American Rousseau: Forward to 1762

The final installment of an essay exploring the ideological source of the modern totalitarian state. Or, why American Leftists violently resist giving power to the individual.

“A people, it appears, may be progressive for a certain length of time, and then stop: when does it stop? When it ceases to possess individuality.” — John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, 1869.

In the 1760’s, a French influencer wrote a book that convinced his countrymen to behead their king and establish a government that required individuals to surrender all their rights to the community. Around the same time, some English influencers decided they didn’t like their king, either, but that an absolute general will was no better than the divine right of kings, and freedom required lawmakers to be restrained from exercising tyranny over the individual; so they created a government with limited powers.

In the 1860’s, American influencers violently disagreed over the government’s power to legally enslave an entire race of people. Southern Democrats created a new Confederate government to conserve that power, and Americans killed more than 600,000 of their fellow citizens in a war to decide who would influence whom. A few years after that war, the French — chastened by their deadly encounter with community organizers — gave a gigantic Statue of Liberty to America.

In the 1960’s, American influencers finally extended full civil rights to the descendants of slaves, and then — in the midst of a whole lot of other influencing — ended the country’s limits on foreign immigration. Of the 1965 Immigration and Naturalization Act, Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.) said: “It will not flood our cities with immigrants. It will not upset the ethnic mix of our society. It will not relax the standards of admission.”

In recent years, influencers have transmogrified a limited American government “of, by, and for the people” into one that illegally forced nuns to provide birth control, asked citizens to report other citizens for spreading “misinformation,” fired workers who refused experimental “vaccines,” restricted the right of people to assemble in private homes, used private money to influence public elections, and colluded with the biggest corporations in history to censor public speech.

Examples of the new tyranny are legion and spreading fast. Today, repeat criminals have the right to be repeatedly released without bail, government has the right to suppress speech, black students have the right to segregate themselves from whites, and men have the right to buy, inhabit, and own women’s bodies.

It’s not clear which is the most egregious, but some tyrannies are clearly more egregious than others. Some state governments: a) allow public schools to intentionally confuse students about gender; b) prohibit parents from seeking to reverse that confusion; and c) give surgeons the right to irreversibly mutilate confused children who have not reached the age of understanding. Legislation has already been proposed that would criminalize and “educate” parents who refuse to “affirm” a child’s “gender identity.” It’s not known when children, against their parents’ wishes, will have the right to enjoy “boundary violations” with “minor attracted persons” — a fetid euphemism for child sexual abuse.

Nevertheless, huddled masses of immigrants still want to come here — witness the 50 million illegals apprehended since 1925, and Yale University’s estimate that some 30 million illegals managed to stay — but they are unaware that the original American bargain of limited government no longer applies.

If we have another civil war, it will be fought on much the same ground as the first: are there any limits to a government’s power over the individual, or can a government simply enslave whom it wants?

In other words, what will America look like in 2060?

American Rubicon

It’s fashionable to ask “how did we get here?” but we already know: leading politicians in both major parties, pushed by the cultural elite, abandoned their sworn duty to uphold constitutional limits on government power. We might say that die was cast long ago because power always corrupts; because politicians have always sought to absolutely increase their power; and because some even think they have good and moral reasons for doing so.

Just over 2,000 years ago, a Roman influencer — the governor of the province of Gaul — illegally led his army across the Rubicon River and into Rome. As he knowingly performed an act that everyone agreed was forbidden, he quoted a line from his favorite play: “Alea iacta est.” The die is cast. And cast it was, for Julius Caesar was both elected dictator by the Senate and then assassinated by members of the Senate. Civil war was followed by empire.

America has her own Rubicon: our social contract says government is merely the protector of “inalienable rights” that pre-exist any form of government, and that citizens consent to be governed as long as their government neither creates rights that don’t exist, nor cancels rights over which it has no power.

