Is America Devolving into Soft Totalitarianism?

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Americans have now existed for more than two generations as the wards of the national state they demanded be built to satisfy their physical needs and wants. Their economic, political, and even social lives now are regulated by statutes and regulations seeing to it that everyone is officially tended to (whether well or ill is another matter, but one the experts insist they alone can address). But meeting basic needs has proven insufficient. Demand for comforts has emptied the public purse even as it has exposed the cultural consequences of dependency in crime, squalor, and hopelessness. Meanwhile, the state has expanded its ends to include a different, no less impossible goal, namely fairness, defined as equal treatment by everyone in all things. In the new state, no one is to be favored over anyone else in employment, housing, education, and welfare. Whether employees or employers, people’s lives are structured to maintain compliance with work rules, environmental regulations, and anti-discrimination regimes that require persistent training sessions and reporting to special “compliance” committees. Everyone is guaranteed equal treatment throughout their lives in the same fashion that they are required to prove that they are treating others equally, that they are not harming the environment, and that they are not somehow promoting or approving religion or traditional lifestyles above previously more marginal choices. Their lives and characters are shaped by a pervasive apparatus controlled from the political center.

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