Sleepwalking into totalitarianism – Part 1

How our 'liberal' democracies are becoming illiberal and increasingly totalitarian

In this two-part essay I describe my observations of the growing totalitarianism in the Western world in recent years. As I say in this first part, in the beginning, wokeism was not driven by governments. It was a kind of soft totalitarianism, a decentralised system of elite control. Then came the highly authoritarian response to Covid, with some totalitarian elements, especially towards the end. 

In the second part of the essay I will provide evidence of how Western governments are now becoming increasingly totalitarian in the name of 'saving democracy', as they say, and I will explore what might be the reasons that have led us to this situation and some ideas of what we can do about it.

I know that the core argument I make in this essay is not new. It has been made many times over the last three years or so. It is more, in the so-called dissident circles of which I know some it has become received wisdom that in the Western world the totalitarian tendencies are advancing frighteningly fast.

At the same time, I am well aware that most people I know, and many of my readers, would still completely reject the idea that our liberal democracies are themselves becoming illiberal or showing signs of totalitarianism. Most people in Western Europe are still convinced that the main threat to our democracies comes from the populist right or from foreign authoritarian regimes, not from those who claim to defend liberal democracy.

While I'm under no illusion that this essay will convince those who firmly believe that the story we're living is one of the good guys (the liberal progressives) fighting the bad guys (the right-wing enemies), my hope is that there are still enough open-minded people who are willing to be convinced by evidence and logic.

I'm not going to argue that Putin is actually a good guy, or that far-right ideology and ideas are never dangerous. But the purpose of this essay is to show, as best I can, that too many representatives of our political and cultural elites, who are generally perceived as the good guys, are in fact developing a totalitarian mindset, and too many people are mindlessly accepting and often even cheering the manipulative steps that are leading us towards a totalitarian society.

One indicator that something bad is happening in our societies is the recent surge in references to Aldous Huxley's Brave New World and George Orwell's 1984. For example, in mid-2022, when the Biden administration announced the formation of the so-called "Disinformation Governance Board" to combat disinformation and misinformation, “Ministry of Truth” trended on Twitter (now X).

But what do I mean when I say that we are sleepwalking into totalitarianism?

The concept of totalitarianism is contested among scholars. However, all definitions include the subordination of the individual to state authority and strict control over all aspects of life. Some scholars stress that while both the authoritarian and the totalitarian state discourage individual freedom of thought and action, the totalitarian state differs in that it is guided by a strong and highly developed ideology and aims to impose a new social value system through coercion and repression (see for example Encyclopaedia Britannica).

By contrast, pluralism and tolerance are (or perhaps I should say were) the essential elements of Western liberal democracies. Open discourse is the key mechanism by which political decisions are made in a liberal democracy. It allows different interests to compete and be balanced. Most importantly, open discourse has driven the creative energy that has been at the heart of the success of our free societies.

The question, then, is whether there are signs that our Western societies are moving away from the principles of liberal democracy and are instead moving closer towards the characteristics of totalitarian societies, or whether we as societies and our governments are firmly committed to the principles of pluralism, tolerance, open discourse and freedom of speech.

The case I'm making in this essay is that there is now overwhelming evidence that we are moving dangerously towards a totalitarian system, even though formally all the democratic institutions are still in place and we are still some miles away from something like a Soviet system. It is still possible to say most things without being taken to court even if this is changing rapidly, as I will explain.

Wokeism

The first time I fully connected the concept of totalitarianism with the cultural phenomena I had been concerned about for some time was when I read the book Live Not By Lies by the American journalist and author Rod Dreher a few years ago. 

In the introduction to his book, Dreher says that he spoke to many men and women who had once lived under Soviet communism and had fled to the United States. He asked them if America was drifting towards some kind of totalitarianism, and they all said yes. These Soviet dissidents all pointed to how elites and elite institutions had abandoned the old liberal defence of individual rights and, under the guise of 'diversity', 'inclusiveness' and 'equality', had created powerful mechanisms for controlling thought and discourse and marginalising dissent as evil.

