How Liberty Survives the Next Mania
I used to think the key to preserving liberty was education—arming people with the ethical and utilitarian arguments for free markets, free expression, and minimal government. Convince enough people, I thought, and the culture will self-reinforce these principles.
COVID disabused me of that notion.
At the start of the pandemic, even many of the most self-described classical liberals—people steeped in the history and logic of liberty, people who had themselves preached its virtues—abandoned them wholesale. They clamored for lockdowns, mask mandates, censorship, and emergency powers. They didn’t just go along reluctantly; many became some of the most vigorous enforcers of the new orthodoxy.
It was a stark reminder: most of the worst forms of statism don’t emerge through slow, creeping encroachment. They erupt in a sudden social mania. The Chinese Cultural Revolution came in a flash. Lenin’s Bolshevik takeover in 1917 overturned Russia almost overnight. Nazi Germany transformed from parliamentary democracy to totalitarian regime in the space of months. The Iranian Islamic Revolution swept away a modernizing monarchy in a single year.
These frenzies are not stopped by widespread knowledge of liberty. In fact, history shows that the most educated classes—those best versed in liberal theory—are often among the first to justify the mania on “pragmatic” grounds. When fear or fervor grips them, they reframe their abandonment of principle as an urgent necessity.
This means that the preservation of liberty is not primarily a battle of persuasion. It’s a battle of architecture. The goal is to build systems—political, cultural, and informational—that can withstand temporary but overwhelming surges of authoritarian impulse.
In epidemiological terms, liberty needs firebreaks.
During COVID, the United States had one great advantage: federalism. Each state retained substantial autonomy. Culturally, the states also varied widely in their instincts toward central authority. Together, these differences created both de jure and de facto borders for the spread of the COVID-statist memeplex.
That’s why there was such enormous variation in policy and culture from state to state. Florida and Texas didn’t become anti-lockdown and pro-freedom bastions because their residents had read more Hayek than those in New York or California. They became so because their state governments had the legal authority, the political culture, and the will to diverge sharply from the national mood. This divergence created choice, competition, and safe havens. It gave the mania somewhere to meet resistance—and eventually to lose steam.
The lesson: liberty survives not by perfect ideological commitment, but by the imperfect fragmentation of power and culture.
If we study history, moments when liberty survived frenzies almost always share these structural features:
1. Multiple Independent Jurisdictions – Federalism, confederations, strong local governance, or even powerful private cities act as political compartments. When one is captured by mania, others can resist.
2. Cultural Pluralism – Regions, ethnicities, religions, and traditions with different priorities and instincts toward authority create natural resistance to a single national mood.
3. A Free Public Square – True free expression allows the social network to evolve into diverse clusters and cliques, each with its own norms and reputations. This “rough terrain” makes it much harder for a single narrative to dominate the whole culture at once.
4. Informational Diversity – A decentralized media ecosystem with no single choke-point ensures no monopoly on the flow of facts and frames.
5. Exit Options – People can move with their feet (migration between jurisdictions), their capital (economic relocation), or their attention (alternative institutions), shifting incentives for would-be authoritarians.
6. Procedural Rigidity – Constitutional or procedural hurdles that slow down radical policy shifts buy time for passions to cool.
This reframes the preservation of liberty from being an educational project to being an engineering project. Education still matters—but only insofar as it helps people recognize why the structures matter, and resist dismantling them in calmer times.
The real challenge is to design societies that stay free despite people—societies where even if a majority succumbs to fear, the system itself slows or compartmentalizes their worst impulses until they pass.
Because history suggests the question isn’t if the next mania will come. It’s when—and whether our firebreaks will still be standing when it does.
— Mark Changizi, FreeX.group