{"id":132278,"date":"2022-09-06T08:40:28","date_gmt":"2022-09-06T12:40:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/stateofthenation.co\/?p=132278"},"modified":"2022-09-06T08:41:30","modified_gmt":"2022-09-06T12:41:30","slug":"america-has-come-perilously-close-to-the-edge-of-the-point-of-no-return","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stateofthenation.co\/?p=132278","title":{"rendered":"

America has come perilously close to the point of no return\u2026<\/b><\/h2>"},"content":{"rendered":"

Biden Puts The \u2018Total\u2019 In Totalitarianism<\/strong><\/h1>\n


\nRoger Kimball<\/p>\n

America has come perilously close to the edge of the point of no return\u2026<\/em><\/strong><\/h3>\n

Joe Biden certainly set the punditocracy abuzz with his neo-totalitarian\u00a0performance piece<\/a>\u00a0at Independence Hall in Philadelphia on Thursday. The significance of that speech can be broken down into three parts, two of which have already received abundant commentary.<\/p>\n

The first has to do with the theater of the piece, its optics or stagecraft. As many commentators (myself included<\/a>) noted, the feel of the event was distinctly, and distinctively, bombastic. The melodramatic red lighting, the presence of armed Marines flanking the president, and Biden\u2019s hectoring, gesticulating delivery made the event seem\u00a0eerily reminiscent<\/a>\u00a0of a speech by Stalin, Mao, or\u2014the closest parallel\u2014that diminutive former house painter who, for a few short years, mesmerized the world with his elaborately staged rallies before pushing ahead with more kinetic activities.<\/p>\n

To those who object that I am flirting with\u00a0Godwin\u2019s Law<\/a>\u00a0by invoking old AH, I reply that the flirtation was not mine but the doing of Biden\u2019s producers and puppeteers. The visual similarity between Joe Biden\u2019s event and some nighttime\u00a0events at Nuremberg<\/a>\u00a0are just too striking to be coincidental. Leni Riefenstahl, as someone noted, would have been proud. Those who point out that Biden\u2019s speech took place on September 1, a fraught day on the Polish border\u00a0anno domini<\/em>\u00a01939, may be too ingenious for this historically illiterate age, but who knows? Often these things are, as our Marxists friends like to say, no accident. There are wheels within wheels.<\/p>\n

Which brings me to the question of the intent behind the theatrics. Was this exercise in garish, totalitarian kitsch a \u201cgaffe,\u201d as some are saying\u2014an aesthetic miscalculation for which that blinking inarticulate muppet who is Biden\u2019s press secretary will have to apologize? Apparently not, since she just said that the speech was \u201cnot political<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

The entertainment committee never sleeps.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

A year or so back, I might have thought that the theatrics were inadvertent. I have changed my mind. Having watched Biden\u2019s Justice Department morph into an American Stasi with the FBI conducting predawn raids against various Trump supporters, arresting former aides and confiscating the mobile phones and other property of his lawyers, I now think that the tactics of intimidation are part of a larger strategy. The FBI\u2019s raid last month on Mar-a-Lago, Trump\u2019s Palm Beach residence, belongs in this category, as of course do the hundreds of indictments and incarcerations of January 6 protestors. Almost all of those unfortunate souls wind up being charged with minor torts like \u201cparading\u201d in or around the Capitol, yet are nonetheless thrown in a special D.C. gulag for months before being found guilty by biased juries and subject to enhanced sentences handed down by Trump-hating judges.<\/p>\n

None of this is adventitious. Like the intimidating and slightly unhinged theatrics of Biden\u2019s speech, they are all deliberate scare tactics, warnings to us all of what can happen to those who dissent. The spectacle of 87,000 newly minted IRS agents waiting in the wings is another part of that \u201cshock-and-awe\u201d campaign.<\/p>\n

