The Authoritarian Moment

by Ben Shapiro

  Whether liberals side with conservatives in defense of free speech and individualism or they side with leftists in pursuit of utopia remains an unanswered question. The jury is still out. But time is running out for liberals to decide. Matthew Yglesias, one of the signatories on the Harper’s Weekly letter and a cofounder at Vox, was berated by members of his own staff for deigning to join up with the likes of Rowling, who has been unjustly accused of transphobia. Unsurprisingly, Yglesias stepped down from his position at his own website just a few months later, citing that incident: “It’s a damaging trend in the media in particular,” Yglesias told Conor Friedersdorf of The Atlantic, “because it is an industry that’s about ideas, and if you treat disagreement as a source of harm or personal safety, then it’s very challenging to do good work.”14

  The threat to core American values is only increasing.

  CONCLUSION: WILL AN AGE OF HEALING EMERGE?

  On the night the media announced their projection that Joe Biden would be president-elect of the United States, Biden sought to put the culture war genie back in the bottle. This was, in and of itself, rather ironic, given Biden’s role in stoking the culture wars, from destroying the Supreme Court hopes of Robert Bork to suggesting that Mitt Romney wanted to put black Americans back in chains. Still, Biden expressed that the way forward for the country lay in unity rather than recrimination. “Now,” Biden intoned, “let’s give each other a chance. It’s time to put away the harsh rhetoric. To lower the temperature. To see each other again. To listen to each other again. To make progress, we must stop treating our opponents as our enemy. We are not enemies. We are Americans.”15

  This was undoubtedly a nice sentiment. But conservatives remained suspicious; time and again in politics, unity has been used as a club to wield against those who disagree. There are two types of unity: unity through recognition of the fundamental humanity of the other and unity through purification. Given their long experience of watching the Left’s political quest to cleanse the country of conservatism and conservatives, conservatives remained wary.

  They were right to be wary.

  The same day Biden gave his “unity” speech, former first lady Michelle Obama—a supposedly unifying figure in her own right, according to her media sycophants, despite her long record of divisive statements—claimed that Trump’s 70 million voters were motivated by love for the “status quo,” which meant “supporting lies, hate, chaos, and division.”16

  Biden, naturally, said nothing.

  Meanwhile, Democrats and media members called for political de-Baathification of Trump supporters. Former Clinton labor secretary Robert Reich called for a “Truth and Reconciliation Commission” to root out Trump supporters. Democratic National Committee press secretary Hari Sevugan tweeted that “employers considering [hiring Trump staff] should know there are consequences for hiring anyone who helped Trump attack American values,” and pushed the Trump Accountability Project—a list of Trump employees and donors to be held accountable for Trump’s presidency. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) suggested “archiving these Trump sycophants for when they try to downplay or deny their complicity in the future.”17 Members of the Lincoln Project, a group of former Republicans-cum-Democrats who raked in tens of millions of dollars in donations to attack Trump and Republicans during the 2020 cycle, called on members of the law firm Jones Day to be inundated with complaints for the great crime of representing the Trump campaign in court.18

  Meanwhile, Democrats with the temerity to call out the woke, militant wing of their own party were subjected to claims of racism and bigotry. Even elected Democrats, it turned out, were deplorables. When moderate Democrats complained that they had nearly lost their seats thanks to the radicalism of fellow caucus members pushing “defund the police” and socialism, Representative Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) called them bigots seeking to silence minorities.19 Progressive groups including the Justice Democrats, the Sunrise Movement, and Data for Progress issued a memo declaring that fellow Democrats who wished not to mirror the priorities of the woke were participating in “the Republican Party’s divide-and-conquer racism.”20

  The battle to silence the silent majority remains ongoing. It is likely to accelerate, not to decelerate, as time goes on.

  To understand how to combat it, we must first understand the history and program of our new cultural fascisti; next, we must understand how deeply our core institutions have been weaponized; and finally, we must understand our own weaknesses, and seek to correct them.

  Chapter 2

  How the Authoritarian Left Renormalized America

  In 2012, President Barack Obama won reelection. He did so despite winning 3.5 million fewer votes than he did in 2008, and 33 fewer electoral votes; he did so despite winning the same percentage of the white-vote-losing Democrat John Kerry did in 2004; dropping support from 2008 among Americans across all age groups and education groups; and losing voters who made above $50,000 per year.

  Obama had barely gotten his head above water in the approval ratings by the time of the election, the economy had stagnated (in the two quarters just prior to the election, the gross domestic product had grown just 1.3 percent and 2.0 percent)1, and Obama had performed in mediocre fashion in the presidential debates. Nonetheless, he became the first president since Ronald Reagan to win two elections with a majority of the popular vote.

  So, what did Obama do to work this magic? He put together a different sort of coalition. Obama won because he held together a heavily minority-based, low-income coalition: 93 percent of black voters, 71 percent of Hispanic voters, 73 percent of Asian voters, 55 percent of female voters, 76 percent of LGBT voters, 63 percent of those making below $30,000 per year, and 57 percent of those making between $30,000 and $50,000 per year.2 Obama became the first president since FDR in 1944 to drop electoral and popular vote support and win reelection anyway.

