And to be honest it took me a long, long time to deal with it. It was agonizing. I spent a lot of time going back and hitting the books for history, political theory, asking myself "WHAT HAPPENED? How did it go so bad?" and what I learned was even worse, in every way. This is always how they are.

There was no way to get around it. My ardent liberalism had been wrong. I was wrong about socialism and anarchism being juvenile and unserious, I was wrong about liberalism being mature and levelheaded, I was wrong about liberalism's goals. I had to admit a lot of failures and errors.