Beyond Theatrics<\/strong><\/h3>\n

So much for the theatrics of the speech. What about its substance? It was a tooth-and-claw attack on Donald Trump and the MAGA agenda. How sharp were those teeth and claws? Trump and his supporters, said Biden, shaking his fists, represent \u201can extremism that threatens the very foundations of our republic.\u201d \u201cThe very foundations of our republic,\u201d forsooth! A week earlier, he noted that the problem was \u201cnot just Trump, it\u2019s the entire philosophy that underpins the . . .\u00a0semi-fascism<\/a>\u201d of the MAGA agenda.<\/p>\n

The response to this unprecedented attack by a sitting president against his predecessor\u2014as well as against the tens of millions (more than 74 million we are told) of his predecessor\u2019s supporters\u2014has been so robust that Biden felt it necessary to walk back his remarks, sort of. \u201cI don\u2019t consider any Trump supporter a threat to the country,\u201d\u00a0he said<\/a>\u00a0Friday, after saying just that on prime-time television to the entire nation the night before.<\/p>\n

But wait, what is the MAGA (or, to quote the results of the lucubrations of Biden\u2019s focus group, \u201cultra-MAGA<\/a>\u201d) agenda that is supposedly so dangerous?\u00a0<\/strong>It\u2019s worth keeping the meanings of these epithets in mind. When Donald Trump first proposed his \u201cMake America Great Again\u201d formula, he specified several things that it encompassed.\u00a0 At the top of the list were efforts to restore American prosperity, in part by exploiting our enormous energy resources, in part by abolishing mischievous and burdensome regulation, in part by cutting taxes and providing incentives for American businesses to hire Americans and produce their goods in America.<\/p>\n

Also at the top of the list was the integrity of our southern border, stanching the flow of illegal immigration, and rebuilding a military that had been woefully neglected during the Obama years. Elsewhere on the domestic front, Trump battled against political correctness and what has come to be called \u201cidentity politics.\u201d He largely remade the federal judiciary, seeing three Supreme Court justices and hundreds of lower court federal judges confirmed, all of whom were nominated because they subscribed to a Antonin Scalia-like judicial philosophy that limited the role of judges to interpreting the law in the light of the Constitution, not making law under the inspiration of their personal policy preferences.<\/p>\n

In the sphere of foreign policy, the MAGA agenda meant \u201cputting America first.\u201d He insisted that our NATO allies begin to shoulder their stipulated financial burden, challenged China on trade and military adventurism, and scuttled the disastrous Obama-era nuclear deal (since renewed) with Iran. Trump also stood firmly against the democracy-exporting (or, more accurately, \u201cdemocracy\u201d-exporting) policies of the Bush era. America would go to war not to promulgate democracy but only to defend its own interests. His Abraham Accords brought peace to the Middle East, a world historical achievement for which Trump deserved the Nobel Peace Prize.<\/p>\n

And how did all that work out? Pretty well, I\u2019d say.\u00a0By the time Trump left office, America was a net exporter of energy; illegal immigration had slowed to a trickle; before the onslaught of COVID, his policies had resulted in the lowest unemployment in decades, the lowest minority unemployment ever. Wages were rising, especially at the lower rungs, and the stock market was booming. All-in-all, MAGA meant American prosperity and success.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

It did not, however, bode well for the elite globalist agenda which rested upon endless foreign wars, the neglect of American workers, and a disdain for traditional bourgeois values like hard work, family solidarity, and local initiatives.<\/p>\n

Biden\u2019s handlers have attempted to co-opt or usurp the epithet \u201cMAGA\u201d and transform it into something ominous. But what it means is not some existential threat to \u201cthe very foundations of our republic.\u201d On the contrary, it is an affirmation of the principles of limited government and individual liberty that undergird the foundations of the American republic.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

The Goal Is Control<\/strong><\/h3>\n

Which brings me to the third current of significance in Biden\u2019s performance. There was a theatrical aspect, a substantive aspect\u2014the attack on Trump, his supporters, and all things MAGA\u2014and there is the long strategic game implied not just in Biden\u2019s speech but in the extraordinary, overweening activity of his administration.<\/p>\n

