The Road to Dystopia Philip Ahlrich

http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/01/on_the_road_to_dystopia.html

When O’Brien, the interrogator from the Thought Police in Orwell’s 1984, holds up four fingers and asks Winston Smith, an imprisoned member of the underground opposition, how many he sees, poor Winston persists in saying he sees four.  But that is not what O’Brien wants to hear.  “No, Winston, you are insane.  There are five fingers.”  The interrogations continue until Winston, wracked with pain and exhaustion and persuaded of his insanity, agrees finally through his tears that he was lying to himself, that he had always been lying to himself, and admitted that he saw five fingers.  He understood that two and two make five.  Emptied of his individuality and broken by the inquisition, he also knew that he had won the victory over himself.  He knew he was a flaw in the social pattern.  He learned, he understood, he accepted.  And in the end, he knew that he loved Big Brother.

The new liberal programs of revisionist history and psychological persecution now directed toward the American people are not at all dissimilar to the enforcement techniques of Orwell’s Thought Police.  Whoever controls the present controls both past and future.  The Democrats are telling us to live with a lie and to believe the lie, for the lie is stronger than the truth.  They do not tell us that such compulsory instructions are the instruments of a totalitarian regime.

The great lie is that America is a racist nation, that the Constitution of the United States is a racist document, and that you are a racist if you believe otherwise.  We are told to believe these things or we are judged insane by those who are insane.  Unfinished minds that accept these misguided narratives in pursuit of political identity and power are mistaking a disease of reason for a virtue.  Any political movement toward unrestricted power requires pervasive thought and behavioral controls upon targeted populations, and we are now watching the Democratic Party, a faction entirely without conscience, accelerating rapidly down these lines of force in pursuit of one-party rule and eventual socialism.

Liberalism is the excuse for insanity.  It is the kind of insanity that thinks itself sane.  It puts reason in chains and makes the victim dance to the anarch’s music.  If liberals cannot understand that the people are the better guardians of their own interests, it is because their ideology does not permit that understanding.  Their doctrinaire habits of thinking have made them as stupid as their madness has made them blind.  They see nothing of the evil within themselves, nothing of the evil of their teaching, and nothing of the evils that wait upon a nation weakened by internal strife.  When the strong argument of freedom is set against the weaker argument of force, only a doctrinaire liberal, unfamiliar with the qualities of reason, will choose the latter.

America cannot survive without understanding who the left are.  Their operating principle is the very soul of intimidation and force.  The BLM separatist movement proudly proclaims its ties to Marxism on its website.  Leftist anarchists burned and rioted all summer in America’s cities, and New York’s governor Andrew Cuomo ridiculed the idea that protests should be peaceful.  Democrats, including Kamala Harris, applauded and encouraged these rioters and offered bail for those few who were arrested.

Restrictions and lockdowns on private enterprise in Democrat-controlled cities and states are destroying the nation’s economy as the lights of entrepreneurial activity, by the thousands, are blinking out across America.  Wherever Democrats go, threat, violence, and censorship follow, and small businesses fail.  These are the inevitable consequences of the left’s malignant influence, and the algorithms for despotism are programmed throughout their party’s doctrine.  Political persecution and dependency on government are not merely features but are the very structure of the Democratic Party’s rising scaffold of perpetual one-party rule.

Despotism always believes in its own righteousness.  There can be no question that one-party rule is the definition of democracy in the dictionary of liberal-speak.  To that end, America’s current electoral system, established by individual state legislatures, is the means by which the worst elements of subversion may enter and occupy the centers of governing authority.  During the 2020 national elections, county election boards in several key states, under the cover of COVID restrictions, unlawfully overruled their state legislatures by creating new mail-in balloting and vote-counting schemes that allowed for significant uncontested fraud.  The consequences of this flawed election are soon to be realized in further repeated attempts by progressives upon the nation’s democratic institutions.

It is the ultimate irony that an America restored to her radical founding principles would be considered “too radical” by modern liberal instruction. Neither party can hold a copyright on human rights.  The most fundamental principles of civil society and government are above the small matters of politics — but when one party chooses to abandon these principles in pursuit of power, it remains for the other to protect them with greater care.

The American people, long accustomed as we are to civility, free expression, and political reconciliation, were not sufficiently prepared for the left’s foreign influence nor their poisonous hate and brutality.  Neither were we prepared for their further entrenchment at the highest levels of state and federal government.  The Democratic Party, now the servant of leftist gangsterism, will soon become the faction that rules America, and already its activists are guilty of numerous attempts to infringe upon the protected rights of the American people.  But it is not the function of government to protect the guilty from the innocent.  The world should not be surprised by the upsurging waves of civil disobedience that are yet to come.

Unlike Winston Smith’s fatal conversion to political correctness, American conservatism and common sense will triumph in the end because the authoritarian alternatives to Western democracy are serial phases of social engineering, political repression, economic decline, and ultimate collapse.  Conservatism, like mathematics, works every time it is tried.  Its governing philosophy sustains a commitment to the nation’s fundamental principles: to constitutionalism and the separation of powers, to equality and freedom under law, to the protection of individual rights, and to the preservation of self-government.

Conservatism requires that the institutions necessary for the survival of free and open societies are protected.  It insists that civil rights are not to be considered as privileges of tribal identity politics.  It affirms that every citizen shall enjoy the right of free expression without fear of intimidation or censorship.  Conservatism means, in brief, that political ideology cannot interfere with truth.  It means that, without liberal interference or totalitarian designs on power, two and two are four — and that alone is victory.

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