In his new book, Live Not by Lies, Rod Dreher draws a comparison between the conditions which prevailed in Europe and Russia before the communist revolution in 1917 and the conditions which prevail in the contemporary West.
Dreher believes that the U.S. is ripe for a totalitarian takeover of our culture, though perhaps not of the murderous sort witnessed in virtually every communist country during the 20th century.
In his book he quotes Alexander Solzhenitsyn, a victim of the Soviet prison camps known as "the Gulag." Solzhenitsyn described the totalitarianism of 20th century Soviet state and the horrific suffering of political and religious prisoners at the hands of the Soviet secret police (KGB).
These wretches had their skulls squeezed with iron rings, they were lowered into acid baths, they were trussed up naked to be bitten by ants and bedbugs, they had red hot iron rods shoved up their colon, they had their genitals crushed beneath the boot of their torturers, they were kept from sleeping for days, subjected to thirst, and beaten to a pulp.
Other prisoners have testified to being starved and kept outdoors in freezing cold for hours with nothing on but their underwear.
This was communist totalitarianism (the word refers to the complete and total control of every aspect of a person's life by the state), and it's the logical endpoint of leftist ideology. It was vividly portrayed in books like Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon, Solzhenitsyn's In the First Circle and The Gulag Archipelago, Czeslaw Milosz's The Captive Mind and films like The Lives of Others.
But Dreher isn't warning that this sort of mass scale barbaric brutality is coming to the West. What he sees on our near horizon is what he calls a "soft totalitarianism." It's more like Aldous Huxley's Brave New World than George Orwell's 1984. It's a totalitarianism in which coercion is exercised by the masters of the culture who compel conformity through speech codes, fear of ruined businesses and careers, tax penalties, loss of opportunities and massive surveillance.
Nevertheless, the prevailing social conditions are so similar to those prior to 1917 in Russia that he's convinced that we should prepare for it.
Some of the conditions that he says make us vulnerable to a very profound restriction of our freedom are a loss of confidence in institutions like the family and government; the loss of belief in objective truth; waning religious commitment; the rise of identity politics in which someone is considered evil simply because of their race, gender, social class or religion; an unwillingness to transmit our heritage to the next generation and a perversion of such history that is transmitted (e.g. the 1619 project); alienation and isolation, especially among the young; and a diminution of the value people place on freedom of speech, the press, assembly and religion.
Social Justice Warriors (SJWs), Dreher alleges, are playing the same role today that the Bolsheviks played in early 20th century Russia. Cancel culture puts at risk entire careers and the livelihoods of those who hold opinions contrary to those approved by the SJWs.
Add to all this the enormous potential for surveillance afforded by modern technology (imagine how easy it would be for all those smart devices in the home, like Alexa, to be programmed to monitor every conversation) and the untoward influence six giant tech companies - Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, Google, Apple and Microsoft - exert over our culture, and it's easy to see that we are precariously close to a precipice.
Here's one example of what's in store if the left continues to gain control over both our culture and our government. It doesn't appear in Dreher's book because it just came to light in the last day or so.
Some on the left have acknowledged that they're keeping an enemies list of people who worked for or otherwise supported Trump. The purpose of the list is to insure that those people have their careers ruined.
The following is excerpted from the link:
Jennifer Rubin, a columnist at the Washington Post tweets:
Any R[epublican] now promoting rejection of an election or calling to not to follow the will of voters or making baseless allegations of fraud should never serve in office, join a corporate board, find a faculty position or be accepted into "polite" society. We have a list.
And she’s not alone in keeping a list. Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio Cortez tweeted her approval of a project started by someone named Michael Simon, who’s keeping track of people who were Trump supporters. They’re finished.
Simon is a former Obama administration analytics guy who has started the “Trump Accountability Project” to keep a list of, as Democratic congresswoman Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez calls them, “Trump sycophants.”
“Is anyone archiving these Trump sycophants for when they try to downplay or deny their complicity in the future? I foresee decent probability of many deleted Tweets [sic], writings, photos in the future,” Ocasio-Cortez wrote.
Simon responded, in a now-deleted tweet: "Yes, we are. The Trump Accountability Project (@trumpaccproject) Every Administration staffer, campaign staffer, bundler, lawyer who represented them – everyone."
One has to be alarmed by this sort of thing, even if one was originally skeptical of Dreher's thesis. It's all of a piece with the behavior of the left in the wake of every revolution in which they succeeded in toppling the established order going back to Paris in 1789, Russia in 1917, China in 1949 and Cuba in 1959. The victors rounded up all those who opposed them, all those who refused to go along with the Marxist-Leninist program, and stripped them of their jobs, their careers, their homes, threw them into horrid prisons, tortured them and murdered them by the millions.
Our contemporary SJWs may not go so far as state sanctioned murder - Dreher doesn't think they will - but they have every intention of ending the careers and wrecking the lives of those who oppose them.
There's more about this group of political revenge-seekers ontheir website.
They make laughable President-elect Biden's promise to bring us all together in unity and harmony. Fat chance of that as long as his party harbors petty tyrants like these.