Limit Government Again, or Government Will Limit Us

"We have ruled for 832 years in this country and you used to bow in front of our rulers," said a political leader in India. King John said that 800 years ago, too.

"People like you threaten us, you insects threaten us," a Muslim leader in India told Hindus. "We have ruled for 832 years in this country and you used to bow in front of our rulers." He was subsequently arrested for "disturbing Communal Harmony."

Looking at the political trajectory in the West, we are headed toward the same kind of society, and I don't see how it can be avoided. The "progressives" among us actually believe in criminalizing speech and some conservatives (me included) are getting so worn down that we recommend using progressive tactics against progressives.

When "hate speech" laws are designed to discriminate against political enemies, why should we be surprised when the laws are expanded to discriminate against everyone?

The Black Book of Communism asked this question about the Bolsheviks, which we can legitimately ask about the Democratic Party today: "Why should maintaining power have been so important that it justified all means and led to the abandonment of the most elementary moral principles?"

The next sentence contained the answer: "The answer must be that it was the only way for Lenin to put his ideas into practice and ‘build socialism.’ The real motivation for the terror thus becomes apparent: it stemmed from Leninist ideology and the utopian will to apply to society a doctrine totally out of step with reality."

The same book also observed that "the [Russian civil] war was not a traditional confrontation between two opposing political groups, but a conflict between the government and the majority of the population."

In 1951, Hannah Arendt wrote in Antisemitism: Part I of The Origins of Totalitarianism that, "the true goal of totalitarian propaganda is 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."

In our fictitious 21st century world, it is wholly unsurprising that looting is reparations, criminals have the right to be released without bail, progressives can suppress speech, "transgender" men can own women’s bodies, and the "transabled" — aka Democrats with brain damage — have the right to be elected to the Senate.

As the insanity grows roots, lots of people are coming to realize that the West's problems are not "a traditional confrontation between two opposing political groups" — liberals vs conservatives — "but a conflict between the government and the majority of the population."

What is surprising — given the insane and growing list of things the government "must do on our behalf" — is that free men haven’t yet declared a literal civil war over the cancellation of the West's most fundamental social contract: limited government.