There's a thought experiment I like to play with liberal friends, which I call King for a Day. The idea is, you are the king, you control everything. Now go ahead: what does your America look like?
What new laws will you make (or abolish)?
What will tax rates look like?
Will we bother with a Constitution or a Supreme Court?
Would you abolish "hate speech?" The Electoral College?
Please, be specific.
It's a pleasing yet confounding game for leftists. Pleasing because they get to play out their progressive fantasies; confounding, because they discover they don't know where to stop. You see, that's the thing: progressivism has no philosophical limits. It always wants more. More government, higher taxes, more regulations...more.
When an objective is achieved, the the goalposts are immediately moved, because they always need a cause, beliefs to cherish, a reason to march in the streets.
This is why the left bristles at the Bill of Rights and the Supreme Court because both are about limits, specifically limits on government, and government is always the vessel of the left's dreams of centralized control.
This is quite in contrast to conservatism, which by its very definition is about limits and de-centralization.
There's a concept called "subsidiarity" which started with the Calvinists and then became a pillar of Catholic social teachings. It says that problems are best solved at the most local level possible. Have a problem? Look to your family. That doesn't get it done? What about turning to your neighbors or town? And so on. Only the very biggest problems are assigned to the state.
The idea is that problems are most efficiently solved by people or entities that are the closest to them.
This is how I think about conservatism.
Contrast this to liberalism, ever voracious, yearning for centralized, top-down, one-size-fits-all solutions to complex problems. Think Obamacare.
Which brings me back to our little thought experiment, which fast-forwards the process, asking our leftist friends to consider their endgame.
But, what might that be? Is it Denmark? Cuba? Something else? At what point does the left say, "we won" and go home? This is one of the interesting questions of our time, and we will attempt to answer it.
The short answer is: never.
Let's consider the evidence we have about the current state of affairs. The left...
- Seems to want anarchy. They have funded radical DAs who won't prosecute crime. They want open borders. They all but celebrated the 2020 summer of looting and rioting.
- Wants to indoctrinate your children. This now happens from kindergarten all the way through college. We now have gender and race struggle sessions for third graders that would make Mao smile. As part of this, they actively drive a wedge between children and their parents. Families are treated with deep suspicion at best, the enemy at worst.
- Advocates economic policies that anyone with common sense could tell you are self-destructive. This includes gutting traditional energy and printing money with abandon.
- Has co-opted the leadership of most every large corporation, NGO, and university, bending them to their agenda. When Disney supports teaching trans ideology to second graders and Princeton declares itself systemically racist, you know the Long March is nearing completion.
- Wants to regulate speech they don't like, recasting it as "violence."
- Views organized religion with hostility.
- Wants to make gun ownership by private citizens illegal, leaving only the state with arms.
All these are precisely the avenues a Lenin or a Mao would pursue if presented with the following assignment: turn modern America into a Marxist state.
Okay, I know what you're thinking. You have liberal friends, and they're not Marxists, for God's sake. And c'mon, man, Joe Biden isn't Pol Pot, so just shut up with your juvenile, everyone's-a-commie hyperbole.
All these things are true, but here's where we consider an apparent contradiction.
It is true that Joe Biden, for instance, is not a Marxist, not consciously. He doesn't want to turn America into Cuba. And yet, he is very much on the side of every policy and cultural experiment that would lead us there, because there is no way they lead anywhere else.
The British philosopher Roger Scruton described totalitarianism as the "absence of any constraint on central authority." What's the best way get that power?
Chaos.
Scruton also observed that revolutions don't happen from below, by the people, but rather from above, in the name of the people, by an "aspiring elite."
Any of this sound familiar? It has always been this way, starting with the Russian Revolution, because those pesky workers never seemed to revolt when they're supposed to. And now, here in America, our most radical ideas are being actively promoted by universities, corporations, and even our own government.
Communists have always embraced societal chaos, including open criminality, as a means to an end, as a way to tear down traditional, competing, institutions. People will ultimately turn to the state to be their savior. Same thing with economic chaos: the people will demand help and the state will provide it in the form of a larger state. Families and churches will be undermined at every turn because they are alternate belief systems. The state can be your only family and your only church.
The answer to the contradiction is that Biden and most others on the left are what Stalin called "useful idiots" The agenda is being driven by a relatively small number of true believers, and the Bidens of the world don't even begin to understand how they're being played. They drift along with wherever the center of power is, and right now that's on the hard left.
Starting with the election of Obama, then the ascendence of Bernie Sanders, AOC, Elizabeth Warren and others, plus the chaos of George Floyd and the money of George Soros, the Democrat Party has been subsumed to the will of these true believers. Joe Biden is their ultimate dancing bear, the most useful idiot of all.
And yes, these people, these relatively few, are Marxists. Denmark is not the goal here.
Of course, few actually call themselves Marxists, they dress themselves in more digestible language like "democratic socialist." Don't want to scare off the useful idiots, after all. But it wouldn't take more than a couple of Stoli shots to get them to admit they'd like to send people like us to re-education camps.
These are the people calling the shots now. The Lovely People smile and go along, terrified of being cancelled or just too dumb to know how they're being used.
So the goal is, and always has been, centralized power. On the left, this always manifests as Marxism, and by Marxism's very nature, the struggle is never over.
The end game is that there isn't one at all beyond a never-ending pursuit of power.
"Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We don't pass it to our children in our bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on to them to do the same." -Ronald Reagan
