Self-awareness not being their strong point, it rarely dawns on the dimly-lit consciousnesses of the left that dressing in black and marching the streets brandishing clenched fists, advocating an all-powerful state and beating to a pulp anyone who even looks like they might disagree with you is just a teensy bit, well, fascist.
These are, after all, the people who rushed out to buy 1984 following the Trump election – and apparently mistook it for an instruction manual.
Meanwhile, unheard immigrants from the Soviet bloc warn that totalitarian tyranny is actually emerging from the left — and Americans are too naive to see it coming.
Sounds crazy, right? I thought so when I first heard it from an elderly woman who spent six years as a political prisoner under Czechoslovakia’s Marxist regime. But the more I talked to people like her, the more I came to see them as canaries in a coal mine. Their message is the same: What’s happening in America today reminds me of life under Communism.
Of course, they’re not saying that the American left are about to perpetrate mass purges and engineered famines (even if Bernie Sanders’s staffers explicitly state that they’d set up gulags, given the chance). Just as Marxism today is a tangential offspring that often bears little superficial resemblance to the Marxism of Lenin, today’s totalitarianism is much more subtle than the old power-from-a-gun-barrel communism.
Stalinism 2.0 is not what the old dissidents predict. They point out that the left in power is achieving totalitarian goals — not simply obedience, but the internalization of left-wing ideology by much softer means.
Who needs the gulag when you can compel obedience by threatening someone’s job or destroy her reputation on social media? Why bother with the secret police when the masses already hand over detailed personal information to Google and other woke capitalist behemoths via smartphones and laptops?
The coming soft totalitarianism may well unify the government, major corporations, the media and leading institutions of civil society, which will collaborate to suppress dissent and coerce conformity. The United States could one day have its own version of China’s high-tech social credit system. Those who resisted Soviet Communism urge us to prepare now for resistance, while we still can.
The risk, here, is falling into the same trap as Umberto Eco, whose often-cited essay is a risible taradiddle which repeatedly sets up “Ur-Fascist” straw-men and pretends that they’re just the same as real Fascism. Eco’s “signs of Ur-Fascism” were almost all superficial and often indistinguishable from normal politics. Liking flags? What political party doesn’t drape its podium in flags and bunting?
Others were blatantly contradictory, such as the supposed “rejection of modernism”. This is nonsense, Fascism in fact presented itself as the most modernist of modern screeds – and not without some justification. Of all political ideologies, Fascism was the only one coined in the 20th century. Socialism, communism, democracy, even environmentalism, all date to the 19th century or much earlier.
As Roger Scruton noted, Eco simply blew so much smoke up the arses of his admirers that they were completely unable to see the mirrors.
So, in what way is America experiencing a “pre-totalitarian” situation? Hannah Arendt’s 1951 “The Origins of Totalitarianism” suggests some clues. Some are, like Eco’s, trivial and unconvincing. Others, though are chilling.
Loss of faith in hierarchies and institutions: Loneliness is politically significant because it leaves the masses hungry for a sense of community. In a healthy society, an individual could find fellowship and common purpose through the institutions of civil society: political parties, churches, civic clubs, sports leagues and the like. In contemporary America, these have largely withered.
Not just withered, but killed off. Just as the Nazis killed off the Boy Scouts and subsumed youth clubs under the all-encompassing Hitler Youth, would-be leftist totalitarians jealously undermine and white-ant every institution suspected of harbouring “conservatism”, from the Scouts to the Country Women’s Association.
Transgressiveness for its own sake: In both pre-Bolshevik Russia and pre-Nazi Germany, elites reveled in acts of rebellion that made fun of traditions and standards, moral and otherwise. They immersed themselves in baseness and called it “liberation.” They also took pleasure in overturning institutions and established practices for the sake of outsiders.
Consider the ghastly spectacles of morbidly obese, shaven-headed feminists rolling naked down the streets, shrieking “free the nipple!”, or platoons of g-stringed flaming queens mincing in “Pride” (so-called) parades. Not to mention the penchant for “Drag Queen Story Hours”.
In this context, too, the sudden, vehement push for same-sex marriage takes on a sinister new light. What was otherwise inexplicable – for decades, the gay movement had openly despised marriage as a stone-aged “straight” institution – suddenly becomes explicable. The gay marriage vendetta had little to do with “love” and everything to do with instituting transgressiveness and overthrowing social norms.
In practice, societies which have legalised gay marriage have indeed seen a subsequent decline in the overall marriage rate. Marxist mission accomplished.
Susceptibility to propaganda and ideology: In pre-totalitarian nations, wrote Arendt, hating “respectable society” was so narcotic that elites were willing to accept “monstrous forgeries in historiography” for the sake of striking back at those who, in their view, had “excluded the underprivileged and oppressed from the memory of mankind.” It’s like Arendt anticipated The New York Times’ fraudulent 1619 Project.
Not to mention the unquestioning, wholesale acceptance of blatantly fake news, especially the most absurd allegations about President Donald Trump.
America is sleepwalking into soft totalitarianism. If we ignore the prophetic voices of those who survived Communism, we deserve what we get.
In Australia, too, refugees from communist-era Poland are shocked to see the same things happening again in Melbourne in 2020, under “Dictator Dan”.
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