Most of this appeared in an earlier post in mid-February, but given recent events I thought it useful to put it up again, with some updates. It’s our basic problem, it puts all the others in proper context, and the things I said in February are not only being proven correct, but the discussion is getting more serious.
Roger wonders, with good reason, if Obama is “objectively pro- fascist.” And certainly Obama’s foreign “policy” is strikingly favorably toward tyrants. No one should be surprised, since much of his domestic program is tyrannical as well. Most Americans no longer read Alexis de Tocqueville’s masterpiece, Democracy in America, about which I wrote a book (Tocqueville on American Character; from which most of the following is taken) a few years ago. What a pity! No one understood us so well, no one described our current crisis with such brutal accuracy, as Tocqueville. As Mark Steyn eloquently points out, he foresaw the sort of American tyranny with which we are threatened today. A unique sort of tyranny, similar to that system under which most Europeans live.
But it isn’t fascism.
If Tocqueville were around, he would remind us that we are not witnessing “American Fascism on the march.” Fascism was a war ideology and grew out of the terrible slaughter of the First World War. Fascism hailed the men who fought and prevailed on the battlefield, and wrapped itself in the well-established rhetoric of European nationalism, which does not exist in America and never has. Our liberties are indeed threatened, but by a tyranny of a very different sort.
Most of us imagine the transformation of a free society to a tyrannical state in Hollywood terms, as a melodramatic act of violence like a military coup or an armed insurrection. Tocqueville knows better. He foresees a slow death of freedom. The power of the centralized government will gradually expand, meddling in every area of our lives until, like a frog in a slowly heated pot, we are cooked without ever realizing what has happened. The ultimate horror of Tocqueville’s vision is that we will welcome it, and even convince ourselves that we control it.
There is no single dramatic event in Tocqueville’s scenario, no storming of the Bastille, no assault on the Winter Palace, no March on Rome, no Kristallnacht. We are to be immobilized, Gulliver-like, by myriad rules and regulations, annoying little restrictions that become more and more binding until they eventually paralyze us.
Subjection in minor affairs breaks out every day and is felt by the whole community indiscriminately. It does not drive men to resistance, but it crosses them at every turn, till they are led to surrender the exercise of their own will. Thus their spirit is gradually broken and their character enervated…
The tyranny he foresees for us does not have much in common with the vicious dictatorships of the last century, or with contemporary North Korea, Iran, or Saudi Arabia. He apologizes for lacking the proper words with which to define it. He hesitates to call it either tyranny or despotism, because it does not rule by terror or oppression. There are no secret police, no concentration camps, and no torture. “The nature of despotic power in democratic ages is not to be fierce or cruel, but minute and meddling.” The vision and even the language anticipate Orwell’s 1984, or Huxley’s Brave New World. Tocqueville describes the new tyranny as “an immense and tutelary power,” and its task is to watch over us all, and regulate every aspect of our lives.
It covers the surface of society with a network of small complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd.
We will not be bludgeoned into submission; we will be seduced. He foresees the collapse of American democracy as the end result of two parallel developments that ultimately render us meekly subservient to an enlarged bureaucratic power: the corruption of our character, and the emergence of a vast welfare state that manages all the details of our lives. His words are precisely the ones that best describe out current crisis:
That power is absolute, minute, regular, provident and mild. It would be like the authority of a parent if, like that authority, its object was to prepare men for manhood; but it seeks, on the contrary, to keep them in perpetual childhood: it is well content that the people should rejoice, provided they think of nothing but rejoicing. For their happiness such a government willingly labors, but it chooses to be the sole agent and the only arbiter of that happiness; it provides for their security, foresees and supplies their necessities, facilitates their pleasures, manages their principal concerns, directs their industry, regulates the descent of property, and subdivides their inheritances: what remains, but to spare them all the care of thinking and all the trouble of living?
The metaphor of a parent maintaining perpetual control over his child is the language of contemporary American politics. All manner of new governmental powers are justified in the name of “the children,” from enhanced regulation of communications to special punishments for “hate speech;” from the empowerment of social service institutions to crack down on parents who try to discipline their children, to the mammoth expansion of sexual quotas from university athletic programs to private businesses. Tocqueville particularly abhors such new governmental powers because they are Federal, emanating from Washington, not from local governments. He reminds us that when the central government asserts its authority over states and communities, a tyrannical shadow lurks just behind. So long as local governments are strong, he says, even tyrannical laws can be mitigated by moderate enforcement at the local level, but once the central government takes control of the entire structure, our liberties are at grave risk.
Dr. Ledeen:
It sounds like you’re talking about the Rez, writ large.
That which you are talking about here sounds like business as usual in the American West, particularly the Indian reservations. The idea of a “Great White Father” used by Thomas Jefferson is every bit as monarchial as the system he overthrew in the Revolution.
Here is an excerpt from a planned speech from William Clark’s Journal (July 26, 1806) intended for the Yellowstone Indians. Although he didn’t meet this tribe, he used similar rhetoric for other tribes. (Taken without permission from “The Original Journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, 1804-1806; Arno Press edition, 1969”, for educational purposes only.)
