Liberalism Is the Near Enemy of Buddhism

On dharma, communalism, and the stubborn human instinct to care for one another.

I rewatched Children of Men recently. I remembered the infertility, the collapsing world, the single pregnant woman who becomes a kind of last ember of hope. What I’d forgotten was the texture of the place: a society that hasn’t only stopped reproducing, but has stopped caring.

The violence in that world isn’t theatrical. It’s flat. It’s the violence of people who haven’t fully accepted their impending decline. A moral dullness settles over everything, the kind that looks calm if you squint. Indifference reads as equanimity. Pity passes as compassion. Politeness substitutes for love.

The dystopia didn’t unsettle me. The familiarity did. The buses hauling migrants to camps, the grainy government messaging, the drained expressions of people who no longer expect anything from anyone. It felt less like prophecy and more like documentation. As if Alfonso Cuarón simply filmed the century we’ve already stepped into.

Halfway through, I found myself crying in a way that felt less like cinematic catharsis and more like an overdue encounter with the world outside my own walls.

I was grieving the erosion of something in us: the capacity for collective care, the basic sense that we owe each other more than tolerance. I was grieving the loss of our instinct to take responsibility for one another.

But, as a spiritual caregiver, what struck me most was how religion—or more specifically, spirituality— functions in the film as the last remaining antidote to the deadening effects of the society around it. Spirituality is what keeps certain characters attuned to suffering, unwilling to abandon their responsibility to one another. It’s the difference between moral drift and moral clarity.

Once I saw that, the entire film clicked. Children of Men isn’t warning us about a hypothetical future. It’s describing the present: a culture that asks us to stay calm while the ground shifts beneath us, to call it “safety” when we retreat into a self-protective bubble, to regulate our feelings instead of addressing the conditions that produce them.

It would have been much easier for the villainy of the story to reside in totalitarianism. But the deeper truth is that near enemies are far more pernicious than outright opposition. A near enemy looks close enough to the real thing to fool the untrained heart. It mimics virtue while hollowing out its ethical force.

And this, strangely, is where I found our sanghas in the film: not in the agents of brutality, but in the atmosphere of well-managed apathy that passes for stability, the orderly numbness that mistakes itself for peace.

The Dharma teaches that the near enemy of mettā (loving-kindness) is sentimental attachment, the near enemy of karuṇā (compassion) is pity, the near enemy of muditā (sympathetic joy) is self-centered joy, and the near enemy of upekkhā (equanimity) is indifference.

The near enemy mimics the posture of virtue while emptying it of moral force.

Liberalism similarly offers the promise of decency without disruption, ethics without conflict, compassion without consequence. It is a politics designed to prevent the very forms of solidarity necessary to survive a future shaped by climate chaos, economic precarity, and the psychic shock of historical violence unfolding in real time on our phones.

It is a political imitation of ethical life—gentle in tone, hollow in consequence.

And nowhere is this sedative more visible than inside American Buddhism.

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The Fracture in the Mahāsaṅgha

For years now, I’ve felt a quiet but unmistakable fissure widening inside the American Buddhist world. It’s been subtle, almost subterranean, the sort of thing you register in tone before you register it in language. A hesitation in the meditation hall. A discomfort during Q&R. A tightening whenever geopolitical events—queer liberation, BLM, Gaza—threaten the family culture of avoidance.

But the past two years have stripped away whatever ambiguity remained. The Gaza genocide, the acceleration of climate breakdown, the collapse of social safety nets, and the startling silence of so many Buddhist institutions have pulled the divide into plain view.

You can sit in a room now and feel the split as clearly as temperature: there are liberal Buddhists and leftist Buddhists, and we are no longer inhabiting the same moral terrain.

This divide isn’t about “politicizing the Dharma.” It’s about liberalism’s limits—limits Buddhism has quietly inherited from the cultural milieu that brought it to the West.

Liberal Buddhism is built on the promise that inner peace can substitute for outer change. That neutrality is maturity. That conflict is a sign of personal imbalance. It thrives in spaces where suffering is primarily existential rather than structural—where meditation serves as a balm for the discontent of otherwise comfortable lives.

It’s a Buddhism optimized for self-improvement industries: the meditation app, the corporate retreat, the suburban sangha where moral complexity must be toned down for the sake of group cohesion or fundraising.

Leftist Buddhists live in another atmosphere entirely. For us, dukkha is not an abstract puzzle but something woven into historical and economic structures. We read Ambedkar and Buddhadāsa and Bhikkhu Bodhi not to politicize the Dharma, but because they reveal its political traction.

Our practice follows us into organizing, mutual aid networks, and protest lines. It demands we see suffering not as a private inconvenience but a collective crisis.

Liberalism and Buddhism rely on incompatible theories of the self, responsibility, and liberation. And the dissonance between them is now impossible to ignore.

Because liberalism, like any near enemy, feels like it should fit the Dharma. But once you look closely, you realize it replaces compassion with pity, equanimity with indifference, and wisdom with self-protective silence.

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The Liberal Self and the Buddhist Not-Self

Even at its most compassionate, liberalism centers the individual. Rights are possessions. Freedom is self-ownership. Responsibility is voluntary. The system exists to protect personal choice, not collective obligation.

Clinging masquerades as virtue—attachment to identity, to views, to righteousness.

Buddhism begins elsewhere. There is no independent self to defend. Everything arises in interdependence.

The Dharma does not grant us the right to peace while others burn. It reminds us that our peace is braided into theirs.

Here again: the near enemy.