Politicians have been declaring ownership of human rights since the first lawyer emerged from the primordial ooze, but no society tried to make it illegal until 1776. And then, in 2001, a relatively unknown state senator decided to cross the American Rubicon.

“Generally,” that senator said, “the constitution is a charter of negative liberties. It says what the states can’t do to you, what the federal government can’t do to you, but it doesn’t say what the state government or the federal government must do on your behalf.”

Those words empowered our politicians to cast off the founding social contract of limited government and knowingly embrace a duty to violate the constitution — by canceling or ignoring some human rights and creating others (see the short list above). This is not a new idea from some undiscovered country, though; it is merely a repackaged version of the idea that led to the guillotines of the French Revolution.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the most widely read intellectual revolutionary in France at the time, published his Social Contract in 1762, insisting that civil society was responsible for destroying liberty, causing inequality, and subjecting humanity to “perpetual labor, slavery, and wretchedness.” His solution was an all-powerful government that would emancipate people from the tyranny of their fellow citizens.

In a 1767 letter to Honoré Riqueti, Comte de Mirabeau, Rousseau wrote: “It is of the essence of society to breed a ceaseless war among its members; and the only way to combat this is to find a form of government which shall set the law above them all.”

“Just as nature gives each man absolute power over all his members, the social compact gives the body politic absolute power over all its members,” he wrote in the Social Contract. “Each citizen would then be completely independent of all his fellow men, and absolutely dependent upon the state: which operation is always brought by the same means; for it is only by the force of the state that the liberty of its members can be secured.”

If you’re thinking that only a totalitarian could conceive of such an arrangement, you would be right. For Rousseau’s absolute state requires the “absolute surrender of the individual, with all of his rights and all of his powers, to the community as a whole,” and “anyone who refuses obedience to the general will is forced to it by the whole body.” A kinder, gentler, way of saying that is “what government must do on your behalf.”

The Once and Future Thought Crime

Before the Magna Carta of 1215, the idea of limited government was literal heresy, a thought crime against the king who was God’s representative. But in that year, a group of English nobles threatened civil war unless King John subjected himself to the rule of law and acknowledged, in writing, the liberties held by “free men.”

“Much explosive material is set out in the Magna Carta,” notes Britannica. “That the king genuinely wished to avoid civil war, that he was prepared to accede to reasonable demands for a statement of feudal law, and that he had a basic desire to give good government to his subjects are all strikingly shown by his submission to clauses that, in effect, authorized his subjects to declare war on their king.”

If Magna Carta provided the ancient foundation for individual rights in Anglo-American jurisprudence, the Social Contract was a depth charge under the waterline of the western nation state.

Unfortunately for the French, they fought over Rousseau’s idea in 1789, and people literally lost their heads: the leaders of the French Revolution created government by guillotine. The device not only beheaded their despotic king, but was eventually used on their own necks, making way for Napoleon Bonaparte to first declare himself dictator for life, and then Emperor.

Fortunately for America, the Founders sent Rousseau packing and adopted John Locke, who said men create governments to protect pre-existing human rights. Unlike Rousseau’s unlimited state, the power of Locke’s state is limited: since government is not the source of rights, government has no legal right to take them away.

Today we find ourselves at the same crossroads again. Are we “the people we’ve been waiting for” who will be raped by the community and deliver a totalitarian regime? Or will we abort the “general will” and reclaim the limited government that is literally our birthright?

The choice might be characterized as “give me heresy or give me death,” because our current leaders would happily oblige us either way.

The Speed of Science

So, who is the American Rousseau? As you have probably guessed, it is the 44th President of the United States, Barack Obama, who received the appellation from the Thurgood Marshall Law Review in January 2009.

In a paper titled American Rousseau: Barack Obama and the Social Contract, author Brian Gilmore contended that “Rousseau and Obama share some philosophical principles. Their acceptance of the idea of a social contract is the key.”

Gilmore waxed on for almost 50 pages about the history of the social contract “through Thomas Hobbes, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and into the modern era,” but — unexpectedly! — failed to mention that America’s first black president unilaterally repealed America’s social contract.

