Consider the age of monarchs. Squabbling barons select a supreme ruler – a king or an emperor — to suppress the squabbling. Peace and prosperity return to the land. The king makes policy but he can’t do everything. His minions take care of the details.
Minions mean bureaucracy. The bureaucracy grows. The king grows old and dies. The dynasty continues. The bureaucracy continues – always continues, and always grows. The bureaucracy becomes an establishment kingdom unto itself. The bureaucracy grows in power and serves its own interests. The king diminishes in power. The land grows restless under the increasing regulatory tyranny and taxes. Legitimacy –what the Chinese called the “mandate of heaven” — is lost and so is the dynasty.
Change the names and we are at the end of a similar cycle – a cycle that began with the guillotine. This time it is a world-wide cycle. The modern king is a modern tyrant – Stalin, Hitler, Mao were the worst.
The socialist idea had been kicking around since the 18th century. This seemingly plausible notion shaped the various Marxist evils of the 20th century. The Soviet Union, Mao’s China, Nazism, Fascism, and today’s imperious European Union, are all socialist tyrannies of one degree or another.
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Bureaucratic agencies become ideal tools for tyrants. A tyrant can point his agencies in a particular direction and unleash them. They immediately glory in their new power. Horrors ensue. Nazi Germany gave us the Holocaust and war. Stalin used betrayal. Friends betrayed friends. Children spied on parents. During the Soviet show trials of the 1930’s Stalin’s innocent victims were forced to falsely confess in order to save the lives of their families. Fear reigns.
Sound familiar? How about the FBI inducing General Flynn to plead guilty in order to protect his son? Mao injected dark comedy by unleashing hordes of children to humiliate their elders. No one was safe. Fear reigns. Sound familiar? Antifa anyone? Black Lives Matter anyone? Greta anyone? Mao lives!
The United States has become an undemocratic administrative state as well, but only by happenstance. In this country Congress has ceded much of its power to unchecked regulatory agencies, allowing them to write their own laws — regulations which enable them to prosecute, and persecute, anyone who might stand in an agency’s way. The agencies are powers unto themselves — judge, jury, and arresting police altogether. Innocents are often victims.
It isn’t just the regulatory, or administrative, state that is the problem. There is a growing sense that something is terribly wrong throughout society – throughout progressive liberal society, that is. How about needles in the street? How about sanctuary cities, counties and states? How about the ruins of Detroit? How about the weekly slaughter in Chicago? How about suppression of free speech in academia? How about the corrupt liberal media? How about big tech bias and censorship? It seems that our governments, and our intellectual establishments both, no longer serve the average citizen. They serve only a leftist political ideology, and themselves.
