I’m just really starting to think Liberalism doesn’t mean anything any longer. If you look at historical economic liberalism, the definition of that is opening up trade and anti-protectionism — a policy espoused most prominently and successfully by arch-Conservatives Reagan and Thatcher in modern political thought.

Liberalism literally means opening and allowing more things. When was growing up, I thought that was what American Liberalism was doing. I realize now that I was in part very, very wrong. But in many ways, I was still correct. The sea change, for me, happened when “American Liberalism” very clearly won the culture wars that we grew up around coming out of the seventies and then had nothing left to eat so it started eating itself.

Today, we can only hope it eats itself like the snake on the first American flag of freedom before it eats the American freedom that gave it birth.