  The story of Obama’s 2012 victory is the story of the transformation of American politics. In 2008, Obama had been a different sort of candidate running a quite familiar campaign: a campaign of unification. Ronald Reagan had run on “morning in America”; Bill Clinton had run on a “third way” eschewing partisanship; George W. Bush had run on “compassionate conservatism”; Obama ran on the terms “hope” and “change,” pledging to move beyond America as a collection of “red states and blue states” and instead to unite Americans more broadly. In fact, Obama’s personal story was part and parcel of this appeal: he could justifiably claim to unite the most contentious strains of America in his own background, being the child of a white mother and a black father, raised in Hawaii but ensconced in the hard-knock world of Chicago, born to a single mother and raised by grandparents but educated at Columbia and Harvard Law School. Obama was, as he himself stated, a “blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views.”3

  By 2012, however, Obama had cast aside those ambiguities. He was the architect of Obamacare, the creator of Cash for Clunkers and “shovel-ready jobs,” a critic of police departments across the country, a newfound expositor of same-sex marriage, a defense-cutting, tax-increasing, big-spending progressive. His progressivism had prompted an ardent response from the American Right: the Tea Party movement and Obama’s loss of Congress in 2010. No longer could Americans of various political stripes project onto him their own views, or their hopes and desires for the nation.

  Obama’s personal popularity—his eloquence, camera-readiness, lovely family—certainly buoyed him. But none of that would have been enough to get him reelected. No, what Obama needed was a new strategy. That strategy—the shift away from appealing to broad bases of Americans with common themes and toward narrowcasting to fragmented audiences, cobbling together ostensibly dispossessed groups—was transformational. It pitted Americans against Americans, race against race, sex against sex. Obama domesticated the destructive impulses of authoritarian leftism in pursuit of power.

  Before Barack Obama, the American Left had b
een split by dueling impulses: on one hand, the impulse toward top-down government control, complete with its implicit faith in the unending power of the state to solve individual problems; and on the other hand, the impulse toward destruction of America’s prevailing systems, which the American Left believed were, in essence, responsible for disparities in group outcome—systems rooted in individual rights, ranging from free markets to free speech to freedom of religion. Each of these impulses—the Utopian Impulse and the Revolutionary Impulse—carries certain aspects of authoritarian Leftism. The Utopian Impulse reflects a desire for top-down censorship, and reflects anti-conventionalism; the Revolutionary Impulse believes in revolutionary aggression, and reflects a similar anti-conventionalism. But the two impulses are in conflict.

  Obama rectified that split by embracing the power of government—and acting as a community organizer within the system itself, declaring himself the revolutionary representative of the dispossessed, empowered with the levers of the state in order to destroy and reconstitute the state on their behalf.

  And it worked.

  In building his coalition, Obama no doubt worked a certain political magic. It just so happened that Obama’s brew of identity politics and progressive utopianism emboldened an authoritarian leftism that poisoned the body politic. America may not recover.

  THE RISE AND FALL OF UTOPIAN GOVERNMENT IN AMERICA

  The American Left has always been attracted by the promise of power.

  The power of the state is an aphrodisiac: it warms the heart and fires the mind with the passion of utopian change. Utopians of the Left are generally advocates for anti-conventionalism; they believe that their moral system is the only decent moral system. They’re also quite warm toward top-down censorship, designed to stymie those moral opponents.

  American progressives in the early twentieth century felt the euphoric intoxication of the Utopian Impulse. The early American progressives identified the state as the solution to a variety of social ills: income inequality and exploitation of labor, under-education and even intellectual deficiency. Concerns about individual rights were secondary; the Declaration of Independence and its guarantees of natural liberty were hackneyed; the Constitution itself was a mere constraint on the possibility of utopia.

  Woodrow Wilson suggested that the state was the repository of all possibility, championing the notion that “all idea of a limitation of public authority by individual rights be put out of view, and that the State consider itself bound to stop only at what is unwise or futile in its universal superintendence alike of individual and of private interests.” Such a notion, Wilson thought, did not preclude democracy—after all, democracy was merely about “the absolute right of the community to determine its own destiny and that of its members. Men as communities are supreme over men as individuals.” Given the challenges of modern life, Wilson asked, “must not government lay aside all timid scruple and boldly make itself an agency for social reform as well as political control?”4

  John Dewey, perhaps the most influential early progressive, believed similarly that the state could act as the moving force behind utopian ambition. “The State,” wrote Dewey, “is then the completed objective spirit, the externalized reason of man; it reconciles the principle of law and liberty, not by bringing some truce or external harmony between them, but by making the law the whole of the prevailing interest and controlling motive of the individual.”5

