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The left's attempt to ban public discourse on controversial subjects such as global warming amounts to totalitarianism, conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer writes.

"The left is entering a new phase of ideological agitation — no longer trying to win the debate but stopping debate altogether, banishing from public discourse any and all opposition," Krauthammer writes in The Washington Post Thursday.

"The proper word for that attitude is totalitarian," he explains. "It declares certain controversies over and visits serious consequences — from social ostracism to vocational defenestration — upon those who refuse to be silenced."

Krauthammer argues that the debate over global warming is a prime example of the left trying to silence opposing views.

Those who believe in manmade caused global warming, including President Barack Obama, declare "the science of global warming to be 'settled,'" he explains.

As a result, "anyone who disagrees is then branded 'anti-science.' And better still a 'denier' — a brilliant chosen calumny meant to impute to the climate skeptic the opprobrium normally reserved for the hatemongers and crackpots who deny the Holocaust."

This totalitarian attitude was also recently on display in the situation that forced Mozilla CEO Brendan Eich to resign just 10 days into the new post because it was discovered that he had donated money to the Proposition 8 effort in California, which defined marriage in the state's constitution as between one man and one woman, the conservative columnist says.

Krauthammer explains that there is a hypocrisy in whom the left decides to lynch since President Barack Obama held the same position in 2008, when Proposition 8 was passed, when he said that "his Christian beliefs made him oppose gay marriage."

The left calls opposition to gay marriage bigotry, he writes.

"By that logic, the man whom the left so ecstatically carried to the White House in 2008 was equally a bigot," he adds.

Those who hold opposing views to the left's orthodoxy are labeled "a denier, a bigot, a homophobe, a sexist, an enemy of the people," Krauthammer writes.

"What's at play is sheer ideological prejudice — and the enforcement of the new totalitarian norm that declares, unilaterally, certain issues to be closed," the conservative author contends.

"Closed to debate. Open only to intimidated acquiescence."...

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Of course the totalitarian left will go berserk at anyone wearing such a shirt. The left are just so tolerant and peaceful.

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New York's Democrat governor Andrew Cuomo recently told listeners of WCNY radio that "extreme conservatives" who are "pro-life, pro-assault weapons, anti-gay" have "no place" in New York State because "that's not who New Yorkers are."...

If Cuomo were the only Left-wing pol to express totalitarian sentiments, one could take some solace. Unhappily, he is not. Do the names Barack Obama, Bill De Blasio, Hillary Rodham Clinton, Chuck-you Schumer, and Harry Reid ring a bell? Remember when NPR fired Juan Williams for being politically incorrect?

Put aside how the Left (and many moderates, libertarians, and conservatives) would respond if some Republican governor said "pro-choicers, gun-grabbers, and homosexuality advocates" were not welcome in X, Y, or Z state...

Focus instead on the totalitarianism evident in Cuomo's rant. When I was a university undergraduate, one of my professors -- who was a Leftist -- used to say, "scratch a liberal and you'll find a fascist." Cuomo's outburst confirms Professor X's observation.

Cuomo's totalitarianism is not aberrant. It dovetails with totalitarian proclivities that are "baked into" Left-wing movements. Leftists tout their espousal of diversity -- as Cuomo did in his "State-of-the-State speech" on January 8th. Leftists' actions -- and occasionally their words -- belie their pro-diversity stance. Intolerance for diverse opinions is at the Left's core...

Milovan Djilas -- once a member of Yugoslavia's politburo, but later jailed as a dissident -- published The New Class: An Analysis of the Communist System in 1957. Djilas explained that although Left-wing revolutionaries proclaimed their goal was the creation of an egalitarian, classless society, they empowered a "new class" of bureaucrats whose rule was even more totalitarian than the regimes they over-threw. (The composition of Djilas' "new class" is not all that different from Siegel's, a.k.a. "the clerisy.")

In his subsequent book, Conversations with Stalin (1962), Djilas argued that Left-wing movements invariably result in totalitarianism. According to Djilas, Stalinism was not a deviation from, but a fulfillment of, the Marxist-Leninist system created in the U.S.S.R. after the October 1917 revolution.

American Leftists did not need to import totalitarian ideas from abroad. As Richard Ellis shows in The Dark Side of the Left (1998), egalitarian movements in the U.S. have consistently manifested "illiberal," i.e., "'intolerant; bigoted; [and] narrow-minded'" etc. tendencies.

