Why Liberals Disdain the Average American
And Wants Constituents Entitled and Dependent
The American political lexicon requires a significant update. For decades, the term conservative has been shorthand for the preservation of the status quo, while progressive or liberal has signaled an appetite for reform. However, a look at the modern administrative state suggests a profound inversion of these roles. Today, the progressive establishment serves as the primary guardian of a stagnant institutional order. And by utilizing a governance model designed to maintain vertical dependency—a system where citizens and local governments are made asymmetrically reliant on federal directives and resources—the liberal elite has institutionalized a state of managed stasis.
This effort relies on the framing of societal challenges as perpetual, manufactured crises. From the alarmist rhetoric surrounding climate change to the supposedly intractable nature of inequality, the liberal technocratic-administrative class uses these issues to justify its own expansion. The objective is to keep conditions just good enough to avoid civil revolt, but just miserable enough to ensure a permanent constituency for government intervention.
The Reliable Pattern of Managed Crisis
I believe the liberal technocratic-administrative class maintains power through a reliable four-step formula. The process begins when they identify or generate a crisis, framing a societal issue as an existential or unprecedented threat. In the second step, they propose a massive, multi-decade solution that requires billions of dollars and a new administrative infrastructure. This solution is designed to generate a pipeline for advocates, interest groups, and research dollars that the establishment can then influence.
The third step occurs when the policy inevitably fails to produce the outcomes promised by political rhetoric. Rather than accepting responsibility, the technocratic-administrative class pivots to a set of tired arguments. They claim the failure occurred because they did not do enough of what was already failing, or argue that the situation is remarkably complex, ignoring that the effort was described as an obvious solution at the time of implementation. In the final step, they either demand more study to postpone accountability or blame the opposing party for wanting to review or stop the failing program. This dysfunctional dance has defined the U.S. government since social welfare programs began in the 1950s and 1960s, and it continues to plague public education today.
The Potomac Two-Step and the Complexity Shield
Inside the Washington, D.C. Beltway, the survival of the bureaucracy depends on a maneuver known as the Potomac Two-Step. While popularized in fiction to describe creative evasion, it is the foundational survival mechanism for the modern political appointee. It refers to the practice of a government employee avoiding association with any issue that might damage their career or reputation. In the context of this four-step process, it is the dance used to navigate the pros and cons of a failed policy without ever committing to a definitive statement of intent that could be used for future accountability.
“There is nothing as permanent as a temporary government program.”
Milton Friedman, Nobel Prize-winning American economist
We see this dance most clearly in public education and social welfare. Simple, measurable goals—such as ensuring children can read by the third grade—are frequently submerged in a thicket of other matters that supposedly require a permanent class of experts with specific pedigrees to navigate.
This artificial complexity ensures that no one is ever held responsible for failure. Instead, the policy cart continues to lead the scientific horse, ensuring that the bureaucracy remains indispensable regardless of its track record. I have personally been in these beltway halls hearing this firsthand; the condescension toward average Americans is the grease that keeps these gears turning.
Mutable Truths and the Misallocation of Research
While conservatives are often ridiculed for believing in American exceptionalism and rigid moral truths, these foundations provide a set of values that are not fickle, do not change with the weather, and don’t require external validation. In contrast, the progressive side has embraced the idea that foundational truths are mutable. This intellectual fluidity explains the eagerness to experiment with concepts like gender identity, often while ignoring the inevitable trade-offs that occur when the consequences of this intellectualism hit society.
The costs of this shift are measurable. Research dollars are frequently diverted from lethal diseases toward identity-focused programs driven by political trends and ribbon-wearing rather than biological urgency. Data on Funding to Lethality (FTL) scores highlights a stark disparity: breast cancer receives significant investment (FTL 179.65), while gastric (stomach) and esophageal cancers rank near the bottom of the 19 cancers analyzed year over year, with FTL scores of 1.78 and 2.12, respectively. Stomach cancer remains the most underfunded malignancy in the country, largely because its highest incidence rates are among off-trend minority populations and first-generation immigrants who lack the Beltway and Hollywood advocacy cache.
