Light On Dark Water

Purporting to offer a middle ground between radical individualism and collectivism, what [liberalism] really gives us is a diabolical synthesis of the two, a bureaucratically managed libertinism.

This is from Edward Feser, quoted by Graeme Hunter in Touchstone, in a review of Feser's book the Last Superstion: A Refutation of the New Atheism. I gather he means "liberalism" in the more or less everday sense, not in reference to classical liberalism.

Just as the Gulf Stream continues to flow generally northeast no matter what storms and local variations are happening on the surface, beneath the specific controversies that are the stuff of our politics, there are deeper and more powerful currents at work. I think this is one of the strongest. It's one of the reasons why I tend to ally myself with those who want to reduce the size and power of the federal government, even though my motives are not necessarily the same.