Liberalism: Fascist and feudal (Corporatism)
“Time makes more converts than reason… A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong gives it a superficial appearance of being right and raises at first a formidable outcry in defence of custom.” Thomas Paine, Common Sense, 1775.
Earlier observations about liberalism’s fascist character needs further reflection given that it features in the problem and runs powerfully through the whole liberal and corporatist ethos. With its postmodern ethos (recall the discussion in Part 1/8) liberalism bears all the hallmarks of the Nazi-style fascism that stained the 1930s and 40s, as the earlier definition of the word demonstrates. It has its own Nazi and Stalinist style final solutions:
· The creation of a ruling class that merges politics with media control, the intelligence services and big business (by collaboration or takeover). As Oborne (Ibid, 2014) observes with reference to the U.K: “…ministers and their assistants prefer to operate through client journalists over whom they can exercise editorial and other forms of control. This…increases the power of the executive to set parameters of public discourse and evade [in Parliament] legitimate scrutiny”.[1]
· Philosophic intolerance: the postmodern insistence that all (traditional) concepts of truth must be subject to a diversity of interpretation and deconstruction, except the liberal creed which must be defended by any means against critical review.
· The elimination of Christian influence by insisting that Christianity must be confined to the private sphere. This cannot be done without suppressing the natural rights of Christians in the public sphere.
· Abortion – population control, feminism and eugenics masquerading as a rights issue.
· Attacks on the traditional family to create greater dependency on the state.
· ‘Book burnings’ - the censorship and propaganda use of text books, history and mass media news to reflect a politically correct world view. Views, events or facts that undermine liberal doctrines are selectively edited from public discourse and history is doctored.[2]
· Free speech control – a politically correct intolerance of any views contradicting liberal dogma. Corporations have followed in lockstep by seeking the legal right to sue those criticising their actions.
· The elimination of real democracy by robbing the people of any effective power over their own government and the insistence that one political view is the only one to be tolerated.
· The balkanisation of society by using grievances and special rights to divide society. Division provides a stronger basis for manipulation and control of the whole by the liberal political elite.
· The use of roving gangs of thugs and the corruption of law to cower or punish dissent: witness the suppression of free speech on university campuses and the use of mob violence to silence the exercise of free speech and free association (brown shirt tactics). Also witness the use of hate speech laws to silence protest, or lock up dissenters. In 2016 a British man speaking publically against Islam was arrested and imprisoned for hate speech and promptly murdered by the Muslim inmates.
Hitler’s coterie of leaders, like our liberal politicians, were variously concerned about animal rights, vegetarianism and a wholesale concern for doing good for the benefit of all. They believed they knew what was best. Anyone with a contrary view was, by definition a subversive threat. They also formed strong links with big business, just as today’s liberal political class has forged common cause ties with the corporate world.[3] Perhaps the crowning achievement of the new liberal political class has been the cross-party merging of self-interest (staying in government), making the people, as voters, largely irrelevant to the prosecution and preservation of power.[4] The seamless policy positions of different parties emasculates the popular franchise.
Below these outward manifestations of a fascist-cum-Nazi approach lies the foundational belief in what Jonah Goldberg calls ‘tribal community’ and the ‘ideology of power’.[5] As Goldberg explains, it is not enough to call fascism evil. Its real seductiveness was “its appeal to community” and therein lies its danger. This is not to say all liberals are consciously fascist, but what is true is that the liberal ideology naturally defaults to ways and means that are both socialist and fascist. Like Hitler, Mussolini and Lenin, humanist liberals have an unshakable faith in the capacity of enlightened centralised power and expert analysis, to do communities good – on terms favourable, first and foremost, to the political class. Their way is the right way and we all must walk in it. From there it is a short step to assume that social and economic advances must depend on a benevolent state, controlled by an elite class enlightened with a liberal world view. Dissenting views, given the indisputable right-ness of the liberal cause, are intolerable. Human rights and democracy can no more survive in this environment than a mouse in a cat house. The god-state must be worshipped with subservient acquiescence.