Ellis asserts that Left-wing movements have exhibited considerable diversity in terms of ideology and strategy. At the same time, however, he observes that "for all their different policy concerns and widely divergent historical contexts, these disparate movements and individuals often display striking similarities in political style and sensibility." Sociological and psychological dynamics in egalitarian movements and individuals -- primarily stigmatizing "the establishment" while idealizing "the oppressed," and espousing extravagantly unrealistic hopes for the future -- drive them to totalitarian dogmatism, which constitutes the Left's "dark side."

Ellis' book should be supplemented by the late John Patrick Diggins' The Rise and Fall of the American Left (1992), and Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning (2008).

Diggins' book is at once narrower in scope than Ellis' -- Diggins deals with Left-wing movements only in the 20th century -- and more comprehensive -- he details a wider range of phenomena. Yet there a similar themes in Ellis' and Diggins' studies: the meme that, despite a steady stream of failures, Left-wing movements recur again and again.

Goldberg's thesis is "modern liberalism is the off-spring of twentieth-century progressivism, which ... shares intellectual roots with European fascism."

What are fascism's essential features? "Fascism is... totalitarian in that it views everything as political and holds that any action by the state is justified.... It takes responsibility for all aspects of life... and seeks to impose unity of thought and action, whether by force or through regulation and social pressure.... Any rival... is... the enemy" (Goldberg's italics).

Although not without flaws, Goldberg's analysis merits consideration. Totalitarian movements, whether they call themselves Communist, Fascist, Progressive, Liberal, etc., tend to be Left-wing phenomena, plumping for the omnipotent state...

Another key feature of modern liberalism is its quest for utopia. Ellis, Diggins, and Siegel realize that radical egalitarians express an unshakable belief in mankind's perfection, and tie this belief to an equally unshakable -- albeit unrealizable -- quest for utopia.

It is probably the Left's tireless quest for utopia that spurs its denizens to totalitarianism. Andrew Cuomo's rant, therefore, is not sui generis. Since they disdain America and the middle class, liberals think they're justified to use "the iron fist." Expect more liberal totalitarianism in the future.

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Left-wing Totalitarianism in America

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Put aside how the Left (and many moderates, libertarians, and conservatives) would respond if some Republican governor said "pro-choicers, gun-grabbers, and homosexuality advocates" were not welcome in X, Y, or Z state...

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I like to think of myself as a pioneer in warning about the rise of the New Totalitarianism in America, which is really not much different than the old totalitarianism. The most important difference is that the new breed is better at hypnotizing itself into thinking they’re good-hearted, compassionate souls who just want the best for everyone… except, of course, the dissenters they grind beneath their jackboots.
I can say with absolute certainty that most of the people responsible for the brutal oppression of the Sweet Cakes by Melissa bakers would insist they are compassionate people whose hearts are brimming with tolerance and love.

Push them harder, and they’ll claim their seething hatred for the Christian bakers – their totalitarian urge to use the power of the State to personally destroy these innocent people – isn’t a black mark against their “compassion” and “tolerance,” because those bakers aren’t really people at all, at least not in the same sense that loving gay couples who demand cakes for their weddings are.

That’s what I mean about the New Totalitarians being the same as the old. We’ve heard all of their ideas, rhetorical tricks, and ugly inner urges before. You’ve got to break some eggs to make an omelette. The ends justify the means. Everything inside the State, nothing outside the State. Everything Obama-era “liberals” are exhaling today was in the atmosphere of Europe a century ago. How can our young people be so poorly-educated that they don’t find the spectacle of howling mobs demanding vigilante revenge against “enemies of the people” to be both familiar, and terrifying?

One of my goals as a writer in the Age of Obama has been to rescue the proper meaning of terms like totalitarian, authoritarian, and fascist. They’re not synonymous, although the ideas are related. They are all aspects of collectivism, the true and eternal enemy of liberty...

If you want to defend liberty against the totalitarian impulse, you’ve got to do better than poking your head out of the political window and declaring the coast is clear, as long as you don’t see any concentration camps or goose-stepping Gestapo squads. Totalitarianism comes before all the other evils, and I have my dark suspicions that it inevitably slides into darker and more feral expressions, in part because of the economic and social pressures created by the politicization of everything. We ought to be on guard against the first level of collectivist evil, not complacent until it bares its fangs and starts vomiting bullets and barbed wire.

Tom Nichols at The Federalist has a superb piece explaining what totalitarianism is, and how it differs from authoritarianism, with which it is often conflated:..

