AMERICA: A VASSALAGE OF TUTELARY FASCISM

   The shape of America in which we now find ourselves at last must be reviewed in the stark and uncomfortable light of the facts as they are. One might attempt to enumerate and consider the wide variety of interferences and regulations which have been heaped upon our hapless and beleaguered citizens. The task is not simply daunting, but impossible. There is no corner of the universe of human action which has escaped their notice.

  The federal government has already begun or will soon undertake all of the following:
they regulate wages, bonuses, voter registration rules, prices, air in tires, auto tail lights, air bags, truck safety, truck driver hours, water in toilets, toilet paper, gasoline mileage standards, cooking oils, appliance efficiency, tobacco, electrical standards, alcohol, air quality, non-prescription drugs, prescription drugs, illegal drugs, the levels at which thermostats are set, government schools, school curriculum, retirement plans, chemical plants, oil and gas exploration, coal mining, highway construction, water quality standards, transportation safety, air traffic control, railroads, customs, prisons, automobile colors, college and university grants and admissions, firearms and ammunition, farm production, ports, securities, insurance, mortgages, banks, security firms, power plants, nuclear plants, fissile material, carbon dioxide emissions, endangered species, forestry, racetracks, abortion on demand, euthanasia as required, eugenics for all, and rationed health care for the survivors.

   Of course, this is not a complete list and can only barely be described as a representative list with a big stretch. In short, the government of the United States has either a fist or a boot in
just about everything. They have a plan to control, manage, supervise, and punish with impunity every aspect of the life of the common man. They have both figuratively and literally shot for the moon. Apologies are offered to those whose favorite source of irritation has inadvertently been omitted.

   The perceptive observer will note that with so much activity they nevertheless seem unable to secure the borders, one the few responsibilities which the Federal government is assigned by the Constitution. Still, how may this form of governance be described? What words are adequate and accurate to convey the idea behind this governance?

   Marxism was international socialism in an extreme form, an entire absence of private property universally imposed. It was a Kingdom of God without God. The state was God and required absolute obedience. The state owns everyone and everything which they do. In this sense there is no actual redistribution in Marxism. There is only distribution, from each according to his abilities and to each according to his need. All production is owned by the state which distributes the benefits equally. This is the vision of its realized eschatology which has never actually been achieved.

   Socialism conveyed an idea not quite so extreme, and still the bulk of all means of production, or at least mass production was under state control. Socialism seems to focus more on the redistribution of benefits than on the actual state ownership of property as it is more willing to accept state control in lieu of state ownership. Socialism is about redistribution. Whatever remnants there remain of a free market are thought of as inequitably distributing benefits which the state must redistribute, because it is the ‘fair’ thing to do. Socialists eventually become dissatisfied with the uneven results of redistribution and become attracted to the simple distribution of Marxism.

   Fascism was national socialism and it embraced national industrial policy (e.g. nationalized auto companies) and national commercial policy (e.g. nationalized financial sector) with huge component of state ownership of properties of heavy industry (e.g. steel mills, power generation, defense contracting, etc.) within the confines of national borders. It carried the additional twist of ethnic, racial, or religious scapegoat-ism, presumably not as an absolutely necessary component, but as a catalyst to achieve the rest.

   Both Marxism and Fascism share a lack of respect for international borders and follow expansionist foreign policy as the extension of their ideology. What drives their missionary zeal is a mystery, but no deeper than the mystery embedded in every empire. It is driven by hubris.

   The vision of governance embraced by the last Bush might be classified as near fascist. He introduced in a major way changes which would ultimately lead to a national commercial and national industrial policy. His successor has carried on with these policies, expanded them, and brought further forward the already incipient component of ethnic, racial, or religious scapegoat-ism. This kind of bigotry has now become popular around the world. The President of Brazil once lamented that the world financial crisis of 2008-9 was caused by white people with blue eyes. For some time anti-religious sentiment has permeated the federal government.

  The financial crisis of 2008-9 was caused by every member of Congress who took campaign cash and turned a blind eye to the abuses at Fannie and Freddie. The fact that this took place
as the culmination of forty years of unwarranted monetary and credit expansion is what led to the collapse. These were all adjunct policies to support a vision of globalism, which suggested that Americans could borrow and consume indefinitely while the rest of the world could manufacture, produce, and invest indefinitely.

   It is this vision which suggested that the American consumer and taxpayer could bring prosperity and growth to everyone in the world who lived in a cave and wore a loincloth. The imposition of individual and corporate income taxes contributed mightily to this vision as the net effect of such taxes is the exportation of a nations entire productive base. As American disposable income came under increasing pressure this model of globalism failed, because there were not enough customers with enough money in their pockets to support the productive capacity of the world. All of the failure associated with collateralized debt obligations, credit default swaps and so forth came about as the result of trying to keep the cheap or free credit flowing, by whatever mechanism could be invented.

   The framers constructed a representative republic which bears almost no resemblance to what we now suffer. The state which they constructed began with a fundamental epistemological assumption: the existence of Natural Law emanating from Nature’s God. From this assumption they drew what they believed to be the knowledge of good and evil. Some things were good and others were evil. They made the claim of self-evident truth. It is a religious claim, a statement of faith. They believed that the universe, its laws, and its God were knowable.

