From old King George to Hitler and the Soviets, from the plantation slave holders to neonazis, and from overwrought religious fanatics and the new “woke” communists, Americans have always had to contend with authoritarianism abroad and even at home. This bent toward authoritarianism can be seen in little to major outbursts throughout our history: slavery, putting down the whiskey rebellion, the trail of tears, jim crow, and the list goes on to include the anti self-preservation acts in major cities and Democrat-run states in their war against the Second Amendment.
Authoritarianism is an instinct toward the forced submission of other people to your will against their own wishes and interests, even if you, the authoritarian, imagine you know what’s best for them. Whether the authoritarian is just lording it over others like some third world tinhorn junta or some idealistic do-gooder like the prohibitionists, the effect is the same: human agency and human dignity suffer and so does human rights and human flourishing.
Throughout our country’s history the threads of the authoritarian bent versus “freedomism” have played back and forth, here and there, each sometimes gaining the upper hand. The question of whether this “land of the free and home of the brave” will be truly free or lean backwards in societal evolution toward authoritarianism remains unresolved.
Freedomism is basically the belief that all humans are spiritually sovereign beings created in the image of God with inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness and wealth. Some of our core self-evident rights, if we believe in the inherent spiritual sovereignty of every individual, include self-preservation, self-determination, self-reliance, self-expression, and free participatory association. They require equitable and equal respect by ALL institutions (including government, business, and all others) for our human dignity, human agency, and the inviolate sanctity of our rights, persons, and property.
A world in which freedomism reigns supreme is a world of prosperity and happiness. A world where authoritarianism has even a little sway is a world where poverty grows, unhappiness spreads, and hate and discontent infect the populace.
Name an ill, such as racism and worker exploitation, child abuse or wealth inequities, social injustice or corruption, and a strict adherance to the spirit and heart of freedomism would substantially mitigate or solve that problem. But authoritarianism can never, ever, solve such problems. It isn’t organic or human in its foundation. It is akin to the introduction of one invasive species to solve the problem of another invasive species that becomes a far worse problem.
If you complain about “gun violence” and your instinct is to outlaw guns, then you are, to some degree, embracing authoritarianism. This knee-jerk response won’t solve the core problem of violence and criminality which results from a lack of respect for the rights, persons, and property of others. This disrespect for basic human dignity by the criminals and malefactors stems from the blatant disrespect meted out by our major institutions, including academia, the press, major corporations, and the government.
It has become fashionable to paint your authoritarianism in the colors of social justice and equity. The modern American “woke communist” isn’t like the Leninists or Maoists, per se, but more like the modern Chinese. They create a wicked partnership between woke communists in the corporate world and woke communists in the government. The supreme “woke communist” shot-callers don’t sound or look like the communists of old.
The evolution of communism from a strict state-ownership model to a partnership between Party loyalists in all institutions, including private and public, acting in ruthless disregard for basic human dignity, is alarming. It may have fooled too many people for too long who were looking for the classic neosoviet or maoist communist.
The basic essence of the communist model isn’t necessarily “state ownership of the means of production.” That’s so 19th and 20th century. The basic common thread is the use of authoritarianism to produce a society of managed outcomes. It requires the atomization of each individual so that they can be molded and shaped into a new type of human being. The modern equivalent of the “Soviet Man” is the “woke individual.” But, like the Soviet Man, the woke individual becomes a mere cog in a machine that uses bogeyman fears and utopian promises to keep everyone in line.
It’s all authoritarianism. While it is good to know the main new authoritarian threat that exists today, it is useful both to see the overall authoritarianism thread throughout human history and to be careful lest we also fall prey to the siren call.
Authoritarianism is essentially a lazy, quick-fix, silver bullet approach to problem solving at the level of society itself. Just cut the gordian knot by mandating that people become whatever you imagine in your theories they should become and, while some dissenters may be “necessarily” punished and harmed for the “common good”, the end justifies the means. The managed progressive evolution of society, in our manifestation of authoritarianism that seems to be a genderless and undifferentiated mass of atomized individuals without faith or family, demands that we punish those who hinder the advancement we have planned!
If your ideas aren’t such that people can adopt and use them for individual and mutual profit solely on the basis of freewill participation, then your ideas are total garbage. If your idea cannot flourish unless it shows intolerance towards all who don’t accept it or want to practice it, then, also, your idea is garbage.
