The New Totalitarians (Part 1)
The constant battle against domination by self-proclaimed elites
“All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” — Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina.
Just about every literate person is familiar with this quote. Tolstoy captured the feeling that every unhappy person has: that his or her own troubles are unique. And that idea dominates current American political discourse; every day you hear some blatherskite claim that the troubles currently afflicting the body politic are unique and uniquely destructive, and that unless they are rejected (preferably by adopting the preferred policies of said blatherskite), some portion (or even all) of current society or even the world will be destroyed.
The yakkers predicting such disasters always claim that the current situation is unprecedented and that a failure to react instantaneously will mean the end of, in the words of the Superman comics, “truth, justice, and the American way”. Both pundits on the left and pundits on the right make similar claims, although their triggering events are necessarily different. The major point of this article will be to highlight such claims, identify their key elements, and then show that they are all manifestations of the same desire for total control that is so passionately embraced by both of the most extreme factions in the current political maelstrom.
The Flight 93 Election Canard
For example, one of the most extreme (and, to be honest, most influential) claims made by supporters of The Former Guy in 2016 was that the presidential election that year was a “Flight 93 election”, as discussed in the linked article written anonymously by former Trump national security aide Michael Anton. The article became a linchpin holding together paleoconservatives and the New Right. One of Anton’s claims in the article follows:
Let’s be very blunt here: if you genuinely think things can go on with no fundamental change needed, then you have implicitly admitted that conservatism is wrong. Wrong philosophically, wrong on human nature, wrong on the nature of politics, and wrong in its policy prescriptions. Because, first, few of those prescriptions are in force today. Second, of the ones that are, the left is busy undoing them, often with conservative assistance. And, third, the whole trend of the West is ever-leftward, ever further away from what we all understand as conservatism.
Without wanting to nitpick, it seems very strange to argue in 2016 that “the whole trend of the West is ever-leftward”, especially less than thirty years after the most leftward totalitarian empire in the world (the Soviet Union) had collapsed, and during a time that, in the United States, an active conservative/libertarian movement had developed within the legal profession (the Federalist Society) specifically to oppose unconstitutional leftward trends. If the “whole trend of the West” really was “ever-leftward”, wouldn’t the Federalist Society be persona non grata in legal circles?
Anton goes on to claim that conservatives have “been losing ground for at least a century”. As a result, he and the pro-Trump magazine/website American Greatness claimed the following:
One of the Journal of American Greatness’s deeper arguments was that only in a corrupt republic, in corrupt times, could a Trump rise. It is therefore puzzling that those most horrified by Trump are the least willing to consider the possibility that the republic is dying. That possibility, apparently, seems to them so preposterous that no refutation is necessary.
“The republic is dying!” Desperate measures are needed! The mere presence of President Donald Trump proves it!
This is an unfalsifiable circular argument. Donald Trump isn’t killing the republic; the rise of Donald Trump proves the republic is dying. Sure.
Of course, one of the oldest maxims of scientific thought is that extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof, not panic and hysteria. But instead of proof, Anton offers more overblown and overheated rhetoric:
A Hillary presidency will be pedal-to-the-metal on the entire Progressive-left agenda, plus items few of us have yet imagined in our darkest moments. Nor is even that the worst. It will be coupled with a level of vindictive persecution against resistance and dissent hitherto seen in the supposedly liberal West only in the most “advanced” Scandinavian countries and the most leftist corners of Germany and England. We see this already in the censorship practiced by the Davoisie’s social media enablers; in the shameless propaganda tidal wave of the mainstream media; and in the personal destruction campaigns—operated through the former and aided by the latter—of the Social Justice Warriors. We see it in Obama’s flagrant use of the IRS to torment political opponents, the gaslighting denial by the media, and the collective shrug by everyone else.
Do name-calling and fear-mongering substitute for actual arguments these days? Or did I miss the arrest and imprisonment of Donald Trump, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and Lauren Boebert?