James Ostrowski, in Progressivism: A Primer on the Idea Destroying America (2014) describes liberalism as a blinded political ideology with no rational basis that sees its repeated policy failures, not as a reason for abandoning those policies, but as the rationale for expanding commitment to them – higher taxes, more debt and an ever increasing determination to maintain them in the face of criticism and rational argument. Political parties across the western world, once tilted towards classical conservatism, have all betrayed their values for this modus operandi. Democracy as a system of human liberty is corrupted to become the means to coercive control that ignores the huge social cost of both democratic and policy failure. There are no limiting controls on this political pathology. At some point it will have to be overthrown or it will become totalitarian and violent in the protection of itself. It is now common for free speech to be thwarted by politicians or judges in the protection of liberal dogmas.
The common man and woman cannot be left in control of their own lives, or the affairs of their communities, without cloying state oversight. The modern liberal state demands every productive person give to it though taxation so that it can give to others without any real accountability to those who were made to give. Those who will not obediently accept their subservience, within a collectivised whole, must be ‘lovingly’, but firmly corrected by state directed punitive correction, using a raft of compliance controls. Professor Rahe’s (drawing on Tocqueville) soft despotism rises to enslave us.[6] As with the fascists and communists there is a constant appeal to community, safety and social concern but it is used as leverage and justification for ideological aims antithetical to fundamental freedoms.
Woodrow Wilson, one of liberalism’s early twentieth century exponents, approved of the state doing “whatever experience permits or the times demand”. He thought little of individual rights, favouring a Darwinian belief in the hegemony of the national family. The state should be the head of this family. Roosevelt’s New Deal carried this notion into public policy, while in other Western nations socialist welfare-ism emerged.[7] Walter Lipmann, a famous American journalist, believed democracy must be about a privileged, intelligent few governing the masses. According to Lipmann the people were merely “ignorant and meddlesome outsiders”. Even Madison, one of the framers of the American Declaration of Independence, believed democracy to be about people of property controlling policy and government.[8] Thus the central planks of Western Civilisation’s culture; the private right to freedom and self-determination, based on an independent self-reliant and socially responsible citizenship, have never been freed from the ancient will to power and a feudal belief in the destiny of the few to rule the many. The low view of the masses becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy as the liberal elite tax the life blood out of communities, educate them to be subservient and allow corporatists to do much the same by perverting capitalism on a global scale.
So, factor in these elements: the Toynbee Effect, abetted by Edward Bernays’ inspired consumerist propaganda, feudal cum fascist social and economic controls, and an education system that indoctrinates, while doing little more practically than prepare people for the workforce.[9] The cumulative effect is to pound Western societies into masses of people with no expectations beyond the life they are herded into by others. There can be little hope that many will look much beyond narcissistic and hedonistic lifestyles. The real potential in western societies has been subverted. Those who should be seeing through this grand denial of human potential are Christians, providing they are founded on a fully rounded Christian world view. However, they are far from being leaders in the flight from the treadmills of liberalism’s benighted utopia, because a pietistic ideology and poor leadership have driven them to the margins of relevance.
A significant number of liberals see the dangers in their adopted world view, but only in relation to a limited number of liberalism’s precepts. These include the so called neo-conservatives or neo-cons who are mostly liberal fellow-travellers looking for a more aggressive foreign policy, while retaining much that is liberal in the domestic policy sphere. The results of their abortive efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan are now clear to all. There is also considerable opposition amongst liberals to corporatism, but once again it has no effect on their broader social and economic liberalism.
Liberals like author Chris Hedges extol typically liberal views. He laments the demise of true liberalism following World War One, claiming its absence opened the gates to a corporatist state. This is as porous in its logic as the liberal claim that it was the Enlightenment that made the West’s advances possible. The lost compact by individuals with their traditional values and heritage and the rise of the very liberal values Hedges supports set the stage for state-ism, corporatist control of power and the associated concentration of wealth and privilege. Chris’s ilk were happy to insist on imposing their ideological dogmas on the West, just as the power of corporatism now seeks to suborn the West to their version of a global consensus. The statist assumptions of liberalism served to aid the rise of corporatism, despite the many liberals who despised corporate power. Liberalism is hoisted on its own petard and the corporatists rest comfortably in their banks and tax havens. The people, robbed of any real democracy, are left to pound their fists pointlessly on the plate glass walls of large buildings, or erect tents in public parks, before slipping once more into their Toynbee stupor.