He quotes a professor now living in the Midwest (of the US): "I was born and raised in the Soviet Union, and I'm frankly stunned by how similar some of these developments are to the way Soviet propaganda operated." Another professor, originally from Czechoslovakia, told him that years ago friends began to lower their voices and look over their shoulders when expressing conservative views.

These developments are not confined to America. They are happening all over the West. The Allensbach Institute, a prestigious German polling organisation, regularly asks Germans "how freely they can express their political opinions in Germany today, or whether it is better to be cautious". While in the 1990s around 70% of Germans said they could express themselves freely in public, this figure has fallen rapidly in recent years. In 2023, the figure was just 40%.

At the time Dreher wrote his book (in 2020), the control of speech was largely driven not by laws and state control, but by a much more decentralised system of elite control. Many of the elites have embraced a radical progressive agenda, now widely referred to as 'wokeism' (which I use here for lack of a better term), and are exercising their influence over the media, universities and NGOs to push their agenda and impose it on the rest of us.

Many have pointed out that in Western societies where Christianity has become a fringe phenomenon, Wokeism has emerged as a substitute for Christianity. Wokeism shares many of the characteristics of religions and is in fact deeply rooted in Christian morality. Without Christian compassion for innocent victims of violence and the demand to protect the weak, the woke obsession with victimhood would not have arisen, as the historian René Girard has convincingly argued. 

However, instead of asking and examining who is actually a victim of unfair treatment or violence and in need of support or protection, the woke ideology establishes fixed categories of victims based on sex, gender and skin colour. It does not matter if a black person is rich and influential. They are victims of racism because of the colour of their skin. White men are perpetrators because they are white.

Instead of asking what can be done to help those who bear an unfair burden in order to have a better life, wokeism mainly calls for punishing the guilty by category: white people, heterosexuals, men. If they commit the crime of using the wrong word or expressing the wrong thought, they risk losing their jobs or being ostracised from their social and professional networks. The policing of language and cancel culture does nothing to improve the lives of marginalised poor people, women or black people. Instead, what it seems to do most of all is to help elites feel morally superior.

While the woke mobs have already created a highly dysfunctional culture of fear and mistrust across the West, it is the bureaucratisation of this ideology that is doing the most damage. Under the label of DEI (diversity, equity & inclusion), most institutions across the Western world have now operationalised woke ideology in such a way that the recruitment and internal promotion of people who belong to pre-established victim categories is prioritised over the person's professional skills and suitability for the job. The absolute goal of equity here means that the organisation should reflect the representation of so-called marginalised groups in society at large.

While we will only know the full extent of the destructive effects of DEI in the long term, it is already clear that these programmes are severely weakening our institutions and the competitiveness of Western economies in the global marketplace.

Where Christian morality was a force for good, wokeism is utterly dysfunctional and culturally destructive.

While these developments clearly already represent a kind of totalitarianism – you could call it soft totalitarianism – with very negative consequences for the functioning of society and the well-being and livelihoods of many people, wokeism was just the beginning, and since then things have worsened in ways I could not have imagined even five years ago.

The authoritarian Covid regime

It was the SARS COV 2 virus that acted as a game changer in the Western world – the pandemic affected most societies in the world, of course, but I'm focusing on the West because that's where we made the most dramatic shift: We no longer regard our civil liberties as sacrosanct rights, but have basically treated them as secondary since the spring of 2020.

The strange organic dynamics of soft totalitarianism that had spread first from the US and then across Europe had now morphed into a state-orchestrated, highly authoritarian agenda across the West.

Suddenly, constitutional civil liberties and rights became secondary to a new absolute societal goal of reducing the number of infections and deaths. Virtually overnight, our centuries-old legal traditions of managing trade-offs and balancing different interests became obsolete, and instead lockdowns, masks and social distancing mandates became received wisdom and could not be questioned.

All Western countries had elaborate pandemic plans, but they were ignored without any logical explanation. Instead, a mix of very radical policies were implemented, most of which were not included in the pandemic plans. Only Sweden stuck to its  pandemic plan and was, it is now clear, the country that did the least harm to its people of all the Western countries.

The mainstream media, with very few exceptions, was in lockstep with the government, suppressing any substantial dissent from official policy. 