Authoritarianism is tempting for three reasons: the submitter no longer bears personal responsibility for their actions or welfare, the imposer gains the wicked satisfaction of lording it over others, and the theorist satisfies themselves that they have magically solved the perceived societal problems with a simple solution.
Overbearing parents, machismo husbands, the karens and kens, and henpecking wives all have the spirit of authoritarianism bubbling up within their souls. Among the authoritarians and their followers there is no doubt this bent toward dominating others and disrespecting their basic human dignity is strong, and yet always “justified.”
The war between authoritarianism and freedomism is ancient and will never end. Even if we Freedomists gained the upper hand in America, the next generation would always be faced with some new manifestation of the authoritarian spirit. Some humans bend toward a wicked desire to control other humans and use all kinds of sophistry, including bogeyman fears and utopian promises, to justify their own inhumanity.
Today it is the woke communist that is our chief threat, a domestic foe to our freedom. The woke communist doesn’t just want state ownership of the means of production but a hybrid partnership of corporate and government power under the single control of the Party. Like all communists, they want a communalized society where the few lord over the many, but for their own good.
There are those within every institution, including the church world and the Republican Party, who collaborate with our modern woke communists. But the Party of Woke Communism today is the Democratic Party, even if most registered Democrats are, at worse, merely collaborators, but mostly just duped followers who know no better.
These woke communists go by many names, they seem to want to confuse everyone from seeing them as a whole. Their names include progressives, social justice warriors, social democrats, liberals (a misnomer to be sure), leftists, the new left, and on and on it goes. But all are cut from the same cloth: they want a communized society of undifferentiated and atomized individuals without faith or family led by a coterie of top-down authorities who know what is best for everybody.
We shouldn’t be fooled by their masks, their bogeyman fears, their utopian promises, or their dialectal approach whereby they hijack and use the very institutions (churches, the press, and corporations, as examples) their ideological forbears (Lenin and Mao) sought to destroy. Arrogance, hubris, and intolerance are the heart of the modern “cancel culture”, a new phrase for an old trick: demonize, marginalize, and criminalize your opponents but never debate them openly and honestly because your dark ideas are pure hell to anyone with half a brain who can see them for what they are.
Imagine a society of people who have no faith or family, who have no gender, and who are an undifferentiated mass whose only purpose is to live out their most basic animal desires and who feel no personal responsibility for their well-being or their actions. This is quite literally a species-ending hellscape being purposefully pushed by woke communists whose shot-callers (unbeknownst to most rank and file followers) simply want a monopoly on everything over everyone.
The good news is, it’s never going to get to that place. The bad news is, the journey of discovery, whereby a strong plurality of people truly resist and overcome this insanity, may get ugly for multiple generations.
But while we focus today on the threat of authoritarianism from “the left”, understand that authoritarianism takes many forms and, to some degree, as human beings with a sinful nature, it can arise within each of us. The religious zealot who thinks God needs help enforcing His laws, through the power of the state, is just as bad as the woke communist, but, let’s be real, those types truly have no institutional power to speak of in the broader society. At worse they may have outsized influence in backwater towns time has forgotten.
Regardless, the overarching war isn’t left and right per se, and it isn’t even just us against woke communist, that is just the primary battle of the moment as the new modern champion of authoritarianism is primarily the woke communist.
You may ask, “how can a billionaire robber baron be a woke communist?” The answer is simple: they believe their wealth and power allow them to have a hand in managing society for the common good. In short, they are full of themselves. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is the quintessential woke communist front and, before their divorce, these two fancied themselves among the world’s most “woke” who, using their wealth and power, would usher in the next evolution of humanity and save the world from climate change.
The billionaire snob whose wealth and power is used to advance the woke communist way is no different than the well-fed, privileged party bigwigs who ran the Soviet Union. The methods change but the end is the same: society will be atomized and then communized and only the woke institutions controlled as a monopoly by the ruling class will have power.
We are in the atomization phase, using gender and new definitions of marriage and family to disconnect people from natural, organic bonds and make them individuals, all alone and powerless, a nameless cog within an undifferentiated mass.