The fascist, or Nazi, character of liberalism is never more apparent than in the ‘think right’ toxicity of political correctness; the censorship of free speech, free association and alternative traditional western economic and social values. This subject was broached earlier but there is more that needs to be said. Keeping one’s thoughts to oneself, while heel clicking and ‘hiel-hitlering’ accepted liberal dogmas has been immensely useful in defending liberal dominance. Theodore Dalrymple (a pseudonym) describes political correctness as an evil that does violence to the human soul because it forces people to say things they do not really believe, but cannot openly question.[10]
Anyone working in organisations connected in any way with public policy will be conscious of the need to avoid saying or doing anything that might be construed in politically correct terms as contrary to accepted liberal dogma. It applies particularly to anything linked to feminist politics, multiculturalism, moral relativism, welfare policies and aspects of the educational curriculum. A liberal backlash is particularly assured if a politically incorrect statement or action appears to have Christian tendencies or hark back to the pre-liberal era. Moreover, the counter-attack will invariably involve ad hominem smear tactics, calls for resignations and rhetorical arguments that will barely touch on facts, or any objective search for the truth. Political correctness poisons the well of the human spirit and leads us helter-skelter down the road to a toxic mix of Orwell’s 1984 and Huxley’s Brave New World.[11]
The power of political correctness to brainwash is chilling. People trampled into the Toynbee Effect are naturally more open to the conditioning power of ideas trumpeted ad-nauseam in the public sphere by liberalism’s vocal and influential cohorts. The cumulative effect of an unwavering politically correct defence of liberal doctrine suppresses critical thought and conditions beliefs. Liberalism is sectarian and fascist to its core and its will to power is as old, as crude and as devious as any of history’s dictatorships.
An aside: As I penned these paragraphs I opened the weekend papers during a coffee break and chanced upon this wonderful example of a typically liberal ‘twist think’ defence of its political correctness against truth. This revisionist dismissal of opposing views by denying what is real and self-evidently true is common to liberals:
“The desire to behave, think and express oneself in politically incorrect ways is a conservative one. It seeks to maintain the status quo and is hostile to change and difference…If it means anything political incorrectness means telling the ‘plain truth’. This is despite the fact that this truth is only true because a culture’s dominant class agrees it is, and despite the fact this truth shuts out the perspectives and liberties of others…” Opinion piece in New Zealand’s Christchurch Press (‘The Box’), 14 June, 2011. (Emphasis mine)
Given the history-long presence of the will to power and the Fuehrerprinzip it is hardly surprising that it is now possible to see a new version of feudalism emerging. The central state becomes the absolute monarch with a divine ‘democratic’ right to rule and corporate CEOs are the new barons; the power behind the throne. ‘We the people’ are unwillingly or unwittingly cast as knights (the state’s military), vassals and serfs. We can be left to till our fields so long as we tithe the best of our produce to the King, pay homage in meaningless elections and send our off-spring to fight their wars and labour subserviently in the baron’s mills.
[1] Oborne describes how this has all came about in the U.K. once Tony Blair and ‘New Labour’ became the government in the late 90s.
[2] The famous book burning incident (May 10th, 1933) filmed in Berlin during the rise of the Nazi party is exposed in Lively and Abram’s book The Pink Swastika. Items burnt included records that would have embarrassed the party.
[3] After the 2008 financial markets’ crash the public purse was emptied to bail out businesses. Then governments borrowed from the private sector or pushed bonds onto the money markets to finance their own deficits.
[4] Oborne (2014) explains how cynically exploited software (Voter Vault) was used to isolate the small percentage of voters capable of swinging an election.
[5] Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism, pp. 158-159.
[6] Ibid. See Part 1/4
[7] Ibid, Goldberg.
[8] This section draws on Mark Steyn’s discussion on the subversion of democracy in his, After America: Get ready for Armageddon.
[9] Bernays’ influence is hard to overstate. He saw people as herd animals whose opinions and behaviours needed to be managed. He is acclaimed as the father of ‘public relations’ and developed techniques he called ‘propaganda’ as a tool for a political and commercial elite to manipulate people’s attitudes and habits. The advertising industry latched on to his methods to further corporate interests. He is credited with using promotion techniques to get women to smoke. Nazi propagandist Goebbels was a student of his methods
[10] Read “Our Culture, What’s Left of It: The Mandarins and the Masses, by Theodore Dalrymple (2005), p.173. Also read his, Life at the Bottom: The World View that Makes the Underclass (2001).
[11] 1984 portrays a world under the iron grip of an omnipresent tyranny, while Huxley predicted a world in which pleasure and comfort conditioned people to accept their subjugation.