Totalitarians are a different breed. These are the people who have a plan, who think they see the future more clearly than you or who are convinced they grasp reality in a way that you do not. They don’t serve themselves—or, they don’t serve themselves exclusively—they serve History, or The People, or The Idea, or some other ideological totem that justifies their actions.

They want obedience, of course. But even more, they want their rule, and their belief system, to be accepted and self-sustaining. And the only way to achieve that is to create a new society of people who share those beliefs, even if it means bludgeoning every last citizen into enlightenment. That’s what makes totalitarians different and more dangerous: they are “totalistic” in the sense that they demand a complete reorientation of the individual to the State and its ideological ends. Every person who harbors a secret objection, or even so much as a doubt, is a danger to the future of the whole project, and so the regime compels its subjects not only to obey but to believe.

This calls to mind C.S. Lewis’ famous warning about how “a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive,” because “those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”

To the warnings of Nichols and Lewis, I would add that totalitarianism involves politicizing every corner of life, imbuing even the citizen’s choice of which fast-food chicken sandwich he consumes with political significance. People who would rather not make political statements with their lunch choices are nevertheless forced into the game defensively… because if they don’t play, and play to win, they’re going to wake up one morning and discover they have lost vital freedoms.

Totalitarianism, you see, isn’t just about turning every aspect of life into a nasty political squabble. There are consequences. The compulsive power of the State is deployed to punish the losing side of nearly every social dispute these days. The fact that we speak of political arguments over every damn thing implies this grim outcome of compulsion and punishment, because politicians aren’t members of an academic debating society, no matter how much they love to posture that way. They control the compulsive power of the State. That’s their job. Everything the State does involves force, which means people get hurt. Regulations are enforced with muscle, as the Sweet Cakes couple can attest. Every dollar the government spends was seized by force from the people who earned it (or, under the modern enthusiasm for irresponsible deficit spending, seized from children who aren’t old enough to earn it yet.)

After all these years of Obama, it should be painfully clear to everyone that the Left isn’t interested in “winning arguments.” They’re not terribly interested in persuasion at all. They want power, and as soon as they have enough to get what they want, the very first thing they do is bellow that all further debate is over, forever – the “law of the land” is “settled.” They’re increasingly comfortable with casting aside their pretensions of adoring free speech and punishing those who verbally disagree with “law” that was “settled” by one weird election, one midnight congressional vote, or one Supreme Court justice.

That’s because, as Nichols notes, totalitarians want Total Victory. They understand ideas are dangerous, and when people are permitted to discuss dissenting ideas, they eventually desire the freedom to implement them. They start wondering where all the walls and prison bars came from, and why they shouldn’t be allowed to explore the free space on the other side of those walls. That’s why the Left is so insanely neurotic about all the social arguments they supposedly “won.” They didn’t win any of them by persuading a majority of people to embrace social change through the republican process. At best, they got to the 51-yard line, spiked the ball, declared a touchdown, and then announced the game was over forever. The Left understands that both totalitarianism and liberty are viral.

Totalitarianism is the antithesis of principle – the ends justify the means is their slogan, hovering on the lips of every single “liberal” in the United States today. It gives them an advantage in these brutal political scrums, because they fight dirty. The whole point of Saul Alinksy’s infamous Rules for Radicals is that totalitarians have no principles they can be pinned to, while their victims are great believers in intellectual consistency and the rule of law, which puts them at a severe disadvantage. Good luck asking any of today’s lefties what happened to the joyous celebration of free thinking, free expression, non-conformity, and provocative bravado they supposedly worshiped just a decade or two ago. They never really meant it – they’re totalitarians, so they only celebrated plucky upstarts who challenged consensus, stuck it to The Man, and fought The Power when they weren’t The Man. Now that they have all the power, you’re not supposed to fight it – conformity and unquestioning obedience are cool.

Totalitarians view everything through the lens of their power goals and preferred political narratives. That’s why President Obama will attend certain funerals and insert himself into certain local crime stories, but couldn’t give a rat’s ass about politically inconvenient horrors like the murder of Kate Steinle, allegedly by an illegal alien. The massed ranks of the Left are whistling past Steinle’s graveyard because her death is extremely inconvenient for them politically. Meanwhile, they’ll whip their supporters into a frenzy over “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot” events that didn’t even happen. That’s actually a persistent feature of totalitarianism over the ages, because imaginary hobgoblins are much more politically useful that real, complicated, factually accurate stories. Every single totalitarian system has invented or exaggerated nemeses and instructed the people to focus all of their rage and despair upon them, while ignoring the actual events taking place right outside their windows.