   They believed in a concept of original sin. They saw the universe as broken and flawed, and man in a state of imperfect stewardship and capable of great evil. This religious understanding was the foundational thought of the framers of the Constitution. Without a concept of Natural Law there can be no universal human rights. Without the radical evil of original sin man is perfectible and there is no need for a separation of powers.

   In modern times few want to consider the idea of original sin, because it suggests a transcendental moral law to which they do not measure up. Nevertheless, it is the idea of original sin which made the framers anti-utopian. The modern atheist or agnostic may suffer some discomfort at this point, but may overcome it by thinking of the demonstrable propensity of mankind to choose submission and servitude rather than independence and liberty. It is this propensity which the religious attribute to original sin.

   The framers had no illusions about creating the perfect state. They did not envision the establishment of a realized eschatology. For them, the world and man was broken and the task was to choose as best one could between manifest evils in an imperfect universe . The task was to protect the inalienable rights of man from the predations of others, whether individuals or government. Evil was that which violated the Laws of Nature and Nature’s God. The affirmation of slavery in the Constitution for some must have been a bitter pill indeed. Their error was trading away the rights of man in slavery to achieve a less noble end: unity.

  The passage of two centuries have brought many changes, and we no longer have a representative republic. We no longer have even a democratic representative republic. We have
something entirely different. Alexis De Tocqueville attempted at the end of his work Democracy in America to envision what sort of despotism democratic nations have to fear. He struggled with this question:

"I think, then, that the species of oppression by which democratic nations are menaced is unlike anything that ever before existed in the world; our contemporaries will find no prototype of it in their memories. I seek in vain for an expression that will accurately convey the whole of the idea I have formed of it; the old words despotism and tyranny are inappropriate: the thing itself is new, and since I cannot name, I must attempt to define it."

  The term suggested by the economist Robert Higgs is ‘participatory fascism.’ It is a good term. It is descriptive of some aspects of what America faces in the twenty first century. However, the term has a serious deficiency. ‘Participation’ is appropriate only in the sense that the ubiquitous Federal Government recruits millions of the common man as accessories to its crimes. For the vast numbers of victims it is not participatory. It places them in a state of suffocating vassalage.

   The student of these matters is drawn to De Tocqueville and his near prophetic vision of modern man in his isolation and self absorption:

"I seek to trace the novel features under which despotism may appear in the world. The first thing that strikes the observation is an innumerable multitude of men, all equal and alike, incessantly endeavoring to procure the petty and paltry pleasures with which they glut their lives. Each of them, living apart, is as a stranger to the fate of all the rest, his children and private friends constitute to him the whole of mankind. As for the rest of his fellow citizens, he is close to them, but he does not see them; he touches them, but he does not feel them; he exists only in himself and for himself alone; and if his kindred still remain to him, he may be said at any rate to have lost his country."
  The totally self absorbed condition of man is necessary to this new kind of despotism to exist. It is a widespread intellectual, spiritual, and social lethargy. It may be said to have reached a zenith in the United States during the decade of the 1960s, except that it has never retreated from its zenith. Indeed it seems as though the popular desire for the empty and the vacuous grows with each passing decade, and into this vacuum steps government.

"Above this race of men stands an immense and tutelary power, which takes upon itself alone to secure their gratifications and to watch over their fate. That power is absolute, minute, regular, provident, and mild. It would be like the authority of a parent if, like that authority, its object was to prepare men for manhood; but it seeks, on the contrary, to keep them in perpetual childhood; it is well content that the people should rejoice, provided that they think of nothing but rejoicing. For their happiness such a government willingly labors, but it chooses to be the sole agent and the only arbiter of that happiness; it provides for their security, foresees and supplies their necessities, facilitates their pleasures, manages their principal concerns, directs their industry, regulates the descent of property, and subdivides their inheritances: what remains, but to spare them all the care of thinking and all the trouble of living?....Such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd."

   De Tocqueville takes the view that those who over such a lengthy period of time have become dependent on the supervision of the central power gradually lose the ability to think, feel, and act for themselves, and finally fall below the level of humanity. The end of such a state is that:

"The vices of the rulers and the ineptitude of the people would speedily bring about its ruin; and the nation, weary of its representatives and of itself, would create freer institutions or soon return to stretch itself at the feet of a single master."
    It is certainly true that America of the early twenty first century is burdened by the vices of rulers and the ineptitude of its people. The financial situation of this period certainly looks like the beginning of ruin. But could America create freer institutions?

   The modern model of American government is not a democratic representative republic.
It has morphed into a vassalage of tutelary fascism. Clearly, it is more vassalage than it is participatory. It is democratic only in the sense that the people, or a percentage of the people, periodically arise from their stupor to vote, and then only to assure their role as accessories to the crimes of the government. This vassalage has been created by the willing subservience of the people to what is presented and envisioned as an utopia. A concept of an utopia is only possible in the absence of an understanding of original sin or of the propensity of mankind to choose submission and servitude rather than independence and liberty. The moral laws of Nature and Nature’s God and the idea of original sin made possible the American nation at its outset. The recovery of those ideas which are anti-utopian is essential or its people will stretch themselves at the feet of a single master.