The defining characteristic of tyranny is the diversion
of power from the people to the unelected elite. The elite can claim to be
inspired by Allah or Marx; it can act in the name of racial purity or universal
workers compensation or both. The details don’t matter, because in all
instances, tyranny derives its justification from the superiority of the rulers
and the inferiority of the people.
The left launched two revolutions. One was the hard
revolution of bombs and assassinations by those who did not have the time or
patience to wait for the long march through the institutions of the state. This
revolution was born quickly and died quickly. It killed millions and choking on
their blood it died by stages, losing its ideas and then its power, until there
were only a few old men and women in shawls clinging to red velvet portraits of
Stalin.
But there was also the soft revolution that was slow and
subtle. It was a revolution of laws, rather than bombs. It did not concern
itself with 5-year-plans but with 50-year-plans. It proceeded by increments,
raising the temperature so very gradually that the free world did not realize
it was cooked until it could smell its own burning flesh.
The revolutions of the east failed. They rose quickly in
fire and fury and only ashes and statues remain. But the revolutions of the
west have been underway for generations in countries where millions of men and
women go about their business without realizing what is taking place around
them.
When H.G. Wells met with Lenin in 1920, he wrote, “Our
essential difference, the difference of the Collectivist and Marxist, the question
whether the social revolution is, in its extremity, necessary, whether it is
necessary to overthrow one social and economic system completely before the new
one can begin.”
Lenin demanded a revolution that would directly attack
the capitalist system, but Wells believed that, “through a vast sustained
educational campaign the existing Capitalist system could be civilized into a
Collectivist world system.”
That educational campaign is the soft tyranny we see all
around us. The educational campaign is a nanny state in which we are forever
being educated by our betters for our own good. The nanny state has a short term purpose and a long term
purpose. Its short term purpose is to educate us out of our selfish freedom of
choice. Its long term purpose is to incrementally “civilize” or “evolve” a free
people into collectivism through smaller measures undertaken in the name of the
public good.
Instead of a single explosive burst of revolution,
instead of terrorists rushing in with guns in hand, instead of bombs exploding
and assassins gunning down public officials, there is the slow creep of laws
that remake attitudes and accomplish the same purpose not in a day or a year…
but over the decades.
Instead of one great revolution, there are a million
smaller revolutions stripped of overt ideology and pretending to serve the
public good.
Health care is nationalized. Gun control is implemented.
Education is centralized. Environmental panic is used to enforce rationing. The
successful are taught to be ashamed of their success. They are taught that they
didn’t build that. The state did. The new bureaucratic collectivism sets out to control the
most minor habits of every man, woman and child. People are told to spy on
their neighbors. Children are taught to report the politically incorrect habits
of their parents. The media asserts that all property and even children belong
to the state.
Each of these is a miniature revolution. A string of
these revolutions over time transforms the soft tyranny into a hard tyranny.
The nanny state is outwardly benevolent and inwardly
ruthless. Instead of a Big Brother who must be feared and worshiped, it puts
forward a Big Sister who shames and controls you for your own good. But the
difference never goes deeper than the mask that tyranny wears. Like the
difference between Lenin and H.G. Wells, it is only a matter of the speed at
which tyranny arrives.
The hard tyranny of the red revolutions and the soft
tyranny of the bureaucratic collectivists both agree on the fundamental premise
of tyranny.
A century before Bloomberg’s soda war, Theodore Roosevelt
stood in New York City’s Carnegie Hall and delivered one of his most famous
speeches, which began with the words, “The great fundamental issue now before
the Republican party and before our people can be stated briefly. It is: Are
the American people fit to govern themselves, to rule themselves, to control
themselves?”
The answer of the liberal technocrats, the Bloombergs and
Obamas, is a chorus of jeers. They make it clear with their policies that they
believe that the American people are unfit to govern themselves in matters
great or small.
If the American is unfit to be trusted with a soda cup or
a gun or a lawn dart or any of a thousand other things taken away from him for
his own good, then how can he be trusted with the ballot box? That mistrust, more than any single abuse, reveals the
scowling tyrant behind the smiling face, the Lenin in every H.G. Wells, the
totalitarian face behind every liberal mask. The soft totalitarianism of the
public interest technocracy is a tyranny that seeks to destroy the rule of the
people and replace it with the rule of the left.
The creeping pace of the soft revolution forces the inner
totalitarian to practice some discretion, mummifying his tyrannical aspirations
in the embalming fluid of political correctness, but no flood of words can
conceal the inner contempt behind the false benevolence of the tyrant who makes
policies that deprive the people of their freedom for their own good.
“I believe the majority of the plain people of the United
States will, day in and day out, make fewer mistakes in governing themselves
than any smaller class or body of men, no matter what their training, will make
in trying to govern them,” Theodore Roosevelt said. The hard revolutions showed the truth of his words when
the red kingdoms fell and the soft revolutions are showing us the truth of his
words as the nanny cities and states falter economically and fall.
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