The utopian democracy described by Rousseau has been called the “mythical kingdom” because — like utopian socialism — it can only exist as myth. Each is a precursor to totalitarianism, but in the last 22 years mainstream American leaders have fully embraced Rousseau’s ancient prescription and the result is exactly what one would expect from a totalitarian recipe.

In 2012, the Supreme Court employed the Constitution’s apparently unlimited Commerce Clause to rule that the government could “compel a private citizen to engage in a private contract to buy health insurance.” The Affordable Care Act represented the “effective end of a government of enumerated powers,” argued Charles Krauthammer, who then asked, “is there anything the federal government cannot compel the citizen to do?”

Since then, Americans have discovered what else “the government must do on our behalf.” Governments must persecute climate deniers, vaccine deniers, and mask deniers — three subcategories of science deniers — because they are “literally killing us.” To “save our democracy,” governments must demonize dangerous “election deniers” who seek to be elected by the people. To “save the planet,” governments must bankrupt private companies that heat people’s homes in winter. To protect us from them — the “pandemic of the unvaccinated” — governments must require injections that do not protect us from the virus, and require “vaccine passports” that “prove” our meaningless vaccination status. To insulate us from “misinformation,” governments must collude with the biggest corporations in history to suppress truthful speech.

Anyone who refuses any of these benevolent mandates must be fired from their jobs and ostracized from civil society. This is what the government “of the people” must do “for the people.” This is Rousseau’s general will in action. This is the new, kinder, gentler, totalitarianism.

In 2020, government officials who denied citizens the most fundamental rights of all insisted they were merely “following the science.” Public health workers embarked on a social media campaign to shame people into locking themselves in their homes. Photos and videos of these loyal workers went viral, declaring, “I stayed at work for you, you stay at home for us.” Then, as massive Black Lives Matter protests kicked off nationwide, these same “public health advocates” declared “we do not condemn these gatherings as risky for COVID-19 transmission; we support them as vital to the national public health.”

For more than two years, governments in America and all over the world told us that the vaccines protect individuals, but — more importantly — they also protect all of society. But on Oct. 10, 2022, a Dutch member of the European Parliament, Rob Roos, questioned Pfizer director Janine Small about the vaccine.

“Was the Pfizer Covid vaccine tested on stopping the transmission of the virus before it entered the market?” Mr. Roos asked.

“No,” Ms. Small answered, adding that, “we had to really move at the speed of science to really understand what is taking place in the market.”

The admission, Roos said, “removes the entire basis for the COVID passport” that “led to massive institutional discrimination as people lost access to essential parts of society.”

Government’s response to the pandemic is the largest-ever human trial of Rousseau’s prescription for the absolute state. Elitists who never got over being denied absolute power have been using any means necessary to regain it, but Americans ruined their plans for over 200 years. The question facing the West now is whether we will go “back to the future” of absolutism or rebel against it once again.

“The Party Answered Only to Science”

In May 1943, University of California professor Robert Nisbet published a short paper in The Journal of Politics. Titled “Rousseau and Totalitarianism,” the paper was part of “the search for intellectual forerunners of the totalitarian state [that] has been widespread during recent years.”

Among the questions America sought to answer: How did the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party become the revolutionary Communist Party? How did “democratic socialists” arrive at the “scientific” truth that violence — unrestricted by any laws — would free the workers from their chains? (For more on that, see Vladimir Lenin, The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky, 1918.) What slippery slope allowed Leon Trotsky to publish In Defense of Terrorism in 1921 and wind up with a Soviet ice pick in his skull in Mexico City in 1940?

On the other side of the socialist front, how did Germany’s Weimar Republic give way to the National Socialist Workers Party? How did the self-described “real socialists” conclude that the Soviets just weren’t doing Socialism right and needed to be taught a lesson? And how could the German people — as Anton Drexler, founder of the Nazi Party put it — “rally around a purely socialist flag” and vote themselves out of a republic and into the Thousand Year Reich? (The Internet Archive deleted Drexler’s book for unspecified reasons. Here is a different source.)

