Yep, we’re here.
Government by regulation = statism.
Call it anything you want - fascism, totalitatianism, communism, socialism, corporatism, soft tyranny. It looks to me and my American University political science degree training that the United States is in the process of creating a new style of distatorship, one in which we’ll still retain a frosting of individual rights and the illusion of limited government, but will actually create a bureaucratic state centered in Washington which will seek to regulate all aspects of our lives.
Maybe that’s why we’re having such a hard time coming up with a name - this is a brand-new thing. And how American is that? We’re coming up with a whole new kind of tryanny, in the same way that we formerly came up with new kinds of transportation, housing, economics, and artistic expression.
To me, this feels like the inverse of China, where a frankly totalitarian regime has loosened restrictions just enough to create economic growth. It seems as if Obama is taking a free market, limited government regime and tightening it just enough to restrict economic growth to only those places that the government allows. Perhaps we’ll meet in the middle and become even better friends.
The scariest part for me is the thought that the Roman republic similarly lost its republican traditions slowly over time, and even when it installed a permanent dictator, still gave lip service to the idea of the republic. Centuries afterwards, the provinces still conducted themselves on republican values, while Rome itself was tryanny. Is this our future - a bureaucratic elite in Washington cranking out regulation after regulation, while here in Alaska we still go through the charade of state soveriegnty and elect our little mayors and state legislature?
Or are we already well past that point right now?
God help us.