With apologies to John Lennon and those who “Imagine all the people…living life in peace” there is no historical epoch when we did not compete for land, resources ,and ideology. Before there were nations, there were kings and queens who diligently employed extortion, espionage, duplicity, and violence to enlarge their political power.

Such behaviors were chronicled for posterity in 1532, when Niccolò di Bernardo del Machiavelli published his seminal treatise, Il Principe, or The Prince in English. His codification of the sordid customs of rulership proved so enduring that centuries later we still associate manipulative, amoral personality traits with his name. Psychologists use “Machiavellianism” to describe subjects who embody high levels of cynicism, deceitfulness, and a dearth of empathy.

Subterfuge and deception have ever been the handmaidens of power, and this complicates the task of advancing Liberalism. Capital L Liberalism is rooted in the premise that individual liberty may not be casually infringed upon, that some individual rights supersede the will of the collective, that moral authority to govern relies upon the consent of the governed, and that all citizens have equal standing in politics and under the law.

This implies that a certain degree of rigor and gravitas should attend our politics. The severity of the challenges we face today also begs for discourse centered on matters of importance. Sadly, the temper of this age is decidedly unserious. Our culture is besotted with fictions and trivialities.

Our political parties understand the demographic cliff that looms over Medicare, Social Security, and other pooling programs, yet they avoid negotiating solutions.

Immigration policies desperately need reform, particularly for the sorely mistreated “Dreamer” population. Unenforced immigration controls are corrosive to law and sovereignty, but a walled border impermeable to wildlife is not a serious policy solution. Instead of compromise reforms, we get spectacles.

Conversely, the culture war issues that consume our political oxygen are frequently the antithesis of serious.

No honest person with a shred of historical learning believes the U.S. was founded (founded!) to preserve and expand the institution of slavery. And how does it follow that the best way to atone for the legacy of slavery is to create a new caste system that presumes all light-skinned people are white supremacists?

Similarly, there is no scientific basis for the claim that speech carries a harm equivalent to physical force. Words are not violence. Abandoning free speech for prophylactic censorship is not a serious solution to inequality.

Recently in The Atlantic, columnist George Packer chronicled the cancerous nature of “equity language guides,” which police speech through a liturgy of prohibitions. They have been spreading stealthily among left-aligned institutions. Many universities have one. So do the American Heart Association, American Cancer Society, American Medical Association, and the Sierra Club.

If you are unfamiliar with these catechisms of social justice, you are not alone. They seek to cleanse any trace of privilege, hierarchy, bias, or exclusion from our communications and literature. For example, stand, Americans, blind, and crazy are taboo. The first two are insufficiently inclusive (not everyone can stand, not everyone living here is a citizen). The third and fourth are insulting to the disabled. The poor is classist; battle and minefield disrespect veterans; depressing appropriates a disability; migrant—no explanation, it just has to go.

This censorship did not evolve organically, the way languages traditionally develop. It is a revolution from above, handed down from supposed experts who purport to speak for marginalized communities while remaining unanswerable to a public that is being coerced.

Sometimes the gap between equity doctrines and ordinary speech generates whiplash. The term Latinx has been promoted for roughly 20 years as a less gendered alternative to Latino / Latina. Institutions like National Public Radio promote it, while critics claim it bastardizes the structure inherent to romance languages.

Republican Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders of Arkansas barred the use of Latinx in state documents as her first official act. No surprise there. But Democrats in Connecticut recently introduced legislation that would do the same thing. Why such strange bedfellows?

Contrived equity language can struggle for adoption and even offend the population it seeks to destigmatize. In a 2019 poll by Pew Research Center, only a quarter of Hispanic Americans were familiar with the term Latinx, and only 3% used it. Some respondents expressed resentment at what they see as tampering by white elites.

There are also moral objections to equity language campaigns. When the Board of Supervisors in San Francisco excised the word felon in favor of justice-involved person it was making an ideological claim: that laws, courts and prisons are somehow illegitimate. If we accept the linguistic change, we acquiesce to this radical assertion without vetting it publicly. That is a craven form of social engineering.

Our adversaries know we are no longer serious.

Vladimir Putin has branded his war on Ukraine a rebuttal to Western decadence. He is betting our willingness to defend Ukrainian self-determination (in a proxy war that costs no American lives) will collapse before his regime exhausts its resources or domestic support.

Xi Jinping has likewise declared Western Liberalism a malignant source of disorder and is playing the long game in his quest for global hegemony. In Xinjiang and Hong Kong, China is habituating us to the age-old notion that might makes right, and that consent of the governed is a quaint anachronism. As with equity language censorship, acquiescing brings us only more provocations (think Taiwan) and ultimately helps transmit authoritarian values.

There is a risk of force escalation in Ukraine, nuclear and otherwise. Chinese authoritarianism is on the march. Hostile climate impacts are manifesting everywhere, even as the Paris accords are subverted by an energy hungry world. Opioids and Fentanyl are fueling a shocking rise in deaths of despair. Our education and healthcare systems fail to serve many of our fellow countrymen (if we dare employ one of those pesky gendered words).

This era demands serious leadership, not the grotesque parade of Facebook beefs and clown-show Tweets we’ve grown inured to. Perhaps defending Liberalism and elevating the serious issues that truly influence human welfare requires a little less Lennon and a little more Machiavelli.