Politics & Power Quote by Francis Parker Yockey

A slogan disguised as a definition, Yockeys line turns "liberalism" into a suspect mindset rather than a political program. By equating it with "Rationalism", he is not praising reason; he is indicting it. In the mid-20th-century far-right imagination that Yockey helped sharpen, Rationalism meant Enlightenment universalism, individual rights, procedural democracy, and the idea that society can be engineered through abstract principles instead of inherited culture. The sentence works because it sounds clinical and self-evident, like a taxonomy entry, while smuggling in a whole metaphysical grievance.

The subtext is civilizational: liberalism is framed as a kind of rootless intellect that dissolves organic bonds - religion, tradition, nation, hierarchy - by subjecting them to critique. If politics is treated as a rational problem to solve, Yockey implies, it becomes a machine for flattening difference and stripping communities of myth, loyalty, and authority. The word "in" does heavy lifting: Rationalism is not merely an influence on liberalism; it is liberalism translated into the arena where power decides what survives.

Context matters. Writing in the shadow of World War II and amid the ideological consolidation of the Cold War, Yockey was constructing an anti-liberal worldview that could outlive defeated fascisms by recasting them as cultural resistance. This line is propaganda-grade minimalism: it reduces a broad tradition to a single philosophical sin, inviting readers to see liberal institutions not as imperfect safeguards but as the political arm of a corrosive, overconfident reason.