this post was submitted on 17 Sep 2026
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The liberalism that is practiced in the US is neoliberalism, the same thing practiced throughout the developed world, and we don't see ideological movements in power specifically because business interests have historically intervened to overthrow those governments in order to install friendlier regimes that let them plunder natural resources.
But then neoliberalism ultimately favors property rights over human rights, and as Marx observes in Das Kapital the owner class will influence the courts to favor property and business over the public good. It'll also hack law to gain influence over the government to deregulate and protect the power of the wealthiest plutocrats and companies.
Democracies and leninist economies have existed. They just get put down before they have much of a chance to flourish. Even Wilson favored monarchists over communists.
In the US, we can't imagine anything other than capitalism because of over a century of propaganda inserted into our primary schooling. That campaign has only gotten more and more conservative and now MAGA ideology is taught in class. This was deliberate, as the US education system was always regarded as an instrument of control and worker indoctrination.
Liberalism, in all of its forms current and historic, has always valued property over human lives. Property is the guiding principle of liberalism.
I'll grant you that's likely to be true for all forms of government informed by liberalism, but that's because charters tend to be written by landowners (and in the US, slave owners), so we have a long run of people creating governments contrived to let its framers keep their property and political power.
But I suspect within political theory, there exist forms of liberalism in which the human rights of individuals outweigh the right to property, especially large scale ownership. In fact, economic theory has long observed that the extreme consolidation of wealth is corrosive to economic systems, to government, to the rule of law, and to society. Combined with the historic trend of wealth to consolidate upwards and eventually capture political power (discussed by Marx in Das Kapital), this means any such system will only be quasi-stable, ultimately leading to corruption of the government and collapse of the economy. It's also the point of the game Monopoly.
According to Wikipedia regarding property rights, Controversy [centers] upon who is deemed to have property rights protected (e.g. human beings or also corporations), the type of property which is protected (property used for the purpose of consumption or production) and the reasons for which property can be restricted (for instance, for regulations, taxation or [nationalization] in the public interest).
Curiously, there is a stark contrast between the right to own possessions, and a right to own large-scale real-estate and capital (id est, the means of production) and it may be in the best interest of society to heavily restrict or even abolish the latter.
But as we've seen in the case of the USSR, we'd have to do that worldwide, as there will always be Wilsons out there eager to rollback such a government towards capitalism again, or create a doctrine of containment (Wilson called it quarantine ) and force a trade embargo. So long as there are plutocrats there will be militaries looking to conquer and annex. (Heck, right now, our current plutocratic class is looking to create robotic military forces that can be controlled by AI.)
Huh. It reminds me of the international response to the 1789 French revolution, which was to demand of France that they select and erect a new monarch, since a republic or a democracy that worked might incite revolts in their own kingdoms.