Yet such shoddy thinking persists. Are policy disagreements or “cancel culture”, as it has been dubbed, really proof that the republic is dying? According to Anton, yes. But a couple of weeks ago, I wrote about J.K. Rowling and the efforts to cancel her over her opposition to treating “intact” males as legal women. Rowling was being harassed online this past week, and her response was priceless:
And that says a lot more than the claims of Michael Anton or other Trump followers: yes, there are people who want to cancel Rowling, BUT SHE ISN’T CANCELLED. Yes, some people probably do get cancelled, but a lot of that comes back to their relative anonymity. Frankly, such activities go back to colonial times, with Puritan preachers “cancelling” non-Puritan speakers and writers. Is something that has existed for hundreds of years actually “proof” that the American republic is dying in the present day?
Or is it merely proof that, as P.T. Barnum was quoted as saying, “there’s a sucker born every minute”?
The New Suckers Born Every Minute
Apparently the latter, because here’s an excerpt from an article that ran on October 20 in the pro-Trump website The Federalist, written by a staff writer named John Daniel Davidson:
[T]he conservative project has largely failed, and it is time for a new approach. Conservatives have long defined their politics in terms of what they wish to conserve or preserve — individual rights, family values, religious freedom, and so on. Conservatives, we are told, want to preserve the rich traditions and civilizational achievements of the past, pass them on to the next generation, and defend them from the left. In America, conservatives and classical liberals alike rightly believe an ascendent left wants to dismantle our constitutional system and transform America into a woke dystopia. The task of conservatives, going back many decades now, has been to stop them.After all, such banning movements were the reason that the Founding Fathers of American government installed a strong protection for free speech in the First Amendment to the Constitution (“Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech. . .”) .
In an earlier era, this made sense. There was much to conserve. But any honest appraisal of our situation today renders such a definition absurd. After all, what have conservatives succeeded in conserving? In just my lifetime, they have lost much: marriage as it has been understood for thousands of years, the First Amendment, any semblance of control over our borders, a fundamental distinction between men and women, and, especially of late, the basic rule of law. . . .
Western civilization is dying. The traditions and practices that conservatives champion are, at best, being preserved only in an ever-shrinking private sphere. At worst, they are being trampled to dust. They certainly do not form the basis of our common culture or civic life, as they did for most of our nation’s history.
Really? Is the First Amendment dead? Perhaps Alex Jones thinks so (“I can’t even get away with defaming grieving parents as liars and play-actors any longer!”), but libel and slander have always been seen as illegal and have never been protected by the First Amendment, regardless of Jones’ attempts to hide behind it. And the horrible people who support him may agree with him. But outside of those fever swamps, the idea is ludicrous on its face.
And do people in general, outside of the small handful of progressives and activists targeting Rowling (as well as any others who doubt the trans orthodoxy), actually not understand the distinction between men and women? Yes, those science deniers have disproportionate strength within the Democratic Party — but the Trumpist election deniers have disproportionate strength within the Republican Party, too. The race to the bottom continues at full speed down parallel roads.
And have we really lost “the basic rule of law” at a time when one of the most legally unjustifiable Supreme Court decisions ever, Roe v. Wade, has just been relegated to the dustbin of history after 49 years?
And yet this nonsense continues on what claims to be the right. As of now, according to Nick Catoggio (“Allahpundit”) of The Dispatch, the current Republican electorate breaks down into three factions, with the “Flight 93” crew almost as large as the partisans who would vote for any Republican:
I imagine the modern Republican Party as a three-part coalition. On optimistic days I split that coalition 30/50/20 and on pessimistic days I split it 40/50/10. The 40 percent are hardcore MAGA, the voters who insist upon Trump or at least a convincing authoritarian simulacrum of him. The 10 percent are Trump skeptics, the pool in which The Dispatch fishes for readers. The 50 percent are the swing faction, the zombie partisans who’ll vote for whatever the party puts in front of them with varying degrees of enthusiasm. They might prefer a traditional Republican on the merits. But if forced to choose between being governed by an aspiring autocrat and a Democrat, they’ll take the autocrat every time.
I could continue to pick on the 30-40 percent who make up the New Right, but I also need to turn attention to the totalitarians on the other side. But before I switch focus, I want to discuss one more point in this regard: the American law of “public accommodations” and its role in the partisan shifts between Democrats and Republicans during my lifetime.
