It has long been the practice of our conservative media to blame the corrupt, “woke,” criminal coddling governments in our cities on the “Democratic Party.” This allows the conservative establishment to flatter the voting public as a source of wisdom while fobbing off its disastrous stupidity on some external force.
Thus, it was allegedly not the voters who elevated the anti-police wokester Brandon Johnson to the mayoralty in Chicago or who allowed the floundering tool of the public sector unions Kathy Hochul to win the governorship in New York. These mishaps occurred because of the Dems, who are always plotting behind our backs with the surveillance state and their media lapdogs.
“Americans didn’t choose to give up their liberties and Constitutional rights.”
The choice was made for them.
“As Siegel writes, ‘Americans are no longer presumed to have the right to choose their own leaders or to question decisions made in the name of national security. Anyone who says otherwise can be labeled a domestic extremist.’”
The last time I checked, tens of millions of Americans did choose the government under which they live. They aren’t the entirely helpless victims of a derailed constitutional government, which is rapidly turning totalitarian. They had made their choice to “escape from freedom,” if I may quote the title of a famous anti-Nazi work by a member of the Frankfurt School.
Having just come from a family reunion, I listened to my own relatives, with advanced degrees, explain how Biden has saved us from a Christian theocracy. I patiently listened to repetitions of alarmed reports about the gun danger courtesy of National Public Radio, which certainly isn’t lacking listeners. One might hope that educated people with high native intelligence would know better than to repeat the latest propaganda emanating from state radio.
Whatever we may think about the behavior of our Deep State and our less-than-unbiased media, they’re certainly not operating without popular support. And let’s not understate the extent of this aid. We know that at the height of the Depression, the Nazi Party brought their share of the German vote up to about one-third, although that total came down considerably by the end of 1932. (That, mind you, was before the viciousness of the Nazis was fully evident.)
A higher percentage of the American electorate is now voting for a rogue government that Kimball and Siegel rightly criticize. This concerns me at least as much as what this administration and its enablers are doing. As hard as this may be for some on the right to grasp, the Deep State and “fake media” have loads of public support. In Canada and Europe, woke regimes that imposed lockdowns and woke instruction on their citizens were rewarded with electoral victories.
We may therefore conclude that voters in countries that call themselves “democracies” have an eroded appetite for freedom. On the basis of their votes, we may also conclude that they’re happy to have the state control their lives and reconstruct their social relations.
But most of those who live under this failed justice system are far from the hapless victims of a totalitarian society. They’re fully complicit in their fate.
I fully understand that those who want to change this situation may regard it as unwise to depict voters as implicated in the misdeeds of their rulers. This may fit a certain misguided populist notion, one in which the “people” are always good, while political elites are held responsible for running things down. Although I, too, would like to see the populace rise up against an evil, inept governing class, it’s ridiculous to pretend that the electorate has no part in giving credibility to those who misrule us.
Without continuing popular affirmation here and elsewhere in the Western world, the “surveillance state” would have been driven from power before producing all the mischief that Siegel and Kimball quite properly lament.