The communization phase only follows the atomization phase. And it is precisely in this atomization phase that the fight is won or lost for the next few generations. If the atomization phase, and the destruction of faith and family, (which is a state of being wherein most children are raised by their own biological or adopted mother and father within the warm embrace of a strictly voluntary faith-based community) is left unchecked, the communization phase will be easy.
Real totalitarianism, which is the extreme and most violent form of authoritarianism, necessarily follows. But this can take years and will always be sincerely denied: indeed, the progenitors themselves may not even desire totalitarianism but they cannot see that this is the only possible outcome if their ideas prevail. For example, in 2021, President Biden may have been no authoritarian, or totalitarian, but he has been forced to bend the knee and at least give symbolic gifts to actually woke communists whose core ideas can only end in totalitarianism.
Unlike the woke communists, our vision of a society of spiritually sovereign equal human beings rooted in faith and family is strictly based on freewill participation. We do not need or want laws or coercion to compel people to live as we do. We believe that a free and pluralistic society of equals will tend to be a marketplace of ideas where the most fruitful ideas tend to attract the most people and resources.
If your definition of marriage and family or your faith (or absence of faith) differs but you agree that we have the inherent spiritual sovereignty and agency to form any bonds or freewill participatory associations we choose, then we can easily get along as friends and allies. A free and pluralistic society of equals can sustain many versions and definitions of faith and family and the marketplace of ideas will organically sort the best and worst ideas.
This begins to touch on our concept of “nationhood” as a spiritual union, purely based on freewill participatory association, of equals who have a shared spiritually-centered social, cultural, and economic value system and goals both for the individual’s profit and the common good of the whole. Even if your definition of nationhood differs, our desire isn’t to make you follow our concept of nationhood (as a spiritual construct) but to prevent others from stopping us from doing so.
Our vision isn’t political. Our chief political aim is the devolution of political, fiscal, cultural, monetary, economic and even magisterial authority back from the concentrated center and top of society to the individuals in their marriages, families, extended families, freewill participatory associations, faith or philosophy based communities, and their locales.
The process of devolution of centralized and top-down power and the deepest manifestation of freedom for individuals within the loving embrace of faith and family, is evolutionary as well. It is not all-political. In fact, its strongest foundation is the individual adopting this “ideology” (becoming a Freedomist) and embracing faith and family as their primary reality and the institutions to which they give their primary loyalty.
We begin with not merely confronting the atomization process as a means towards the communization of society but by intentionally rebuilding the very institutions under assault, faith and family in particular. It is not that we don’t want others to manifest faith and family as they believe it should be, this is never an authoritarian approach because that approach always undermines our entire vision for a free and pluralistic society of equals!
Our approach is to push back on all authoritarian responses by any entity that seems to use its wealth and power as a leverage to force or strongly manipulate people into doing what they think everyone should be doing. The question is not the legal rights of these “private” entities, it is a moral and ethical question of whether those with outsized economic or cultural power should abuse it in a way that violates the dignity and agency of other human beings.
Even though we do not sign on to political controls to weaken mega corporate powers who are trying to impose the woke communist way, this doesn’t mean we don’t seek to reduce their influence and control through other means, such as opting out and/or competition. We generally oppose political controls because they are not a good means and therefore cannot produce a good end.
As an example, Facebook was within its right to ban President Trump, but its ability to control a major portion of public discourse through its near monopoly power, in collusion with other platforms, is both unethical (but not illegal) and, more importantly, unwanted by us.
We don’t care why the platforms do what they do. We suspect their owners are either outright woke communists or collaborators who think they can appease the woke communists, whose radical, loud, and violent demands they fear. The net effect is that the power of the platforms, like every other major US institution, has been harnessed mostly to the benefit of the woke communists, even if that is not their intention.
An authoritarian response to the alleged wokeness of the platforms may boomerang upon us like the “Patriot Act” which was crafted to fight America’s enemies but which is now used against Americans whose only “crime” is not being a woke communist, one of their followers and/or beneficiaries, or at least a collaborator.
Authoritarianism is the true and ancient foe to freedomism, but today it takes the primary form within America of woke communism. This, not climate change or alleged white supremacy, which may indeed be threats, is the number one existential threat to America and especially to freedom within America.
When or if we defeat the woke communists in our era, there will be other forms of authoritarianism we must guard against, and, no doubt, some new manifestation of communism, the communization of society, will rear its disgusting mug and call itself glorious and beautiful!