Totalitarianism can begin by declaring benevolent intentions and citing popular support for its ideas, which is especially easy to do when the totalitarian party has near-total control over the media… but as I said, it always slides into something uglier. We’re arguably well into the ugly stages of the process now – how many people thought in 2008 that freedom of speech and religion would be on the chopping block by 2016? Things get ugly because power, like any other resource, suffers from the law of diminishing returns. The Ruling Class has to squeeze its captive people ever harder to produce each new droplet of power; taxes must become higher and more complicated to chase the dwindling pool of free dollars still fluttering through a statist economy; the regulatory apparatus must consume new areas of our lives to continue its growth...

What’s happening in America right now is bad, and it will get worse, because that is the nature of the collectivist beast. Its work is never done, and it grows increasingly angry with anyone who still dares to resist it. The number of actual voters required to form a compulsory “consensus” that cannot tolerate even the most polite verbal disagreement will continue to dwindle. The “tyranny of the majority” will degenerate into tyranny, period, because the actual majority has been intimidated into silent acquiescence. When everything is political, every freedom becomes a prize for the taking… and those prizes will be taken. There will be more injuries, and not all of them will bleed money.

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On the Fox show Outnumbered Thursday, Newt Gingrich referred to liberals as “the totalitarian Left.” That same day, on Fox Business’s Varney & Co, political commentator Monica Crowley remarked that the Democrats of today, seeking a fundamental transformation of America, are not the classical liberals of the past.

Gingrich’s description of the Left’s totalitarianism dovetails directly into Crowley’s, since that fundamental transformation is a total one that necessarily must be coerced. Both their comments echo what the Horowitz Freedom Center has been declaring for twenty years: that “inside every liberal is a totalitarian screaming to get out.”...

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Frontpage editors are pleased to announce the winner of our essay contest launched on April 5, 2013: "Inside Every Liberal is a Totalitarian Screaming to Get Out."

The winner of the $1,000 first-place prize is N. A. Halkides. Mr. Halkides is a mathematician, systems analyst and freelance writer living in the greater Chicago metropolitan area. His essay, entitled Inside the Progressive Mind, is below:

Inside the Progressive Mind By N. A. Halkides

The Progressive believes in precisely two things: his own magnificence and the constructive power of brute force. In combination, they lead him naturally from the role of pestiferous busybody to brutal dictator. Where the productive man dreams of the things he might create if only left alone by his fellows, the Progressive dreams of the world he could create if only the lives and property of his fellows were at his disposal. The roots of his pathology lie in that oldest and most destructive of all human vices, the desire for the power to rule over other men.

As naked power-lust is a rather ugly motive, the Progressive rationalizes his desire to rule as a concern for human welfare, seeing himself as a great humanitarian, far superior morally to the lesser beings who pursue merely “materialist” ends such as their own prosperity and who frequently object to his program for achieving Utopia. This assumed moral superiority spills over into fields of practical accomplishment, and the Progressive imagines himself capable of allocating resources and even directing entire industries far more efficiently than a free market, often despite not even having any business or scientific experience. But despite what the Progressive believes about himself, the desire to compel others to obey his orders is what drives him forward. To satisfy this desire, there is ultimately no limit to what actions he will take, for he respects none of the restrictions on government officials intended to guarantee individual freedom that have been developed and set forth in written or unwritten constitutions.

It is easy to make the mistake of judging Progressivism by its earlier and less-severe manifestations and to conclude that its petty and paternalistic restrictions, for example New York Mayor Michael “The Nanny” Bloomberg’s recent crusade against large-size soda drinks, are simply bothersome annoyances. In fact the transformation from irritating but superficially benevolent nanny to ruthless dictator not only occurs rather quickly, it is a logical consequence of the Progressive’s zeal to usher in Utopia and of the means he must use to achieve the smallest of his goals - brute force. We should recognize the following principle: Once the Progressive is permitted to intrude however slightly into matters that are properly beyond the sphere of government, then all aspects of the individual’s life may be subjected to control. Once any degree of coercion is permitted, then no level of force is out of bounds...

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The left's attempt to ban public discourse on controversial subjects such as global warming amounts to totalitarianism, conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer writes.

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ORIGINAL: bounty44
could do this all day...

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ORIGINAL: bounty44

could do this all day...

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Inside the Progressive Mind By N. A. Halkides

Where the productive man dreams of the things he might create if only left alone by his fellows, the Progressive dreams of the world he could create if only the lives and property of his fellows were at his disposal.