I am so fucking tired of politics. I hate the establishment for starting countless and endless foreign wars, for spying on its own citizens, for endorsing and encouraging police brutality, for the idiotic and evil and counter-productive war on drugs, for flagrantly violating the civil rights of its own citizens, for smothering small businesses in their infancy with excessive regulations and propping up major conglomerates with corporate bailouts and selective tax breaks, for supporting the most brutal and repressive third world dictatorships just so the big oil and mineral companies can get rich, for the rigged elections, for the flagrant corruption permeating the system from the global stage all the way down to the local level.
And despite all that, I still find myself supporting the establishment more often than not, because the alternatives are even worse. On the anti-establishment left you have socialists who don't know what socialism is, anarchists who don't understand the definition of anarchism, so-called Marxists who've never actually read Marx. They want to "smash capitalism" without even having a clear definition of what capitalism is, let alone the slightest idea of what kind of system they'd prefer to replace it. They don't understand fundamental principles of economics and propose policies that would be utterly disastrous if they were ever actually implemented. They gleefully endorse violence against their ideological opponents, they have nothing but disdain for anyone who doesn't support their agenda, and they're willing to throw basic human rights and freedoms under the bus whenever it suits their purposes. Some of them go as far as defending far-left dictators (or sometimes even far-right dictators who oppose the U.S.).
And even those guys aren't half as bad as the extremists on the anti-establishment right, who are really just the absolute lowest dregs of humanity. White supremacists and ethno-nationalists and "race realists," xenophobes who view immigrants as criminals and terrorists and leeches and job-stealers, misogynists who feel entitled to sex and think that "sluts" deserve to be raped, social conservatives who want to force women back into the kitchen and believe that an undifferentiated clump of cells should be prioritized over people's bodily autonomy, traditionalists who scream about how there are only two genders and how marriage should be between a man and a woman, conspiracy theorists who rant about the evils of the multicultural globalist agenda. And to top it all off, they have the nerve to complain about how they're the ones being oppressed because they can't be as bigoted as they want without facing social consequences.
Some people see libertarianism as a fourth option, but it largely seems like a dead end. Thanks to the Tea Party movement, a lot of the people claiming to be 'libertarians' are really just more anti-establishment right-wing extremists, wingnuts and populists and paleo-conservatives who happen to like weed and hate taxes. As for the actual libertarians, most of them are hopelessly naive idealists who'll never get anything done because they waste all their time bickering over ideological purity and refuse to accept any reforms that aren't 100% in accordance with their utopian values. But even aside from those flaws, there's just no real popular support for libertarianism among the general public, because at its core, it's really just another form of liberalism, and people are largely fed up with liberalism.
The sad fact is, liberalism has failed, and it's only natural that people would abandon liberal values in favor of the tempting promises that far-right and far-left extremism have to offer. But the problem with modern establishment liberalism was not liberal values; the problem was that the establishment was not liberal enough, that it didn't actually live up to the standards it claimed to espouse. The solution to the establishment's failure is not to abandon liberalism but to embrace it, to build a newer and better liberal order for the 21st century, free of the hypocrisy and corruption that plagues the current system.
What we need is not establishment centrism, nor is it nationalist or socialist extremism. What we need is radical centrism, fire-and-sword liberalism. What we need are brazen defenders of liberal values who are willing to stand up to both the establishment that's perverted those values as well the fascist and communist bastards who oppose those values as a matter of principle.