they fought against public investment, social services, and worker protections, they helped create the very conditions of isolation and desperation that would ultimately undermine their own families and communities and consumer base their businesses depended upon.
The Patriarchal Dimension: Preserving Hierarchy Through Ideology
The libertarian project cannot be fully understood without recognizing its deep connection to the preservation of patriarchal power structures. Like the Landed Gentry that wrote the Constitution to serve their interests, the wealthy Americans who funded and promoted libertarianism were overwhelmingly male, and their ideology served to protect not just their economic privileges but their social dominance as well.
Libertarianism's emphasis on individual achievement and merit-based success obscured the reality of inherited advantage and systemic discrimination. By insisting that success was purely a matter of individual effort and talent, libertarian ideology made it possible to dismiss the institutional barriers faced by women, racial minorities, and other marginalized groups as either non-existent or self-imposed.
White Male Structural Advantage over Black Americans and Women
1607-White Male settlers begin accumulating asset rights.
1968-Black Americans begin accumulating asset rights
1974-Women begin accumulating independent asset rights
White Male Americans: ~400 years of opportunity
Black Americans: ~55 years of legally protected access
Women: ~50 years of legally protected access
That’s a 345-year gap—not merely in income, but in compounded, intergenerational wealth between White Males and Black Americans.
That's a 350-year gap—not merely in income, but in compounded, intergenerational wealth between White Males and Women.
This ideological framework proved particularly effective at maintaining patriarchal hierarchies within families and communities. As Conservatives were persuaded by Reaganism to convert to Libertarianism, the patriarchal idolization of the male breadwinner, the nuclear family as the primary social unit, and the rejection of collective responsibility for childcare and eldercare all served to reinforce patriarchal gender roles. Women who sought greater economic and social freedom were told that they already had all the freedom they needed—the freedom to compete in the marketplace like any man, never mind the structural disadvantages they faced.
The result was a peculiar form of American patriarchy that clothed itself in the language of freedom while systematically undermining the conditions necessary for genuine equality. By attacking the social programs and collective institutions that might have provided women with real alternatives to economic dependence, libertarianism ensured that patriarchal family structures remained not just culturally preferred but economically necessary for many.
The Great Atomization: How Radical Individualism Destroyed Community
The practical consequences of libertarianism's ascendance have been profound and devastating. As the new religion spread, Americans were increasingly taught to see themselves as isolated individuals rather than members of interconnected communities. Every relationship became transactional, every interaction a potential market exchange.
This transformation manifested in countless ways. Marriage became a business transaction. Church attendance plummeted. College sports programs and local Sports associations were privatized and turned into franchises. Professional sports became disembodied for-profit franchises that are nothing more than a brand. Labor unions, once the backbone of working-class solidarity, were systematically attacked and diminished. Membership in civic organizations plummeted as Americans were told that voluntary association was less efficient than market mechanisms. Public spaces were privatized or allowed to decay, replaced by commercial venues where the only recognized relationship was between buyer and seller. Labor mobility was idolized instead of corporate mobility.
Even family relationships were not immune to this commodification. The libertarian emphasis on individual choice and personal responsibility transformed childcare from a communal responsibility into a private burden. Eldercare became not a matter of intergenerational solidarity but a financial planning problem. The extended family networks that had once provided emotional and material support were replaced by market services—for those who could afford them.
The victory over Communism in the 1980s set the beast of radical individualism loose to destroy what was an already weakened social structure. Ronald Reagan and the Republican Party used a toxic mixture of manufactured settler myths and Libertarianism to convince Millions of Americans that social capital must be transferred to the private sector or Socialism would come to America and steal our freedom and destroy individualism and “our way of life”.
The impact on American communities has been devastation. Main streets emptied as local businesses were replaced by chain stores with no stake in community wellbeing. Local government yoked to real estate developers by maladaptive fiscal Federalism. Real estate developers that care about absolutely nothing other than their own profits. Public institutions like libraries, parks, and community centers—dismissed by libertarians as wasteful government spending—deteriorated or disappeared. The informal networks of mutual aid that had sustained Americans through hard times withered as people internalized the message that accepting government support was a sign of moral failure.
By the early 1990s, Libertarianism leveraged by States rights and fiscal Federalism quickly destroyed family after family. Neighborhood after neighborhood, community after community. And finally, the Nation. And now we have heavily armed and masked government gangs roaming our communities using state violence to enforce an inherently divisive and maladaptive institutional structure.
The Loneliness Epidemic: The Human Cost of Libertarian Success
Today, we live with the consequences of the libertarian revolution's success. Americans report unprecedented levels of loneliness and social isolation. Young people struggle to form lasting relationships in an institutional structure that commodifies attention and allows corporations to steal our ideas and information and to use that data for profit.
A structure that produces a culture that treats human connection as another consumer choice. Mental health crises proliferate as individuals bear alone burdens that were once shared by communities. It is not the screens or the smart phones or social media. It is the institutional structure built on a warped ideology created by ignorant White Men to preserve their patriarchal privilege in the name of liberty and prosperity. The self-deception is stunning. It requires a degree of motivated reasoning that is incomprehensible to me.
