harmonicminer

From a comment I left at azusapacificalumni.com.

Assuming there is a considerable affinity between socialists of all stripes, nationalistic and internationally oriented, and assuming the line of relationships detailed in “Liberal Fascism” by Jonah Goldberg, what are the differences between baseline USA culture now and German or Italian culture in 1920s and 1930s?  I’m sure there are some, but one similarity is that both were in the throes of severe economic upheaval, and both were prey to charismatic leaders who promised to fix everything and make it better, with “a chicken in every pot” populism as the sales strategy, masking totalitarian intentions.

Is fascism/socialism really possible here? Goldberg makes a convincing case that fascism, at any rate, has already happened, in the Wilson administration (175,000 jailed for being suspected dissidents!). Wilson was not willing, or perhaps not able, to extend it much past the end of WWI. And perhaps he had scruples about it, as well, though they were not always in evidence. And FDR had no problem with Japanese-American internment, did he? Is it an accident that the two most egregious abrogations of civil rights in USA history since slavery were done by Democrat presidents?

So: what would Americans do if the federal government passed a law to totally disarm the citizenry? Or one to nationalize major industries, in fact if not on paper? (Fascism’s brand of socialism often features private ownership on paper, but government management in fact, a la the Krupps in Germany.)

Will Americans ever be willing to tolerate government run healthcare (more than it exists already, which is way too much)? Will Americans be willing to routinely see loved ones die, as in Canada, waiting for scans, tests or surgery? Will we say, oh well, that’s just the price of getting everyone covered with “health” insurance?

Will Americans be willing to tolerate rounding up large groups of people, once again? How will dissenters fare under an Obama administration? Not well, I fear.  “Reasonable” conservatives say we should not worry about the fundamentals of American society, even if the Left takes over for a time.  I’m not so sure.

Will Americans tolerate confiscatory taxes and redistribution in the name of “equality”, even if it hurts the economy and reduces the ability of the government to collect revenues sufficient to keep its promises?

What, exactly, would Americans do if every gun store, gun manufacturer, firing range, gun club, and state and local municipality were required under pain of incarceration to give up all their records about gun owners, and the ATF systematically began going door to door with those records in hand, searching for all weapons? It’s popular for the Left to say “that can’t happen here” (Obama has said he “couldn’t get the votes”, which isn’t quite the same thing as saying he wouldn’t do it if he could), but the Left never says why it can’t, and ignores those municipalities that HAVE pretty much banned firearms, period, and gotten away with it (except, of course, for the criminals, which is one reason why every one of those cities has a far higher murder rate than the national average… it’s more dangerous in Chicago than Baghdad these days).

Here is what we do know: such bans have been enacted and carried out in Britain, Canada and Australia, all inheritors of the same English common law tradition from which our Second Amendment springs.

I don’t know what the future holds, but I am not sanguine about it.

I heard someone say in church the other day that “God is still in control”. That’s true, of course. But God leaves quite a bit up to us, and has so arranged the place that we suffer the consequences of our foolishness rather more often than not. And presumably, God was in control in 1930s Germany, the location of the Wittenberg Door’s 95 Theses.

We may be in for another round of evidence in the history of human weakness.

What Goldberg calls “smiley face socialism” may be our destiny, as more and more people “find their voice” in the voting booth, and vote for benefits for themselves, to be paid for by others.  If so, it signals the late middle age of our nation, as we trade freedom of action for temporary security, in the hope that our funds will last just up until we die from natural causes, in bed, so medicated that we don’t know of our impending discorporation.  Who cares what we leave for the children to inherit?

Tags: freedom