Aftermath: Despotism, America Transformed, Crusaders and Revolutionaries, Cultural Genocide, Enemies of the Republic, Lincoln's Revolutionary Legacy, Myth of Saving the Union, Pathways to Central Planning 
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The Liberal Obsession Since 1865
“America [today] is not simply divided; she is fractured in a craze of spreading lines and hairlines that trace the boundaries of ideological, cultural religious, ethnic, and racial rivalries and resentments. The country is reaping the burden of a history shaped since 1865 by liberal thought and liberal politics.
First came the “reunion” of North and South – in fact, no reunion at all but the forcible union of institutional components of two broadly dissimilar geographic, social and political regions that from 1789 until 1865 were considered by the Founding Fathers and their descendants as sovereign States linked in voluntary and equal compact with one another.
National union at the cost of 618,222 men was succeeded by decades of the unrestrained free enterprise (excepting the tariff) favored by economic liberalism and a century and a half of increasingly liberal jurisprudence, liberalizing education, liberal secular metaphysics (described by George Santayana in Character & Opinion in the United States, published in 1920), liberalizing psychology, sociology, and economics, and their practical application: social engineering, the mass immigration of increasingly unlike, incompatible, and unassimilable peoples, multiculturalism, and the ensuing social confusion, resentment, chaos and public violence.
What used to be called the art of politics has long since become the abuse of it; while the most skillful government, unable to override or cancel history, is incapable of “solving,” or even adequately coping with, troubles of the fundamentally nonpolitical sort – what the country is experiencing today. And not the United States alone, but all the Western democracies.
On both sides of the Atlantic . . . governments are paralyzed by their inability to devise solutions to their respective crises compatible with the scruples of the liberal creed and the liberal agenda that have given form and meaning to their national projects for two centuries.
Liberalism is no longer capable of controlling liberally the liberal society for which it is responsible, and so far it appears that liberals would prefer to see their liberal world destroyed by barbarians, foreign and domestic, than to rescue it by illiberal means.”
(Liberalism in the Headlights, In Our Time; Chilton Williamson, Jr., Chronicles, September 2016, pp. 10-11)