Nisbet said totalitarianism is simply understood as “the internal invasion by the state of its civil society,” and it arises when politicians “desire to subjugate, and where possible exterminate, the groups, associations, statuses, and roles that are the building blocks of civil society and, ideally, to replace them all by relationships entirely of the state’s creation.”

As flawed as she is — as any government is — America until now has been understood to be perfecting her resistance to absolute power, and protecting individual rights from that power. If we are to live under a totalitarian regime, we Americans will have to consent. The French Rousseau provided the reason for that consent by saying the community is empowered to compel its neighbors to be “free,” and the American Rousseau translated that into “we are the ones we’ve been waiting for.”

Rousseau’s “supreme direction of the general will” is Karl Marx’s “dictatorship of the proletariat.” Both require every citizen to surrender not only their person, but also their power, to the collective. That definition of freedom is an inverted— nay, perverted — understanding of the word, and yet politicians who seek Rousseau’s pure democracy say they are “following the science” to get there.

In the 21st century, virtually every kind of science has been co-opted by totalitarian ideology. Medical science denies biology and plays maidservant to Big Pharma and Big Government. Behavioral science redefines pedophiles as “minor attracted persons.” Computer science helps suppress anti-totalitarian protests in China and America.

This kind of science is, of course, not science at all, but the scientism identified by Italian philosopher Augusto Del Noce, who watched Benito Mussolini’s fascists come to power in the 1930s. “The essential element of totalitarianism,” wrote Del Noce, “lies in the refusal to recognize the difference between ‘brute reality’ and ‘human reality,’ so that it becomes possible to describe man, non-metaphorically, as a ‘raw material’ or as a form of ‘capital.’ Today this view, which used to be typical of Communist totalitarianism, has been taken up by its Western alternative, the technological society.”

Del Noce’s ideas are discussed in a new book by Aaron Kheriaty, The New Abnormal: The Rise of the Biomedical Security State. “Scientism,” he writes, “is the philosophical claim — which cannot be proven scientifically — that science is the only valid form of knowledge.”

This is the dogma that drove Dr. Anthony Fauci to arrive at the position that if you attack him “you are attacking science.” Fauci is not the Church, and his critics are not heliocentric heretics challenging a State Religion, but in June 2021 he felt fully justified in saying, “If you are trying to get at me as a public health official and scientist, you’re really attacking not only Dr. Anthony Fauci, you are attacking science.”

“Genuine scientists don’t talk like this,” writes Kheriaty. Indeed. But Anthony Fauci talks like this because he is saying, in essence, “it is only by the force of the state that the liberty of its members can be secured.”

“Science” was similarly harnessed by 20th century politicians — neither Lenin nor Stalin were ever soldiers — who promised to “free workers from their chains” but instead birthed the worst totalitarian regime yet known to history. The most comprehensive historical treatment of that murderous ideology — The Black Book of Communism, first published in France in 1997 — soberly noted that, in the Soviet Union, the very basis of the regime was something all too familiar in America today: “The Party answered only to science.”

As Karl Marx wrote in Private Property and Communism (1844), “Natural science will in time incorporate into itself the science of man, just as the science of man will incorporate into itself natural science: there will be one science.”

And so, One Science there would be. As Simon Ings observed in Stalin and the Scientists (2016), the Communist Party “ruled in the name of scientific government” and “leaders and key bureaucrats were themselves dedicated amateur philosophers of science.”

“Science also justified the terror by requiring that all aspects of social and individual life be transformed,” noted the Black Book, and through the application of unconditional violence, Communists achieved a terrifying social conformity that took 100 million lives in less than 75 years. Today, as Kheriaty observes, techno-totalitarians don’t need “concentration camps, gulags, Gestapo, KGB, or openly despotic tyrants. Instead, dissenters are confined to a moral ghetto through censorship and slander.”

