The Great Reset's Origins, or How to Destroy Classical Liberalism

The Great Reset is frequently presented as a return to democratic social principles. In reality, it's a bid to extinguish the last traces of classical liberalism.

As should be clear by now, Francis Fukuyama’s declaration in The End of History: The Last Man (1992) that we had arrived at “the end of history” did not mean that classical liberalism, or laissez-faire economics, had emerged victorious over communism and fascism, or that the final ideological hegemony signaled the end of socialism. In fact, for Fukuyama, the terminus of history was always democratic socialism or social democracy. As Hans-Hermann Hoppe noted in Democracy: The God That Failed, “the Last Man” standing was not a capitalist homo economicus but rather a “homo socio-democraticus” (222).The fall of socialism-communism, rather than classical liberalism, was the end of history, with all its Hegelian pretensions. Apparently, the big state and the huge capital were supposed to have struck an unavoidable and permanent truce. The Great Reset is the culmination of this long-awaited truce.

Before "the end of history," the elite subversion of the free market economy and republican democracy had been going on for decades. According to Cleon W. Skousen in The Naked Capitalist, elites positioned within major banks, large corporations, leading think tanks, influential publishing companies, the media, tax-exempt foundations, the educational system, and the US government sought to remake the US in the image of its (former) collectivist archrival since at least the early 1930s (57-68). As Carrol Quigley noted in Tragedy and Hope: A History of the World in Our Time (1966), elites propagated socialist, communist, and other collectivist ideologies at home, while funding and arming the Bolsheviks in Russia and the communists in Vietnam and promoting international policies that led to the deliberate abandonment of eastern Europe and Southeast Asia to the communist scourge.

For many, the goal of advancing socialism has been most evident in the eagerness with which higher education institutions have absorbed and circulated Marxist, neo-Marxist, and post-Marxist collectivist ideologies in their various guises since the early 1930s—including Soviet propaganda, critical theory, postmodern theory, and the most recent variants, critical race theory, critical whiteness studies, and LGBTQIA+ ideology—at least since the early 1930s. The dreaded "long march through the institutions" was never a grassroots, bottom-up initiative. Instead, it was a covert operation carried out by elites in positions of power and influence. The Frankfurt school of critical theory's philosophers, sociologists, and psychologists, equipped with Marx's theory of revolution and Antonio Gramsci's model for socialist cultural hegemony, hardly kicked off this march when they arrived in the United States in 1933. Rather, they were welcomed by the wealthy and supported by tax-exempt charities that had already begun their job. The so-called "long march" through the institutions was more like a stampede.

To comprehend the Great Reset, we must first acknowledge that it is the culmination of a centuries-long and continuous effort to undermine classical liberalism (free markets, free speech, and liberal democracy), American constitutionalism, and national sovereignty. The concept of resetting capitalism implies that capitalism was once pure. The Great Reset, on the other hand, represents the climax of a much lengthier collectivization process and democratic socialist agenda, as well as the state's accompanying rise. The Great Reset is aimed to strengthen and finish an already prevalent economic interventionism, and to employ US-led military power to accomplish this process if economic intervention fails. This helps to understand why the West is arming and funding Ukraine in its fight against Russia.

I don't mean to imply that the global neo-Marxist economics of the Great Reset, as well as its worldwide rather than national economic fascism, are anything new. They are novel, as are the methods through which they will be implemented. But we must not be so perplexed that we believe the Great Reset effort arose out of thin air—it is the result of decades of elite thinking and activism.

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