This loneliness epidemic is not an unfortunate side effect of libertarian policies—it is their logical outcome. An ideology that teaches people to see themselves as fundamentally separate, that views cooperation with suspicion and collective action and coordination as coercion, cannot help but produce isolation. When every person is told they are the CEO of their own life, solely responsible for their success or failure, the result is not empowerment but crushing anxiety and alienation.
The irony is thick. Libertarianism promised freedom and equal opportunity. It delivered psychological and financial dependency on corporations and spiritual void and loneliness. It promised prosperity but created precarity. It promised to unleash human potential but left millions of Americans too isolated and unhealthy and uneducated and exhausted to pursue their dreams. The very ideology that claimed to champion human liberty has created conditions that make genuine freedom—the psychological and financial autonomy that comes from planning and preparation and cooperation, security, community, and mutual support—impossible for most everyone.
The Desperate Search for Connection
In response to this manufactured loneliness, Americans are desperately seeking new forms of connection and community. There is palpable deep hunger for intimacy and friendship and belonging that the new religion has failed to provide. Social media, despite its many problems, exploded in part because it promised to reconnect people who had been separated by libertarian atomization.
Yet these market-based solutions to loneliness reproduce the very problems they claim to solve. Private social media platforms, driven by profit motives, steal our time and attention and exploit our need for connection while amplifying division. Private healthcare exploits fractured risk pooling to keep Americans sick rather than prevent illness and heal. Commercial communities and strip malls built around consumption offer only shallow substitutes for genuine intimacy and community and solidarity. Even as Americans spend billions trying to purchase their way out of isolation, the fundamental structures that create psychological and financial dependency and spiritual voids and loneliness remain intact.
The grassroots movements that explicitly reject libertarian individualism in favor of renewed cooperation. Mutual aid networks, community land trusts, cooperative businesses, and other forms of collective organization represent attempts to rebuild the social fabric that libertarianism tore apart. These efforts remain small and fragmented, but they point toward the possibility of a different future.
The Nordic Model of psychological and financial autonomy shows how we can break out of the prison built by patriarchy and the restrictive institutions and reductionist doctrines that it continues to produce after five thousand years.
Reclaiming Cooperation: The Path Forward
If libertarianism became America's postwar religion, then we are now living through a crisis of faith. The promises of individual freedom and market prosperity ring hollow for millions of Americans struggling with psychological and financial dependency, isolation, insecurity, and despair. The question is whether we can imagine and build alternatives before the social fabric deteriorates beyond repair.
Reclaiming cooperation means more than simply reversing libertarian policies, though that is certainly necessary. It requires a fundamental shift in values and consciousness—a recognition that human beings are not isolated individuals but inherently social creatures who thrive in community. It means rebuilding the institutions of collective action that libertarianism dismantled and creating new ones suited to contemporary needs.
This transformation will not be easy. The wealthy interests that promoted libertarianism remain powerful and committed to preserving their privileges. The ideology itself has become so deeply embedded in American institutions and culture that many people cannot imagine alternatives. Yet the very desperation of our current moment creates opportunities for change. As more Americans experience the bitter fruits of radical individualism, they become open to different possibilities.
The idea of America is alive.
Fatal Arrogance
The rise of libertarianism as America's dominant ideology represents one of the most successful propaganda campaigns in human history. Funded by wealthy elites and promoted by small business tyrants, it transformed a nation that had proven the power of collective action into one that views cooperation with suspicion and solidarity as weakness. The human costs of this transformation—in loneliness, desperation, and social decay—are now undeniable.
Yet the story is not over. The same human needs that libertarianism denied—for connection, community, and mutual support—persist and demand satisfaction. Across the country, Americans are beginning to rediscover the power of cooperation and the joy of solidarity. Whether these efforts can overcome decades of libertarian dominance remains to be seen, but the stakes could not be higher.
The choice before us is stark: continue down the path of radical individualism until the last threads of social connection snap, or begin the difficult work of weaving back together the bonds of community and cooperation. The libertarian revolution taught Americans to see themselves as isolated individuals in competition with one another. The task now is to remember what we once knew—that we are stronger together than alone, and that true freedom comes not from isolation but from the security and support of genuine community.
In the end, the critique of libertarianism is not just political or economic but based on modern knowledge and science and profoundly moral. A philosophy that leaves millions lonely and desperate, that transforms every human relationship into a market transaction, that preserves privilege while preaching freedom, cannot be the foundation for a good society. We need and deserve better—an America that values cooperation over competition, solidarity over selfishness, and community over isolation. The work of building that America begins with recognizing how we got here and having the courage to imagine a different path forward.
Group functional outcomes require planning, not spontaneous order.
