The bureaucratic dystopia

American Thinker ^ | 4 Sep, 2024 | Jay Davidson

[MtnClimber]

The government is a necessary evil...now, in our case, run rampant.

The original progressive (communist) president of the United States, Woodrow Wilson, in 1911, started what is now a behemoth, a leviathan of public (government employment)-sector bureaucracies. These bureaucracies have proliferated exponentially over the 115 years of their existence.

Franz Kafka and C.S. Lewis both wrote about a similar dystopia in 1930s Germany, just as Hitler was taking control of that nation, first with bureaucracy and then murder. The Marxists/Stalinists dispense with gradual bureaucratic takeover and murdered millions using the USSR’s military and police force.

Regardless of how they assume control (regulatory bureaucracy, administrative state, or force of arms), there is one common denominator: control of the private sector, the citizen, the individual, through a central government.

This is the source of the general malaise we citizens feel today. Mutual respect and common goals are replaced with hate, anger, violence, destruction. It doesn’t make sense to decent people, unless we postulate an intent behind this vast disruption of everything we hold dear.

Our family, friends, and neighborhood; our religion and our nation, the very idea of America, Land of the Free and Home of the Brave, is being torn apart, with intent and malaise aforethought.

However, evil can’t live in the light of intelligent curiosity, awareness, and knowledge. In opposition to our adversaries, who concocted a lie in the dark to subjugate us, we can remember and rediscover the truth behind our nation’s founding. We can know the principles upon which this nation was founded, and in the pure light of that knowledge and those principles, we can drive back the evil malaise that infests our nation.

We do by living according to the principles of our Constitution, which controls the government, and the inalienable rights noted in the Declaration...

[MtnClimber]

In many instances the government is an unnecessary evil. They should be afraid of the citizens they swindle.

[Olog-hai]

… The thesis of the state socialist is that no line can be drawn between private and public affairs which the state may not cross at will; that omnipotence of legislation is the first postulate of all just political theory. Applied in a democratic state, such doctrine sounds radical, but not revolutionary. It is only an acceptance of the extremest logical conclusions deducible from democratic principles long ago received as respectable. For it is very clear that in fundamental theory, socialism and democracy are almost, if not quite, one and the same. They both rest at bottom upon the absolute right of the community to determine its own destiny and that of its members. Men as communities are supreme over men as individuals. […]

Corporations grow on every hand, and on every hand not only swallow and overawe individuals but also compete with governments. The contest is no longer between government and individuals; it is now between government and dangerous combinations and individuals. Here is a monstrously changed aspect of the social world. In face of such circumstances, must not government lay aside all timid scruple and boldly make itself an agency for social reform as well as for political control? “Yes,” says the democrat, “perhaps it must.” …

— Woodrow Wilson, Socialism and Democracy, 1887

Just a little insight into Wilson’s thinking. For those who still think that the word “democracy” can be equated with limited government, think again—Wilson here equates democracy with socialism, which means that democracy is inherently totalitarian and inherently against individual rights.

[marktwain]

President Theodore Roosevelt was a Progressive. President Hoover was a Progressive.

The Progressive philosophy had successfully take over both political parties.

Wilson pushed it much harder than Theodore ever did, but he followed precedents created by Theodore.