A Quiet Totalitarian Revolution
Adapted from "Live Not by Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents" by Rod Dreher (Sentinel, 2020)
... Now and in the days to come, Big Tech and Woke Capital — that is, financial firms and corporations that embrace progressive values — will ramp up their campaign to marginalize and silence dissenters...
For some time now, naturalized American citizens who grew up in the Soviet bloc have been saying that they’re seeing in this country the rise of something that reminds them of what they left behind. It’s not Stalinism 2.0, but it is totalitarian in the sense that it is an all-encompassing system that seeks to politicize all aspects of life, demonizes people based on their identity, and will brook absolutely no dissent.
What makes this totalitarianism so difficult to see clearly is the fact that it is soft. Unlike in Stalin’s Russia, it does not depend on inflicting pain and terror to eliminate its opponents. Rather, it seeks control by manipulating access to comfort and status. It’s less Nineteen Eighty-Four and more Brave New World...
... The social justice phalanx radicalizing American institutions are taking over in part through force and intimidation. But they are also appealing to the deep desire for a sense of meaning and purpose in the hearts of younger Americans, who have not found it in traditional religion or bourgeois capitalism....
3. Conservatives thought capitalism was naturally on their side.
... To many on the Right, especially libertarians schooled by the novels of Ayn Rand, corporations seemed the natural opponent of the leviathan state...
Now an elite club of global megacorporations are more powerful than many countries...
And these corporations are very “woke,” to use the slang term for progressive enlightenment....
4. Conservatives, like all Americans, are naïve about technology.
... Corporations now have the data to identify your politics, your religious views, your friends, and so forth. If they decide that you are a deplorable person not worth doing business with, they have the data to prove it,...
But over and over dissidents told me that the law is not a reliable refuge: if the government is determined to take you out, it will manufacture a crime from the data it has captured, or otherwise deploy it to destroy your reputation....
What we are heading for is an American version of China’s social credit system. In China, the state has mastered a techno-totalitarianism of which Mao Zedong could only have dreamed....
Those with eyes to see, let them see. Then judge, then act....