Conclusion
Hayek feared the planner. He warned of a fatal conceit—the belief that reason could design better systems than those that evolved over time. He taught that tradition was wiser than intellect. That the market knew more than any mind. And he was half right.
But his blind spot was vast.
Why are fatally flawed fields of study like Economics and Political Science sitting on top of the contemporary public policy decision hierarchy?
Economics and Political Science as they exist today are designed to preserve the existing institutional structures. Career risk is serious obstacle to structural evolution.
Property and exchange and markets are what we design them to be. Capitalism is what we design it to be. Capitalism and patriarchy have been intertwined for far too long. The solution isn’t Communism or Fascism or Libertarianism. The solution is stop pretending that Adam Smith or Karl Marx or Friedrich Hayek were scientists in possession of the necessary knowledge to be able to make intelligent assessments of the scientific basis of human evolution and neurology and how group functional outcomes are achieved by overcoming our evolutionary inheritance.
The solution is to demote Economics and Political Science from their perch on top of the modern public policy decision hierarchy. And replace them with modern knowledge and science.
In the Scandinavian fjords where I was raised, people live by rhythm, not ideology. We read the waters and wind. We adapt. And when traditions no longer serve, we don’t destroy them. We shape them. Together.
This is what Hayek could not see. He feared the heavy hand of the state but ignored the guiding hand of the village. He mistook all reasoned adaptation for authoritarian control. He could not imagine that ordinary people—bound together by memory, necessity, and care—might use their minds in concert, not for domination, but for survival. Not by promise of reward or fear of punishment. By recommendations and trust. That they could overcome their evolutionary inheritance by way of scalable and reasoned adaptation.
And then, in America, his warning became a banner. Not among academics alone, but among billionaires who had no fjord to navigate—only balance sheets to grow.
The Koch brothers, heirs to fossil fuel fortune, turned Hayek into doctrine. They did not seek understanding. They sought to unbuild the postwar state. Their money seeded the Cato Institute and Americans for Prosperity. It poured into universities, into think tanks, into endless campaigns against taxes, unions, environmental regulation. They spoke of liberty. But they meant profit.
Richard Mellon Scaife followed suit. His wealth—born of oil and banking—funded a media machine of anti-government fury. The Olin Foundation slipped libertarian ideas into elite law schools, teaching future judges that the market was moral and the state was suspect. And in time, these judges rose. Their rulings hollowed out labor protections, dismantled voting rights, and redefined public goods as private opportunities.
Then came the DeVos family—Amway billionaires who wove libertarian ideology into Christian cloth. Through school vouchers and “religious freedom” campaigns, they sanctified deregulation and privatization. They hid their greed and antisemitism and homophobia and Islamophobia under a veil of self-reliance that made public education a target. Their money funded networks that turned neighbor against neighbor—those who “take” from the state and those who “pay.”
And behind it all, the Bradley Foundation anchored the intellectual front. Its grants propped up academics and activists who turned libertarianism into a secular religion—one that preaches markets, punishes solidarity, and calls it all freedom.
They called it Reaganomics. They demonized government and called it socialism. But it was the long project of class warfare—waged not with clubs, but with donations, legislation, and doctrine. Tax cuts for the wealthy. Attacks on unions. A war on the administrative state. The unraveling of the New Deal.
They called it Neoliberalism and they created a housing and healthcare and education and child and eldercare care crisis.
They failed to deliver anything even close to equal opportunity.
They cloaked it in the language of Hayek. But it was never about humility before tradition. It was never about knowledge and science. It was about patriarchal conditioning and backlash. About privatizing social capital. About dismantling the very institutions communities had built to care for one another.
They ask why we are divided.
You cannot get unity from a divisive structure.
And here lies the other fatal conceit.
To believe that private groups and organizations have the capacity to provision and allocate necessary resources that maximize individual potential by guaranteeing equal opportunity for all members of society.
To believe that only markets evolve. That communities cannot reason together. That power cannot shape tradition. That self-serving business owners and antisocial billionaires with foundations know better than fishermen and explorers and traders and warriors who know how to read the waters of life.
In the fjords, we knew better. We did not romanticize tradition. Nor did we fear change. We adjusted when the spawning grounds shifted. We mend the net when it frayed. We lit the fires when the enemy came. We learned that wisdom is not inherited whole—it is practiced, refined, and shared.
Hayek feared planners. But he missed the planners of ideology. He warned of those who knew too little. But said nothing of those who knew exactly what they were doing.
My people council and plan.
My people prepare and maintain.
My people observe and adapt.
Anyone can become kin. If you row along side us you are one of us.
Now the waters rise. The nets tear. The weapons rust. And the longship drifts.
But the loom still stands. The tools remain. And the knowledge—quiet, local, relational—still lives where people listen to each other, not to doctrine. In the returning tide, after the rogue wave crashes, we may remember what Hayek forgot.
We are not passive heirs of tradition or evolution. We are its stewards.
And we can build better.
Conscious evolution is our endowment.
We must not let ideological obsessions and arrogance end the Idea of America.