Keep Right — Column by Ralph K. Ginorio
For more than a century, avant-garde dreamers have pointed to somewhere in Europe and said to Americans, “This is our future!” Before the fall of the Soviets, many of the most fashionable of these luminaries indicated that Communist Russia, of all places, led the way towards a progressively socialist Utopia.
The mixed economies of progressive Scandinavia were touted as the most “advanced” of societies, at least until contemporary 2010s mass immigration from beyond the West brought matters there to crisis. Unlike what these critics call our problematically regressive American Republic, 1950s-2000s Norway, Sweden, and Denmark were praised for being harmonious and comfortable communities without excessive violence or conspicuous poverty.
Most continental Europeans adopted this communitarian model both before and after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. To an extent, the rest of the English-speaking world also accepted Socialism’s Welfare State. The United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand each embraced an incremental shift Leftward that would be impossible under the United States
Constitution.
An air of inevitability heralded these increasingly Leftist policies. Progressives and other variants of Socialists have always excelled in the sophistry of propaganda. In service to their agenda, they redefine some words and ban others, always infusing unrestrained emotionalism into every controversial issue.
They imply or even explicitly state that “only a bigot” could believe in principles that violate their cherished assumptions. Bigotry is hateful to its core, so any bigoted speech must be muzzled to protect the innocent. Britain’s censorious Online Safety Act is merely the most recent attempt by international Socialist elites to muzzle the free expression of anyone who dissents. Utopia, apparently, cannot long endure people with diverse views engaging in a boisterous debate.
Most Americans would be shocked at the blatant intrusiveness of governments within what used to be called the Free World. Even standing silently over half-a-city-block away from an Abortion Facility violated Britain’s speech controls, resulting in significant jail time for a person who was silently praying.
Government regulation goes well beyond the suppression of political dissent. In Britain, unless one is a Moslem, too loudly proclaiming any religious idea is functionally illegal. In many nations, there is a list of approved baby names for girls and boys from which parents must choose. In France since Charles de Gaulle, a government-sponsored language commission assiduously weeds official French of foreign-derived terms; replacing them with acceptable
French substitutes.
From how private citizens use their land, handle their garbage, heat their homes, decorate their possessions, buy their goods, and otherwise live their lives, bureaucrats have the final say in regulating human activity within these “evolved” societies. Human autonomy and personal judgment are controlled as if freedom itself was the primary threat to humanity’s ongoing survival.
Thomas Hobbes once described this view of society as constituting a great body as the Leviathan. Imagine each person is a cell in a giant life form that constitutes the nation. Just as every bodily cell has its distinct purpose, every individual fills a specific role within society. This interdependence requires that each cell stay in its preordained place, limited to its particular function.
Uncontrolled cellular growth in a body is cancerous, and will eventually kill the larger life form. Just as cancer cells must be excised and life functions regularized within a living body, Socialists demand that the individual must conform to the needs of the society. For the common good, they demand that the rest of us must become resigned to their limitation of our scope and
circumstances.
Another term for this is Feudalism, a society where parentage determines destiny. It should be obvious why elites espouse Socialism and its pretense of Utopia: such a society is both hierarchical and stable. This favors those elites which rule in the present can best ensure that their progeny will also reign overcountless future generations.
The Utopia proclaimed by Progressive evolutionary Socialists, revolutionary Fascists and National Socialists, and revolutionary international Communist Socialists is nothing more than a High-Tech Feudalism. Far from being egalitarian, these vaunted utopias lock everyone into a social order which stifles unpredictable creativity and suppresses destabilizing dissent.
Our Constitution, rooted in Enlightenment philosophy and expressed in a history of personal liberty and limited government, has thus far largely protected Americans from the siren song of Utopian Socialism. Personal choice, far from being a cancer, is understood by most citizens to be both what defines us and explains our prosperous material success as well as our genuine social progress. Indeed, the most far-reaching and long-lasting social reforms in human history have been made not within Socialist societies but in free ones.
Individual liberty is not the primary source of social problems, as Socialists of all types proclaim. Our freedom is instead, along with God’s grace, the primary source of our liberation from tyranny, misery, and want.