In America, that censorship and slander is accepted by roughly half the electorate. How? Because language is manipulated, because certain questions are forbidden, and because those who object are “placed outside the purview of polite society and excluded from enlightened conversation.”

The Soviets minimized the torture and murder of their citizens by referring to them not as “human beings” but as “the bourgeoisie” or “capitalists” or “enemies of the people.” Lenin ordered Tsar Nicholas II, his wife, and his children, murdered because they were “the representatives of feudalism,” “bloodsuckers,” “parasites,” or “lice.” To Hitler, the Jews were “filth” or “maggots in a rotting corpse” or a “spiritual pestilence worse than the Black Death.”

For some politicians in America, over 70 million voters are “deplorable” “haters” — or worse, “election deniers” who are a “threat to democracy” — and others are “unvaccinated” “Covid-deniers” who are “killing your grandmother.”

As the Black Book cogently observes, “The manipulation of language was one of the most salient characteristics of Leninism, particularly in the decoupling of words from the reality they were supposed to represent, as part of an abstract vision of society in which people lost their real weight and presence and were treated as no more than pieces in a social and historical erector set” (emphasis mine).

In the midst of what might be the most widespread use of propaganda in human history, specious claims of “fascism” and “big lies” are repeated by journalists and newspapers, CEO’s and corporations, doctors and hospitals, even as real science disproves the propaganda.

We know that Joe Biden’s claim of a “pandemic of the unvaccinated” was, in fact, a big lie. Similarly, there is no “21st century Jim Crow,” because, as but one example, the number of votes cast in recent Georgia elections are at an all-time high. And children were never at high risk of death from COVID-19, but a trio of big lies — that mandatory masking, mandatory vaccination, and mandatory school closures would “flatten the curve” — did not flatten the curve but did create a completely avoidable educational crisis. On the other hand, children are at high risk from a social contagion that promises “affirmative care” for “gender transition” — euphemisms for medical and psychological experiments that purport to create a more “authentic” version of the patient.

All these efforts have been undertaken by the government for “the people” with participation — and even enforcement — by individual members of the tech community, the educational community, the medical community, and the scientific community. In essence — we are told by programmers, teachers, and doctors — “it is only by the force of the state that the liberty of its members can be secured.” They will compel us to be “free.”

As we watch this scenario play out in the society around us, it is useful to know that both the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum and the National Institutes of Health have asked how it was that “more than half of all German physicians became early joiners of the Nazi Party” and how the Party so quickly dominated “Germany’s formerly independent professional medical organizations.”

In 2012, an article in the International Journal of Law and Psychiatry observed that Nazi physicians “conducted some of the most harmful medical experiments ever documented,” including the research-killings of 800 pairs of twins.

“One theory for Nazi doctors’ abandonment of the ancient and most basic tenets of ethical medicine,” the authors wrote, “is that medical doctors tend to have an authoritarian personality, characterized by a strong adherence to rules and a weak ability to control more primitive, ‘id-driven,’ impulses.”

The paper — written before so many American pediatric hospitals decided to cash in on transgender surgeries for minors — contends that the “reasons for the behavior of these German physicians are often difficult to comprehend in today’s medical and legal environment, where explicit consent from patients and subjects is mandatory, and where any intentional, even accidental, harm inflicted by physicians is publicly condemned and brought before the law.”

Only a decade on from that publication, millions of Americans are wondering why so many doctors have abandoned so many basic tenets of ethical medicine, and why so many of our fellow citizens fail to publicly condemn them.

More recent required reading on this subject includes a 2020 article in Tablet Magazine titled Why Did So Many Doctors Become Nazis? and a 2022 article from the Association of American Physicians & Surgeons titled The Nazification of American Medicine.