  Indeed, progressives reveled in the limitless nature of ambition given a powerful state. As president, Wilson activated the state to persecute his political opponents, including antiwar socialist Eugene V. Debs; Wilson’s attorney general, Thomas Gregory, turned a blind eye toward the American Protective League, a vigilante group a quarter of a million strong, raiding their neighbors’ mail for proof of antiwar activity.6 Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, a fellow progressive, explained that the state had the ability to restrict reproduction of those with Down syndrome, since “It would be strange if [the public welfare] could not call upon those who already sap the strength of the State for these lesser sacrifices, often not felt to be such by those concerned, in order to prevent our being swamped with incompetence.”7 Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood, called for the sterilization or quarantining of some “fifteen or twenty millions of our populations” in order to prevent the supposed poisoning of the gene pool.8

  With the end of World War I, however, America grew tired of the progressive vision of state as sovereign; the Utopian Impulse had been humored and found wanting. The triumphant election of Warren G. Harding ushered in an era of smaller government, and a return to the traditional vision of individual freedoms guarded by a constitutionally limited state. Calvin Coolidge, Harding’s successor and the winner of 54 percent of the popular vote and 382 electoral votes in the 1924 election, expressed his view of business with reverence toward the free markets. “[I]f the federal government should go out of existence, the common run of people would not detect the difference in the affairs of their daily life for a considerable length of time,” he stated. “We live in an age of science and of abounding accumulation of material things. These did not create our Declaration. Our Declaration created them.”9

  The restoration of constitutional normalcy did not last. With the Great Depression, the Utopian Impulse—and the crushing hand of government—once again gained the upper hand. Crisis was, as always, an excellent opportunity for a renewed love affair with democratic socialism. While today’s intelligentsia likes to bask in the glow of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s accomplishments—most obviously, the creation of massive new welfare state programs—his actual record was dismal. FDR implemented massive new regulations, manipulated the currency, and attacked private property. Individualism once again fell out of vogue, with FDR stating, “I believe in individualism in all of these things—up to the point where the individualist starts to operate at the expense of society.”10 Which, of course, meant that he didn’t actually believe in individualism.

  FDR declared that the fundamental freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution—free speech, freedom of the press, trial by jury, freedom of religion—were utterly insufficient. “As our Nation has grown in size and stature,” FDR declared, “these political rights proved inadequate to assure us equality in the pursuit of happiness.” Instead, he proposed, America had to embrace a “second Bill of Rights,” which would guarantee the rights to a job, to food, to clothing, to a decent profit for farmers, to housing, to medical care, to social security, and to education. “All of these rights spell security,” FDR trumpeted. He went so far as to suggest that should the economic policies of the 1920s—a time of limited government and free markets—return, “even though we shall have conquered our enemies on the battlefields abroad, we shall have yielded to the spirit of Fascism here at home.”11

  FDR combined his utopian government programs with top-down censorship, including fascistic crackdowns on dissenters. As Jonah Goldberg describes in his book Liberal Fascism, “it seems impossible to deny that the New Deal was objectively fascistic. Under the New Deal, government goons smashed down doors to impose domestic policies. G-Men were treated like demigods, even as they spied on dissidents. Captains of industry wrote the rules by which they were governed. FDR secretly taped his conversations, used the postal service to punish his enemies . . .” FDR aide Harry Hopkins openly suggested, “we are not afraid of exploring anything within the law, and we have a lawyer who will declare anything you want to do legal.”12

  The result of all of this government utopianism was catastrophic for everyday Americans, besotted though they were with the overpowering personal appeal of FDR. According to University of California, Los Angeles, economists Harold Cole and Lee Ohanion, FDR’s policies—particularly his attempt at top-down organization of industry via cartelization, curbing free market forces in favor of centralized control—made the Great Depression great again, lengthening the depression by fully seven years. Consumption dropped dramatically; work hours dro
pped dramatically.13

  With the rest of the world lying in ruins at the end of World War II, America could afford the bloat and inefficiency associated with larger government programs. But the added ambitions of the LBJ administration taxed the resources of the American democratic socialist ideal to the breaking point. President Lyndon Baines Johnson doubled down on FDR’s commitments, now suggesting that America could become a “Great Society” only by launching a multiplicity of major government spending initiatives, fighting a “war on poverty.” Government encroached into nearly every arena of American life, offering subsidies and threatening prosecutions and fines. Government promised housing; it offered instead government-run projects, which quickly degraded into dystopian hellholes. Government promised welfare; it offered instead the prospect of intergenerational poverty through sponsorship of single motherhood. Government promised educational opportunity; it offered instead forced busing and lowered public schooling standards.14

  This was a bipartisan affair—former conservative Richard Nixon, as president, re-enshrined LBJ’s economic programs, including unmooring the American dollar from the value of gold and setting prices, wages, salaries, and rents.15 And once again, as with FDR’s response to the Great Depression, economic stagnation set in, with the percentage of people living in poverty stopping its decrease in 1970 and the stock market topping out in January 1966 around 8,000 . . . and dropping steadily until July 1982 in inflation-adjusted terms.16