The Law of Public Accommodations Helps Shift the South
Here is the electoral college map of the 1956 election, in which Dwight “Ike” Eisenhower swept everything except for some of the “Solid South”: the former slave states that had voted Democratic since the Civil War. Seven former slave states (six of whom seceded) opted for the Democrats; the other 41 states backed Ike.
This map looks like a serious aberration compared to the maps of today. For example, here’s the 2020 map:
What happened to the “Solid South”? It switched from “straight Democratic” to “leans Republican” during this period. Why? One part of it has to do with public accommodation law. Public accommodations are defined as businesses, whether publicly owned or privately owned, that serve the general public (thus, excluding private clubs). In traditional American law, merchants had absolute freedom as to whom they served.
Because of this feature in traditional law, the “Jim Crow” racial discrimination practiced throughout the American south, which became institutionalized by the Supreme Court’s blunder in Plessy v. Ferguson, ended up leading many Northern places, from restaurants to theaters, to practice equivalent racial discrimination, limiting or banning access of blacks, so as not to offend their customers who had lived in the South — generally solely due to relatively small differences in the amount of melanin in skin pigmentation. And even after eliminating Jim Crow laws that had been approved under the Plessy standard, not much changed: for example, “white” restaurants still wouldn’t serve blacks.
Such exclusionary measures were always controversial, at least outside of the southeastern United States. Classical economic theory held that such a practice would not continue once it was no longer mandated by law, because of the market opportunity presented to business owners who served everyone. Unfortunately, that theory proved to be less than accurate in practice in the short term. And so the North acted to mandate the change to nondiscrimination. By 1964, about half the states in the U.S. had laws banning such discrimination in places that were defined as “public accommodations”.
Public accommodations law was expanded to a federal law by Title II of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which banned all such discrimination on the basis of “race, color, religion, or national origin” in all public accommodation businesses involved in interstate commerce (which basically included every such business; see Heart of Atlanta Motel, Inc. v. U.S. (1964)). But one of the people who was most opposed in general to Title II was the Republican presidential candidate that year, Barry Goldwater, a strong libertarian who saw the law on public accommodations as an unjustified infringement on the centuries-old rights of business owners to manage their businesses.
As a result of Goldwater’s opposition here, support among blacks for the Republican presidential ticket plunged from about 75% for Dwight Eisenhower in 1956 (although, due to voting restrictions in the South, more blacks who were able to vote lived in the North and voted Democratic. meaning that Ike only received about 40% of the black votes actually cast) to about 20% for Goldwater in 1964. Running parallel to this shift was a serious segregationist movement within the Democratic Party, led by former Alabama governor George Wallace, who became the leader of the American Independent Party formed by and for segregationist Democrats.
Richard Nixon’s “Southern Strategy”
In the 1968 election, Republican candidate Richard Nixon took advantage of this Democratic split with his “Southern strategy”, an effort to lure a majority of segregation supporters from Wallace to the Republican Party without opposing the gains in civil rights. It worked; although Wallace won five “Deep South” states (Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Louisiana, and Mississippi), Nixon won all of the other former “slave states” except for Maryland and Texas (North and South Carolina, Delaware, Florida, Kentucky, Missouri, Oklahoma, Tennessee, and Virginia). Beginning with that election, Republicans became the dominant party within the once-Democratic “Solid South”.
However, to enable this shift without alienating traditional Republican voters, who traditionally had been very supportive of civil rights, openly segregationist and white supremacist Republicans generally were treated the same way within the GOP that Republicans had previously treated John Birchers and other paleoconservative extremists: public shunning and sometimes expulsion. You might even call it “cancel culture”. And that generally remained the rule within the Republican Party until the arrival of Donald Trump, who avidly sought that excluded bloc of Republicans — and their same segregationist beliefs — as his base within the Republican Party.
Of course, Trump followers will squeal that they aren’t racists; it’s a dirty lie spread by those leftists destroying the republic! And, unquestionable, some number of Trump supporters are not racists. But, as this article by Alec Dent in the new Vanity Fair (“The Right’s Quiet Un-Cancelling of a Dead White Supremacist”) describes, open racists such as Sam Francis are once again being cited as primary influences by Trump-aligned “conservatives”, ranging from Arizona senate candidate Blake Masters (backed by both Trump and Peter Thiel) to — in what is probably no surprise — the same Flight 93 election-spewing Michael Anton quoted above.