The theory proposed by the Journal of Law and Psychiatry suggested that “physicians were easily persuaded to follow newly established, barbaric rules of conduct” because of their “authoritarian personality.” But “practitioner narcissism” may have also been to blame, with its attending “inflated sense of self-importance in shaping the future of the nation and a desire for career advancement and public praise.”

Which brings us to the fundamental transformation.

The Fundamental Transformation

Peter Drucker was born in Austria in 1909, moved to England in 1933 after his writings were banned and burned by the Nazis, and came to the U.S. in 1937. Among his many influential works is The End of Economic Man: The Origins of Totalitarianism (1939).

In the preface to the 1969 edition, Drucker observed that “surely, no other event of recent Western history calls out more for analysis and explanation than the sudden emergence of a political creed that denies every single political value of the European tradition, and of a political system that, for the first time, at least in the West, totally denies the individual altogether.”

Hannah Arendt, the highly influential political philosopher born into a German-Jewish family in 1906, was forced to leave Germany in 1933, and subsequently left France for the United States in 1941. She didn’t use the words “fundamental transformation” in her 1948 book The Origins of Totalitarianism, but she did observe that wherever such a regime rose to power it “developed entirely new political institutions and destroyed all social, legal and political traditions of the country.”

And she brilliantly identified “the true goal of totalitarian propaganda” as “not persuasion but organization … to translate the propaganda lies of the movements woven around a central fiction ... into a functioning reality, to build up, even under non-totalitarian circumstances, a society whose members act and react to the rules of a fictitious world.”

On Feb. 6, 2008, the most famous “community organizer” in America, Barack Obama, said, “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for. We are the change that we seek.” On Oct. 30, 2008, on the cusp of his historic presidential election, he uttered another prophetic sentence: “We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America.”

Eight years later, his administration had proven that millions of Americans believed a fundamental transformation was necessary. They no longer wanted a government that restrained its own power, and they no longer restrained themselves. They exhorted each other to “do something” — to “emancipate people from the tyranny of their fellow citizens.” They had come to believe “it is only by the force of the state that the liberty of its members can be secured.”

And suddenly, Rousseau’s 250-year-old dogma, which preceded our Revolution and was rejected by our Founders, began to affect virtually every act undertaken by the public and private sectors.

By 2014, the Urban Institute — in what might be the understatement of the century — was saying that “government doesn’t always work as well as it should” and calling for “injecting private capital into the public sector.” The World Economic Forum was already having “conversations” with states, non-governmental organizations, and the private sector about “injecting expertise” into the “humanitarian ecosystem.”

The goal was, and still is, to use private capital to literally buy public outcomes, and by 2020, $400 million in private funds had been “injected” into the accounts of state election officials to influence the presidential election in favor of Joe Biden. Time called it the “secret” “shadow” campaign — by “a well-funded cabal of powerful people, ranging across industries and ideologies, working together behind the scenes to influence perceptions, change rules and laws, steer media coverage and control the flow of information” — that “saved the 2020 election.”

Also in 2020, Stanford professor Barbara Fried co-founded a “secretive Silicon Valley group” that donated $20 million to Democrats. As it happens, she is the mother of Sam Bankman-Fried, the now-bankrupt cryptocurrency wunderkind who spent $10 million on Biden in 2020, funneled over $40 million to Democrats in 2022, promised $1 billion for 2024, and then somehow “misaccounted” $8 billion of his customers’ funds.

To ensure Biden’s 2020 victory, Twitter — at the request of government actors — suppressed “wrong” opinions on COVID-19, gender identity, climate change, and Hunter Biden’s laptop. After the election, the Biden Administration colluded with private sector behemoths to actively censor “disinformation” and created an unconstitutional (now “officially” disbanded) “Disinformation Governance Board” to continue that work.