In \u201cJoe Biden and the Sovietization of America,\u201d a column that will be published in the October edition of\u00a0Spectator World<\/em>\u00a0(available online mid-September), I mention in passing the practice of\u00a0Gleichschaltung<\/em>, the attempt to bring all aspects of life into alignment with the governing philosophy of the state. The term was popularized in Germany in the late 1930s, but it describes a process that is common to all totalitarian societies (indeed, it describes the effort that puts the \u201ctotal\u201d in \u201ctotalitarian\u201d). Among other things, it involves the politicization of all aspects of life, the surrender of individuality to ideology. George Orwell sketched the process in\u00a0Nineteen Eighty-Four<\/em>. Lenin and Stalin brought that fiction to real life in their iron-fisted control of life in the Soviet Union. Xi Jinping continues that legacy today in China. What we call \u201cpolitical correctness\u201d hints at the program, for really to be politically correct is to suffuse every element of one\u2019s life with the dogmas that the ruling consensus has defined as the correct orthodoxy. The fascistic formula \u201cthe personal is the political\u201d gives one expression to this idea, since, taken seriously, it denies the legitimacy of the personal altogether.<\/p>\n

The Biden regime is making great strides in this direction. As Josh Hammer observes in a\u00a0penetrating column<\/a>, Biden apparatchiks are moving on multiple fronts to abolish the distinction between the public sector and the private sector. Late last month, the world was treated to Facebook\u2019s Mark Zuckerberg confessing on Joe Rogan\u2019s podcast that, yes,\u00a0the FBI did in fact put pressure<\/a>\u00a0on the social media giant to bury news about Hunter Biden\u2019s \u201claptop from hell<\/a>\u201d\u2014news that very likely would have changed the results of the 2020 election had it been allowed to circulate. Entities like Facebook and Twitter, Hammer points out, \u201cno longer qualify as meaningfully \u2018private\u2019 and have instead simply become appendages of the state.\u201d They are simply part of the\u00a0propaganda machine<\/a>\u00a0of the ruling party. Citing Missouri Attorney General (and U.S. Senate candidate) Eric Schmitt, Hammer describes the \u201cvast censorship enterprise\u201d promulgated by the state. Former U.S. Representative Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) described aspects of this enterprise in his book\u00a0Countdown to Socialism<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\n

But the goal of total control involves more than censorship. It also involves the insinuation of the state into the most intimate areas of our private lives. One example is the Biden regime\u2019s new weaponization of Title IX legislation. This brief statute, which, in just a couple of lines, says that institutions that receive federal funds may not discriminate on the basis of sex, has been enlisted in the campaign to abolish natural sexual identity and replace it with a polymorphous, \u201cgender fluid\u201d model. Among other things, this radical new interpretation of Title IX gives\u00a0teachers priority over parents<\/a>\u00a0on matters of sex and gender, requiring, for example, that \u201cK-12 schools support socially transitioning children to a different gender without requiring notice to parents, the involvement of medical professionals, or legal documentation.\u201d<\/p>\n

The late Andrew Breitbart liked to point out that politics is downstream from culture.\u00a0<\/strong>Indeed it is. It saddens me to report, though, that the Left seems to have a livelier appreciation of this fact than the Right. Barack Obama came to office promising to \u201cfundamentally transform<\/a>\u00a0the United States of America.\u201d Obama laid the groundwork for that transformation. Now his bumbling, senescent prot\u00e9g\u00e9, aided by an army of Obama-era lieutenants, a compliant media, and a corrupt deep-state bureaucracy, is completing the job.<\/p>\n

There is, I know, a point of no return, a point beyond which a society beset by totalitarian impulses must either rebel or succumb utterly. Are we there yet? I do not know. I do sense, however, that we have come perilously close to the edge. I pray that it is not too late.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

___
\nhttps:\/\/jameshfetzer.org\/2022\/09\/roger-kimball-biden-puts-the-total-in-totalitarianism\/<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Biden Puts The \u2018Total\u2019 In Totalitarianism<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-132278","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stateofthenation.co\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/132278","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stateofthenation.co\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stateofthenation.co\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateofthenation.co\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateofthenation.co\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=132278"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stateofthenation.co\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/132278\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stateofthenation.co\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=132278"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateofthenation.co\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=132278"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateofthenation.co\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=132278"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}