Children. The Great Spirit has given a fair and bright day for us to meet together in his View that he may inspect us in this all we say and do.
Children. I take you all by the hand as the children of your Great father the President of the U. States of America who is the great chief of all the white people towards the rising sun.
Children. The Great Chief who is Benevolent, just, wise & bountifull has sent me and one other of his chiefs (who is at this time in the country of the Blackfoot Indians) to all his read children on the Missourei and its waters quite to the great lake of the West where the land ends and the [sun] sets on the face of the great water, to know their wants and inform him of them on our return.
Children. We have been to the great lake of the west and are now on our return to my country. I have seen all my read children quite to that great lake and talked with them, and taken them by the hand in the name of their great father the Great Chief of all the white people.
William Clark went on and on and on for two more pages about Indians being children of the Great White Father. Later language in the Office of Indian Affairs (later BIA) archives is very similar.
Imagine the tyranny you describe as applied to international affairs. Imagine the tyranny you describe as applied to the American West. Or Appalachia. Even Indian removal in the 1830’s was explained as being done for the Indians’ own good!
Perhaps Alexis de Tocqueville may have realized that any government that would tyrannize Indians would eventually act precisely the same way toward everybody else.
Today, Michael, as you know, Canada is celebrating the 142nd anniversary of the passing of the British North America Act, which was the beginning of the Canadian nation.
A week earlier, on June 24, which is the nativity of John the Baptist, the province of Quebec (one of the 4 former colonies of the British Crown, which were the original provinces of Canada) celebrated its fete Nationale.
I have yet to find anything on June 24 that was particularly important in the life of Quebec, other than that was the day the nativity of John the Baptist was celebrated (and John the Baptist was a very important figure accorded respect in 1867 Quebec).
So, when you have the state absorbing attributes of the church, you have the same thing of the early Roman Empire. Emperor and
High Priest combined.
This is hardly the only example of the ancient
world, and yet the same mistakes are being repeated time and time again.
So, those who are willing to learn from the mistakes of others are viewed as dangerous as
a combination of the most virulent diseases of all time.
As long as distinctions between the various areas of life are not respected, and you have
one area of life seeking hegemony over other areas of life, then trouble is waiting in the wings.
I
I think the key question in Iran is whether adult Muslims should be treated as adults or treated as children.
In velayat-e-faqih, Muslims (and everybody else) are treated as children. They effectively become wards of the state, with a Supreme Leader (or the Great White Father of Iran) supposedly knowing what is best for his “children”. In contrast, if adult Muslims were regarded as adults, each adult Muslim would be responsible for the welfare and the governance of his nation.
In a society of adults, each adult feels an obligation to be well informed so he or she can actively participate in the governance of his society. In a society of children, each child defers to the judgment of an expert for the governance of his society. Ideally, liberal democracy is the governance of a society of adults by adults.
Not only is velayat-e-faqih a morally bankrupt ideal of governance, but all ideologies promoting the power of experts over a well-informed citizenry should be questioned. For example, the legacy of Woodrow Wilson and his “progressive” ideology of public administration should be called into question. Sadly, I think Wilsonian elitism has corrupted the ideals of liberal democracy to such an extent that some self-proclaimed “experts” from liberal democracies would actually call the Iranian government “democratic” when the state ideology of Iran is so inherently anti-democratic.
“… In the seamless web created by the new tyranny, everything from the Boy Scouts to smoking clubs will be strictly regulated… ”
Heh. Just yesterday I formally registered the region’s first Jewish Boy Scout Troop. I took-on the project some time back precisely as an antidote to PC soft tyranny.
“On my honor I will do my best to do my duty to God and my country and to obey the Scout Law;
to help others at all times;
to keep myself physically strong, mentally awake and morally straight.”
These lads aren’t as likely to end-up as O-Bots.
Long before the modern rationalizations for the “begnin” nanny state, Confucius had given his own vision of the perfectly ordered pyramid with the emperor at the top, talking to god, and most of the rest of us at the bottom, lucky for the privilege to talk to their dog.
The bulk of human experience is tyranny, whereas liberty is the ultimate unprobability, a.k.a., America. Government of the people, for the people, by the people cannot survive unless the people has enough intestinal fortitude to make it work.
Every individualist allowing himself or herself to fall into a state of sheepishness only helps his or her government to turn into a parasite. The trend can only be stopped, and reversed, by a grassroot awakening, which is why the tea parties give me hope.
“…equality is not a defense against tyranny, but an open invitation to ambitious and cunning leaders who enlist our support in depriving ourselves of freedom.”
That is a good sentence. Thanks, Dr. Ledeen.
The current pres. seems to be the personification of this ambition. I used to think he was just making rookie mistakes due to inexperience, but the Honduras vs. Iran comparison makes his intention distinct.
Just emailed this item to all my politically minded friends.
My compliments.