Even as Democrats leveraged corporate money and power for a political win in 2020, they leveled charges of “fascism” — the political command of private corporate power — against their Republican opponents. Never mind that the inventor of fascism was violently opposed to individual rights and smaller government, and was fanatically wedded to an “anti-individualistic” state that terminated “useless or harmful liberties” but preserved “those which are essential.” (One is reminded that liquor stores and strip clubs were “essential” businesses during the COVID-19 pandemic, but churches and skate parks were not.)

Heralding the modern Democratic Party’s slogans — Unity, Stronger Together, and Social Justice — Benito Mussolini chose an ancient Roman symbol of “unity, strength, and justice” to represent his Fascist State. Outside that State, he wrote, “no human or spiritual values can exist, much less have value. … If liberalism spells individualism, Fascism spells government.”

In the 21st century American form of fascism, the big-government politicians formerly known as Liberals have chosen the Big Lie that small-government Conservatives are the Fascists. It took about 50 years, but the 1960s liberals who told America their “free speech movement” would “save democracy” have begun doing what their government cannot legally do: meting out “consequences” for speech that is protected by the Constitution.

Sometime in the 2010’s, the phrase “you have freedom of speech, but not freedom from consequences” became commonplace, followed closely by “punch a Nazi.” Punching actual Nazis is a good idea, and although their scourge is not entirely dead its members are in extremely short supply — so our modern fascists are forced to invent them.

By 2022, Rousseau’s dogma drove President Biden to proclaim that Donald Trump’s “MAGA crowd” is “semi-fascist” and “really the most extreme political organization that’s existed in American history.” In response, military historian Victor Davis Hanson said the president “cannot really believe that roughly half the country is now more dangerous than Antifa, Black Lives Matter, the Weathermen, the American Nazi Party, the American Communist Party, and the Ku Klux Klan.”

The citizen jury has not returned its verdict on Mr. Hanson’s charge.

This is the End

Writing from California in 1943 — before the National Socialists had been not only militarily defeated but utterly destroyed — Robert Nisbet said it would be “a mistake, and perhaps a dangerous one, to find the essence of totalitarianism solely in its dictatorial form of government. … We are hardly prepared intellectually if we feel we can take refuge in an educational system which simply warns its students to beware of individual despotism and doctrines of force and absolutism. Totalitarianism, if it arises in America, will not make its ideological appearance so crudely.”

And indeed it has not. It has been, in fact, quite nuanced. America’s 44th president might be the most famous communist organizer in the country’s history, but Hannah Arendt’s observation about organizers creating “the rules of a fictitious world” carries special meaning in this third decade of the 21st century.

Rousseau’s dogma, adopted by Obama and his acolytes and true to totalitarian form, has deconstructed every institution of American civil society from the 4-H to the NCAA, much of the destruction occurring under the banner of Critical Theory, and all of it designed to indoctrinate and terrorize the population.

Today’s enforcers insist on a fictitious version of “science” that says men can become women, that evolution confers on those men no advantage in strength or speed over biological women, that new laws must allow these new uber women to compete in women’s sports, and that “deniers” of this fictitious science should be prosecuted. In this one example we can see — in America — what The Black Book of Communism called “the transformation of ideology and politics into absolute, ‘scientific’ truth.’”

But that one example is not what most shocks the conscience. What is most shocking is the sheer volume of all the diverse and horrifying examples, the chaos engulfing “family and village or neighborhood to the church, the economic association, trade union, school, university, even sports and hobby clubs.” (See R. Nisbet, “Arendt on Totalitarianism,” The National Interest, Spring 1992.)

Even more shocking still — if that were possible — is the realization that the chaos is intentional. Not that our leaders are the fentanyl dealers, the murderers, the gender surgeons, the drag queens, or the pedophiles. But they are intentionally implementing government policies that undermine “the people still living in the contexts of the traditional social order” — whose children are morally, emotionally, psychologically, and physically raped by the shock troops unleashed on society.

An extended quote from Nisbet’s 1992 article is illuminating (emphasis mine).

