The New Authoritarians
The Left used Margaret Atwood’s “Handmaid’s Tale” to portray Trump supporters and conservatives as the new authoritarians. They were actually using it as a guidebook for themselves
Every so often, I encounter a post to which I respond, “I wish I’d written that.”
This is one, by Alex Gutentag (probably not his real name) for Tablet Magazine, which focuses on “Jewish life,” is spot on and definitely worth reading. It’s entitled “The New Authoritarians.” A special needs teacher in California, he illuminates, again, the hypocrisy and projection of The Left, the real authoritarians among us who demand conformity to their dominant ideology and censorship, even cancellation, for those who resist.
How do you spot these people? Easy. Many have those feature yard signs with messages that begin “In This House We Believe” and include banalities like “love is love,” while claiming to believe in “science.” Scientism is more like it, the same mindset that brought us eugenics a century ago. You’ll likely still see them still wearing masks while walking alone outside, even though every state now, including Hawaii, has eliminated mask mandates. Even indoors.
Virtue signaling is their preferred language.
Enjoy this great post, published on March 29. Click the link below to read the rest:
The New Authoritarians
By Alex Gutentag
After the election of Donald Trump in 2016, many Democratic voters felt baffled and betrayed. Pollsters and statisticians had predicted a decisive victory for Hillary Clinton, and her campaign had even attempted to elevate Trump because they thought he was the easiest candidate for her to beat. Conveniently, the Russian collusion narrative and allegations of white supremacy allowed the Democratic National Committee, the Clinton campaign, and the media to avoid asking themselves how they had made such an enormous miscalculation.
In reality, their inability to predict or understand Trump’s appeal to voters was symptomatic of a class stratification that had been building for decades. From the 1970s until the 2008 financial crash, only the top 20% of the country saw its real income steadily grow while the real income of the bottom 80% stagnated. This top 20% consisted largely of affluent college-educated professionals who migrated to the Democratic Party, while large segments of the working class left it. In 1960, Democratic President John F. Kennedy lost the votes of white college graduates, but he won the support of white voters without a college degree by a 2-to-1 margin. For Joe Biden, the results were the exact opposite. In 1992, almost 60% of Bill Clinton’s supporters were whites without a degree, but the same was true of only 27% of Biden voters. By 2018 the top 10 wealthiest congressional districts were all held by Democrats.
The Democratic Party’s elitism problem corresponds to a long-standing trend among liberal professionals. For decades, they have been waging a thinly veiled class war against their perceived inferiors, which Christopher Lasch described in his 1994 book Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy. One of Lasch’s central arguments was that managerial elites had abandoned public debate and their basic obligations to the majority. The economic divide between the Democrat-affiliated upper-middle class and the rest of the country has produced a highly insular intelligentsia increasingly disconnected from reality and aligned with corporate interests.
While the GOP was once considered to be the party of big business, the country’s top billionaire megadonors are split between Democrats and Republicans, and Democrats equal or outpace Republicans in donations from pharmaceutical companies, the tech sector, and Wall Street. The alliance between Democrat-led causes and corporate executives is sometimes portrayed as necessary for holding off an insurrectionist, anti-democratic threat from the right. However, it is this very alliance that has produced highly centralized government and corporate control while curbing free expression and open discourse.
After Trump’s election, many commentators expressed anxiety that his followers would plunge the country into far-right authoritarianism. Instead, it is the class of college-educated Democrats that now openly argues for the value of blind submission to authority and the elimination of personal freedoms. The trend Lasch wrote about in the 1990s has metastasized. It no longer poses a mere threat to democracy—it has become a full-fledged attack on basic democratic principles. Far from upholding civil liberties, the self-proclaimed “resistance” to Trumpism has itself exhibited many hallmarks of authoritarianism: suppression of dissent, demand for unquestioning obedience, and tight control over the flow of information. While scapegoating Trump supporters, a nexus of billionaires, woke corporations, public intellectuals, and Democratic officials have sparked the very descent into authoritarianism they claimed would emerge from the populist right.
The TV production of Margaret Atwood’s novel The Handmaid’s Tale premiered on April 26, 2017, and was widely touted in liberal media outlets as a “prescient” “mirror” of the country under Trump. Journalists warned that the United States was on the precipice of becoming a Gilead-like dystopia where human rights would be nonexistent. Yet based on the domineering COVID-era behavior of the show’s own target audience, The Handmaid’s Tale appears to have been less of a warning to viewers and more of a handbook. Forced and coercive medical procedures, adoption of mandatory new garbs, censorship, and frozen bank accounts were central to the totalitarian state depicted in the novel and the show. In the end, this program found its real-world parallel, not in autocratic moves from the right, but in liberal-approved measures like vaccine mandates, mask requirements of dubious medical value, restrictions on speech, and seizure of protesters’ financial assets—all of which were vocally supported by the affluent laptop class.
Finish the essay here.