Liberalism looks like mettā because it speaks of kindness. But its kindness ends at the boundary of personal comfort.

It looks like upekkhā because it values neutrality. But its neutrality is just polite aversion.

It looks like karuṇā because it acknowledges suffering. But it refuses to confront the structures causing it.

This is why American Buddhism feels increasingly unmoored: it was imported into a culture constructed around the sovereignty of the individual. What emerged was a kind of therapeutic Dharma—one that could be practiced alone, purchased as a product, and understood as a lifestyle choice rather than a collective experiment in liberation.

But as Bhikkhu Bodhi has warned, if we allow Buddhism to be reduced to a form of mental therapy or a practice for inner peace, we rob it of its capacity to diagnose the roots of suffering in the structures of society.

The Dharma is not neutral. It never has been. And liberalism conditions us to forget that.

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When Marx Wanders Into the Meditation Hall

I’m hearing more and more leftist Buddhists talk about Marxism—not as a rival philosophy, but as a diagnostic tool. Marxism, stripped of its Cold War caricatures, is a method for understanding how suffering is organized through political and economic systems. It explains why exploitation happens, why wealth concentrates, why crises recur, why alienation deepens.

For those of us practicing Dharma with our eyes open, Marxism often feels like the missing vocabulary for things Buddhism has always implied.

The Buddha analyzed upādāna: clinging to identity, property, power.

Marx analyzed alienation, extraction, ownership.

Different languages, similar insights.

Where I diverge from Marx isn’t in the diagnosis but the destination. Marxism is brilliant at describing what must fall. I am less convinced by its descriptions of what must emerge in its place. Central planning, transitional states, proletarian governance—these models hinge on forms of vertical power that don’t align with the world I want to build or the world the Dharma gestures toward.

Because overthrowing capitalism is necessary, yes. But sustaining something humane afterward matters just as much.

And here, too, liberalism shows its near-enemy face: it critiques excesses but never the structure. It wants relief, not revolution. Rehabilitation, not reorientation.

The Dharma demands more than that. It always has.

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Communalism as the Dharma’s Political Shape

While I agree with Marxism’s diagnosis, and possibly with the need for a class revolution, I am not as convinced by its post-revolution vision.

The state that Marxism imagines as a temporary steward of the commons has never, in practice, shown much inclination to wither. Hierarchy tends to regenerate itself. Vertical power rarely dissolves. And even the most principled revolutionary program, once centralized, becomes vulnerable to the very forms of domination it originally sought to dismantle.

This is where communalism inspires me.

Communalism, generally speaking, is a political philosophy that argues human freedom is only possible when political power is rooted in face-to-face assemblies—units small enough that people are accountable to one another, and decisions are made by those who must live with them.

Its architecture is profoundly simple: local assemblies at the bottom, confederated councils above them, each delegate recallable, each layer designed to prevent domination rather than reconstitute it.

Communalism refuses to replace top-down power with new top-down power. It imagines federated networks of local assemblies, ecological governance, mutual aid as civic infrastructure, and decision-making scaled to lived relationships rather than bureaucratic abstraction. It is a political vision grounded in relationship rather than representation, interdependence rather than individualism.

It’s not utopian. It’s simply human-sized.

And it’s the closest political expression of the Sangha the Buddha actually imagined: a community of shared responsibility, shared resources, shared vows.

The historical Sangha was a revolutionary experiment in redistribution long before socialism had a name. Shared labor, shared food, shared dwellings. A rejection of caste hierarchy. A refusal to organize society around ownership.

Communalism is that vision brought into sustainable political form.

It is, in many ways, the Dharma translated into governance, and it exposes liberalism’s cracks even more starkly. Because if communalism is the political analogue of Sangha, then liberalism mimics community while undermining the obligations that make community sustainable.

Liberalism offers all the gestures of connection with none of the demands. It proposes a community that costs nothing, a politics that risks nothing, a compassion that transforms nothing. But the Dharma has no such illusions. The Dharma insists that liberation is enacted with others; that freedom is shared or it is not freedom; that the spiritual life is necessarily a social life.

Communalism, in this light, is not an alternative to Buddhism but its political maturation. It takes interdependence seriously enough to build institutions around it.

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What Comes After Liberal Buddhism

The question American Buddhists face now is not whether to be political—everything is political. The question is whether the shape of our politics will continue to reflect liberal assumptions that isolate suffering within the individual, or whether it will reflect the deeper, more demanding vision of interdependence the Dharma actually teaches.

What collapses societies is not a lack of meditation apps or wellness language. It is the loss of the instinct to care for one another — the same loss that haunted the world of Children of Men. And unless we recover a Dharma capable of confronting structural suffering rather than soothing us through it, we will drift toward that same horizon.

We do not need more compassionate liberals. We need post-liberal Buddhists. People who understand that liberation is relational. Who grasp that neutrality in the face of injustice is not equanimity but abdication. Who recognize that collective safety is a spiritual obligation, not a side project.

Who refuse the near enemies that mask indifference as peace.

We need people willing to build the parallel structures—mutual aid networks, local assemblies, community defense formations, spiritual circles grounded in accountability—that will carry us into whatever future remains.

The world ahead will not be liberal. It will not be capitalist. And it will not be delivered from above. It will be assembled by the communities willing to remind one another that we belong to each other in ways liberalism has taught us to forget.

If the Dharma has always pointed toward anything, it is this: liberation is not a solitary pursuit. It is a collective inheritance.

In spiritual solidarity,
🧿Constant Craving ✨