“The great strength of Arendt’s Origins thus is its unerring aim at the very heart of totalitarianism: the effort of the state, using whatever techniques may be available and seem necessary, to destroy civil society, all the way from the family and church to the constitutive ties of the historic nation itself. Totalitarianism, as Arendt repeatedly stresses, requires for its complete success the demolition of as much of civil society as possible. Not until civil society has been severely crippled through propaganda and terror does it become possible to create new, meaningful structures which are the conception and development of the absolute state: ‘The struggle for total domination of the total population of the earth, the elimination of every competing non-totalitarian reality, is inherent in the totalitarian regimes themselves.’”

Our totalitarians and their enablers will deny this, but all you need do is look around. Yes, our public institutions have embraced Mussolini’s vision of democracy — “an organized, centralized and authoritative democracy” in which the State “returns to the corporazioni” and imbues the soul with “unity, strength, and justice.” Yes, the State “educates the citizens” and “urges them to unity” while denouncing “individualistic” efforts to escape the new fictional reality. Yes, our progressive betters tell us if “respect for the State declines” then our democracy is “headed for decay.”

And yes, Americans have come to believe in community organizers much like we once believed in generals and railroad barons, because the organizers alone can give us “for the first time the picture of a greater community, something that has a strengthening and encouraging effect on most people.” (Which sounds really nice until you realize that quote is from page 715 of the 1941 English translation of Adolf Hitler’s National Socialist manifesto, Mein Kampf.)

In a recent conversation with Jordan Peterson, Christopher Rufo made the compelling case that the governing bodies of many of our public schools are already totalitarian. “We have officially in our law anti-discrimination, but unofficially the de facto law of our institutions is explicit and purposeful race and sex discrimination in service of left-wing ideology,” Rufo said. “We actually have what is really at heart a violation of the very basic social compact that defines our democratic institutions. … Because if the government is acting against the people without the consent of the people through their legislators to pursue its own ideological ends, that is the definition of tyranny.”

Our pontificating progressives who largely run the public school system insist that “Bush is Hitler” or “Trump is Mussolini,” but in 2016 one political party received nearly 99% of the donations from the biggest corporations in world history, bought fake Russian intelligence to influence the presidential election, used the FBI to spy on their political opponents, and a few years later accused over 70 million American voters of “insurrection” and “semi-fascism.”

To Hitler, “the Jews” were “the cause of Germany’s collapse.” Even worse, he wrote in Mein Kampf, “their entire existence is built on one single great lie.” To men like Joe Biden, white people are the cause of the American collapse, and their one single great lie of “white supremacy” has become “21st century Jim Crow” that tries “to suppress and subvert the right to vote in fair and free elections, an assault on democracy.”

These lies are so big, and have such far-reaching consequences, it is not surprising that many people cannot conceive they’ve been lied to. What is surprising — given the lies, the accusations, and the vast, insane, and growing list of things the mythical kingdom “must do on our behalf” — is that free men haven’t yet delivered an ultimatum over the cancellation of Magna Carta’s 800-year-old promise.

What if Mussolini’s terrifying words from the last century finally prove true almost 100 years later? “Never before have the peoples thirsted for authority, direction, order, as they do now,” he wrote. “If each age has its doctrine, then innumerable symptoms indicate that the doctrine of our age is the Fascist.”

It took just 27 years for Rousseau’s idea of a pure democracy to jumpstart mass beheadings in France, and 22 years have gone since Barack crossed the Rubicon. For those who believe the Big Lie — that it is “only by the force of the state that the liberty of its members can be secured” — the guillotine is the only way forward. The rest of us, no matter the cost, must resist the totalitarian government of the “community organizers.”

Author’s Note: Updated 2/27/23. I began this series of essays a year ago, and the last part proved the most difficult to write, partly because events are now moving faster than ever. In Part I, we discovered that the “Workers of the World Unite” slogan and the “We Believe” yard sign both mean something very different from what the words actually say. In Part II, we saw how the modern “anti-fascist” movement must invent enemies to exist.