Because many of you may not be familiar with Sam Francis, here are some examples of his thoughts from the article:
In the pages of Chronicles, [Francis] praised [former KKK head] David Duke for fighting to protect “the American Way of Life.” He said immigrants couldn’t be expected to assimilate to “Euro-American” morals and culture. He questioned why the federal government should be involved in ending racial discrimination and why Republicans would try to engage in outreach to Black voters. (These are all articles from 1990, well before some of his modern defenders claim he turned to white nationalism.)
And so, as a result, he was discredited among Republicans back then — but, like a zombie, his strand of racist peleoconservatism returned from the grave under Trump:
At the time, Greg Forster, of the conservative think tank Center for Equal Opportunity, told the Washington City Paper that he hoped to discredit Francis in the same way National Review founder William F. Buckley discredited antisemites in the conservative movement decades prior. Francis maintained a cult following, and continued to write for Chronicles, Taylor’s American Renaissance, and VDARE, until his death, but defenses of Francis are hard to come by. Or, at least they were until Donald Trump ran for president.
Alec Dent, the author of this article about Francis, is an editor at a site I frequently cite here, The Dispatch. Because of articles like this, there are a sizable number of alleged conservatives (“conservatives-in-name-only”?) who constantly trash The Dispatch, claiming that it only targets people on their side. That’s false, of course, but the idea that you should abandon principles for partisanship is right at the rotten core of the Trump backwash.
And yet. . . . Sam Francis did have at least one worthwhile insight — the concept of “anarcho-tyrrany”, which was defined by Dispatch writer Kevin D. Williamson as “a situation in which the government either refuses to or is unable to enforce its most fundamental laws — e.g., controlling the borders . . . — while at the same time it seeks to regulate the minutiae of citizens’ lives with . . . terrible moral ferocity”. Which brings us to the other wing of the new totalitarians: the progressive left.
Be Seeing You
But that discussion of the progressive left’s “terrible moral ferocity” will have to wait for Part 2 of this article. And maybe after that, we’ll take a look at the upcoming Supreme Court redistricting case from North Carolina (Moore v. Harper) about the “independent state legislature doctrine”, which achieves a rare distinction: the arguments of both sides are quite probably wrong. And maybe we’ll still write about the rock/folk/pop group The Jayhawks pretty soon. And — in the more important development — I’m going to go to Colorado and visit my daughters, my son-in-law, and my granddaughter and grandson-to-be over Halloween weekend!
But before I sign off, I just need to direct a little more approbation at probably the worst people in the world (to borrow a phrase from onetime ESPN sports reporter turned political lunatic Keith Olbermann): Russian war criminal Vladimir “Vladolf” Putin and his supporters. I continue to see people I formerly thought of as reasonably intelligent utter words of praise for Vladolf, which is as sad as seeing support for Sam Francis. Anyway, for those people who need refutations of Vladolf’s talking points, let me direct you to Luke Coffey of the Hudson Institute and his October 20 article, “Ten Myths about US Aid to Ukraine”. I know Vladolf’s fan club worships his “Christian revivalism”, which is intertwined with his genocidal ways, but mass genocide in Ukraine is nothing new to Russia even before it discovered religion — and it was just as wrong then as now.
This person thinks cancel culture exists and likes its
https://www.yahoo.com/now/why-cancel-culture-good-democracy-120000525.html
As we await party II: back to “cancel culture” - does it exist - is it a figment of the alt-right? It is so hard to try and honesty wade through the competing information/media sources but it sure seems like the the tiny core of folks I was vaguely aware of back in law school (looking at you mousy woman whose name I cannot remember who step eating lunch with me after I said mildly right of center things in Con Law) whose mushroomed into a group running the show lots of places. I don’t know what to make of this type of event. Obviously need the specific words said but: https://www.wsj.com/articles/no-dissent-allowed-at-hogan-lovells-abortion-dobbs-roe-v-wade-meeting-safe-space-forum-genocide-lawyers-outrage-11669753147?st=vkmfw2vn0x0djcy