ROGER KIMBALL: The Appeal of the New Totalitarians.
What is the America against which the elites have pitched themselves? It is the America articulated in the Declaration of Independence: a polity founded on the proposition that “all men are created equal.” Where are we today? Dreher quotes the governor of Vermont, who a few days ago tweeted the news that “If you or anyone in your household identifies as Black, Indigenous, or a person of color (BIPOC), including anyone with Abenaki or other First Nations heritage, all household members who are 16 years or older can sign up to get a vaccine!” So, all men are created equal, but some are more equal than others.
Dreher began his column with an arresting quotation from Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism. In a section about the “temporary alliance between the mob and the elite,” Arendt observes that “The members of the elite did not object at all to paying a price, the destruction of civilization, for the fun of seeing how those who had been excluded unjustly in the past forced their way into it.”
“The destruction of civilization.” It’s a melodramatic formulation, to be sure, but it was entirely apt for the situation Arendt was analyzing. That was the price the elites did, in fact, pay. We are living at a moment that is both increasingly fissiparous and increasingly dominated by a totalizing ideology, the ideology of racialist wokeness and radical sexual exoticism.
* * * * * * * *
It was part of Arendt’s genius to grasp and explain that side of the phenomenon as well, the “irresistible appeal of the totalitarian movements’ spurious claim to have abolished the separation between private and public life and to have restored a mysterious irrational wholeness in man.” It’s what makes the effort to transform politics into God so appealing to susceptible souls, and so dangerous for society as a whole.