“[Modern humanitarianism] has shown an increasing disregard for the privacy of the private citizen, considered as a parent,” wrote G.K. Chesterton. “For what could be more purely and perfectly Communist than to say that you regard other people’s children as if they were your own?” What, indeed? And yet that’s exactly what the U.S. president just said.
“There is no such thing as someone else’s child,” Joe Biden said Monday. “Our nation’s children are all our children.” That claim of the elites, that they have the right to control other people’s children, might have an empathetic and humanitarian veneer. But a century ago G.K. Chesterton warned that it was the most Communist—and therefore most “poisonous”—claim that anyone could make.
”There is no such thing as someone else’s child. No such thing as someone else’s child. Our nation’s children are all our children,” Joe Biden quoted a former teacher during a speech honoring teachers in the White House Rose Garden, according to Fox News. It shouldn’t be a surprise, considering that Democrats have pushed transgender “treatments” and sexual propagandizing without parental knowledge, let alone permission. Democrats have also consistently attacked the family unit through the war on masculinity, abortion, contraception, radical feminism, and other policies.
In a collection of essays and articles by the great G.K. Chesterton published in the early 1930s, All I Survey, one essay addresses the very claim made by Biden. It turns out the idea that “our nation’s children are all our children“ is at least a hundred years old. Chesterton, a traditional Christian, a great admirer of America’s founding, and an avowed champion of democracy, consistently opposed authoritarianism of every kind—particularly Communism. Chesterton insisted in his piece “On the Child” that there is no more Communist statement than the claim that “all children are our children.”
Chesterton opened the topic by discussing a then-recent meeting of allegedly philanthropic women arguing about what to do with “the Child,” as some sort of abstract and unnatural phenomenon. “A very famous political lady, who certainly believes that what she says represents the most lofty luminous idealism, uttered on this occasion the following words: ‘We must care for other people’s children as if they were our own,’” Chesterton quoted. He continued (emphasis added):
And when I read those words, I smote the table with my hand, like one who has suddenly located and smashed a wasp. I said to myself, ‘That’s it! She’s got it! She’s got the exactly correct formula for the worst and most poisonous of all the political wrongs that rot out the entrails of the world. That is what has wrecked democracy; wrecked domesticity through the breadth and depth of democracy; wrecked dignity…that is what has taken away from the poor man the pride and honor of the father of a household…his children are not his children; and democracy is dead…
She does not comprehend a word of the terrible sentence that she has spoken’…[it’s this:] ‘We, the rich, can take care of poor people’s children as if they were our own. As we have abolished their parents, they are all orphans.’
Chesterton explained how this statement means than that a privileged, supposedly enlightened, and wealthy elite has the right to control the lives of children poorer than their own. This pernicious philosophy would not only undermine society, Chesterton predicted, but it would allow a disturbing amount of control by the rich. It turns out he was most discomfitingly prophetic.
Such supposed humanitarians do not say all children are theirs because of a common humanity that appeals to particular cases, Chesterton said. The woman to whom he referred did not, he noted, say, “When I hear of a child being beaten with a red-hot poker, the common human bond makes me feel as angry as if it were my own child.” Rather:
She does not deal with hard cases, or even with individual cases; she generalizes from the start. She assumes that she will, in fact, manage, she assumes that she will be allowed to manage, any other children as if they were her own. And in practice she is probably right; it is the supreme and final proof that in theory she is entirely wrong. Our society has unconsciously and unresistingly admitted this great heresy against humanity. The notion of making the head of a humble family really independent and responsible, like a citizen, has really vanished from the mind of most of the realists of our real world. It is the less wonder that it has never even entered the head of an idealist.
No longer do Marxists even pretend they are interested in personal responsibility. Both the Communistic Democrats of today and the elitist philanthropists of Chesterton’s time have the notion that they are superior and that it is therefore better for their “inferiors” to have their lives run for them. A sense of personal responsibility would get in the way of the great project of remaking humanity in their image, according to their ideology. It sounds abstract, but that’s exactly what we are seeing with LGBTQ ideology, welfare, critical race theory, and so on, all imposed with draconian force by the institutions and government.
The rich “raid the playgrounds of the poor,” Chesterton said. They believe that they are more virtuous for practically stealing other people’s children from them. We see that attitude now with transgenderism—the notion that groomers who encourage minors to self-mutilation without parental consent are somehow brave and praiseworthy. Biden has openly supported “transgender” surgeries for minors. A man who treats someone else’s horse as his own, Chesterton pointed out, is called a “horse-thief”. But the elites who claim other men’s children as their own, and plead “humanitarianism,” are not called kidnappers.
The wealthy Communist who so treats a child is not called a kidnapper. Which only shows that Communism, anyhow our Communism, would not be the rule of the poor, nor even the unruliness of the poor; but only the extension of the existing unruliness of the rich.
This alleged humanitarianism and philanthropy—or, to use modern terms, “equity” and “tolerance”—is nothing more than “kidnapping on a large scale,” Chesterton argued.
That is, it has shown an increasing disregard for the privacy of the private citizen, considered as a parent. I have called it a revolution; and at bottom it is really a Bolshevist revolution. For what could be more purely and perfectly Communist than to say that you regard other people’s children as if they were your own?
Rather than the exact dichotomy of rich and poor, we might in modern America say the elites or radical leftists versus the ordinary, sane citizens. But the reality is the same. Biden, with his claim that all children are “our children,” is no better than a kidnapper.