The redirection of funds toward identity-driven intellectualism is even more apparent in the growth of new federal offices. Since the launch of the Sexual and Gender Minority Research Office (SGMRO) in 2015, the NIH has allocated almost $628 million to transgender research broadly across over 300 grants. SGM health research awards nearly tripled from 2012 to 2022. While the government claims to advance health equity, the data suggest it prioritizes areas that sustain a political narrative. For instance, in 2024, the NIH awarded a $384,748 grant for a study on “Race and Sex Disparities Among Emergency Medicine Chief Residents”—funding that focuses on labor market social engineering while the most lethal gastrointestinal cancers receive relative crumbs.
Meanwhile, higher education resources are increasingly poured into programs that study market-insensitive areas like sexuality instead of developing the skills the market demands. Research shows that while university education can provide high returns, some educational programs, often managed by government workforce initiatives, actually produce negative earnings returns for young male learners.
The Dependency Trap and the Crowding Out of the Family
The most damaging consequence of the liberal status quo is the crowding-out effect on private initiative and familial support. Research confirms that as government assistance increases, the informal support networks of families and communities tend to contract. Real per-person government spending has grown 20-fold between 1929 and 2019, and federal regulatory restrictions increased 164% between 1970 and 2020. This explosive growth matches the decline of social capital in the United States.
“Too many people think, ‘I have a problem and it is the Government’s job to cope with it.’”
Margaret Thatcher, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1979 to 1990
Evidence from across Western democracies reinforces this dynamic. In the United States, research indicates that for every one-dollar increase in public welfare spending, private remittances from donors decrease by approximately 12 cents. Furthermore, U.S. data on unemployment insurance suggests that every dollar of public assistance can crowd out familial transfers by 20% to 40%. In Germany, public transfers to older generations have likewise been shown to “crowd out” upward financial support from children to their parents. By taking over the traditional roles of the family and the church, the state removes the very institutions that provide individuals with a sense of agency and belonging. This creates a state of vertical dependency where the individual relies on the government not just for financial support, but for identity and moral guidance.
The Happiness Gap: Values vs. Expert Pedigrees
This dynamic explains a persistent happiness gap in American life. Evidence indicates that conservatives are generally happier than liberals. This gap is attributed to life choices that progressives often devalue: marriage, faith, and purpose. Arthur Brooks identifies four pillars of happiness: faith, family, friendship, and work. Marriage and active participation in a religious community are two of the strongest correlates of subjective well-being.
Progressive elites often dismiss this data by labeling their opponents as self-centered or ignorant, essentially arguing that their bliss is the result of ignoring the world’s misery, or, at times, even insinuating that the average American isn’t capable of understanding the world as their experts do. However, they use the language of authentic happiness like auctioneers, yet they never give credit to the conservative or libertarian traditions that have long espoused these beliefs. They prefer a world of layer after layer of so-called complexity so their self-appointed experts can scurry around the beltway with their pedigrees, acting as if they know secrets about life that most Americans, particularly those who don’t live in cities, don’t have the capacity to understand. The massive failure of DEI is just one example of this elite capture.
A Manifesto for Structural Accountability
To dismantle this dysfunctional dance and break the cycle of managed misery, we must implement four structural changes to the way our government operates:
Tie Policy to Outcomes: We must develop solutions to tie policymakers’ ideas to actual outcomes and hold them accountable, even after they are not in office. Accountability should be a fundamental value, ensuring that the Potomac Two-Step no longer provides a shield for political careerism.
Self-Terminating Programs: Government programs must not be immortal. We need self-terminating legislation that requires a rigorous evaluation of effectiveness before any reauthorization. By imposing mandatory sunset clauses, we can manage legislative inertia and prevent the normalization of extraordinary or emergency powers.
Reduce Federal Bureaucracy: The size of the federal bureaucracy must be significantly reduced, and those funds redirected toward genuine innovation rather than labor market massaging.
Neutral Research Funding: To protect science from political rhetoric, we should move toward a truly neutral way to assign federal research dollars, such as a lottery-based system. By awarding grants randomly to all proposals that pass a high bar of methodological rigor, we ensure that established names and radical ideologies do not have an unfair advantage over researchers pursuing objective truth. This would prevent the media-driven contortion seen in the case of climate change scientist Judith Curry.
The irony of the modern age is that the progressive side, once the champion of improvement, now lacks the spine for the structural changes needed to better our country. It is time to replace the layers of literal and metaphorical complexity with a system that values accountability, empirical truth, and the authentic flourishing of its citizens. The snoozing democracy must be awakened by a commitment to outcomes over rhetoric and innovation over dependency.
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