While most of the media's suppression of dissent was self-imposed, Western governments intervened heavily in what social media companies such as Facebook and Twitter (now X) would allow to be posted on their platforms. We know from the Twitter files that the US government was constantly telling Twitter which accounts to block and which posts to ban. The UK government set up the so-called Counter Disinformation Unit, which “passed information over” to companies such as Facebook and Twitter to “encourage the swift removal” of posts.

Much of what was labelled disinformation during the Covid 19 pandemic turned out to be fact, or at least a credible hypothesis, months later. For example, in the first year of the pandemic, Facebook and Youtube blocked content arguing for the lab leak hypothesis, and only lifted the ban when the mainstream media decided that it was a credible and eventually even highly probable hypothesis to explain how the virus had emerged in the first place.

Noam Chomsky once famously said: “The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum—even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there's free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate.” This sounds like a very accurate way of describing what happened during the pandemic.

Many journalists still believe that, on balance, it was justified to ban certain ideas from public discourse during the pandemic and walk in lockstep with the government instead of holding it to account and criticising it where it deserves it. They believe it was for the greater good. But whatever the good intentions, censorship was and is a terrible idea. Many of the disastrous measures taken during the pandemic could have been avoided, or at least not sustained for so long, if dissenting voices had been heard, and there were many. The overall damage would certainly have been less.

The censorship of social and mainstream media, which is totally incompatible with the West's self-image of a free society, was a key element in the successful manipulation of large majorities in our societies. The other key element was the systematic ostracism, defamation and in many cases persecution by so many of our public figures, political leaders and journalists of all those who disagreed with the lockdown regime.

Some of the world's most respected scientists were suddenly vilified as covid-deniers or conspiracy theorists because they disagreed with the lockdown consensus. In Germany, for example, during the pandemic it became normal for government officials and journalists to label anyone sceptical of government policy as a "corona denier" or, more bluntly, a "covidiot", and to equate them with right-wing extremists and conspiracy theorists.

Across the West, for many months it was very difficult, and in many cases impossible, for people to exercise their constitutional right to demonstrate against government policies. Demonstrations were often labelled as dangerous mass contagious events and banned. Where people did dare to demonstrate, they were often treated as serious criminals and often beaten by the police for minor offences such as failing to maintain the proper social distance. At the same time, when Black Lives Matter protests and demonstrations erupted in the summer of 2020, they were welcomed by governments in North America and elsewhere without major restrictions. In this case, the moral case against racism outweighed the official consensus that there was a high risk of infection in the open air.

The whole approach to the Covid pandemic was highly authoritarian, severely violated many constitutional rights, including freedom of speech, assembly and movement, created a culture of fear and was inhumane, especially towards the elderly, who were often left to die alone, and towards children, who were not at risk from the virus but had to bear a very heavy burden. But things got even worse when the authorities started pitting the vaccinated against the unvaccinated, creating a huge social divide that continues to this day. 

The witch hunt began in the autumn of 2021, when it was already clear that the various types of vaccine did not protect against infection, or did so only to a limited extent, and therefore could not help to create herd immunity in the population. It was also clear from the start of the vaccination campaign that the so-called mRNA vaccines were in fact not normal vaccines at all, but experimental gene therapy drugs that had been given emergency licences throughout the West. Due to the complete novelty of these so-called vaccines, their long-term safety was completely unknown, while their efficacy was at least not as good as initially promised. Despite the lack of serious studies, we now know that the risk of serious adverse reactions to mRNA vaccines is unusually high, and this clearly does not include the long-term risks.

Despite all this, and in clear violation of the Nuremberg Code, those who rightly feared the adverse effects of these 'vaccines' and chose not to be vaccinated were harassed in most Western countries, and many were even forced to be vaccinated if they didn't want to lose their jobs. It was often impossible to go anywhere without a vaccination pass.

Many people in public life engaged in vile agitation against the unvaccinated. The president of the World Medical Association, Frank Ulrich Montgomery, famously said: "At the moment we are really experiencing a tyranny of the unvaccinated, ruling over the two-thirds of the vaccinated and imposing all these measures on us." At the time he said this, in November 2021, he must have known that his claim was based entirely on a lie. But many others said similar abhorrent things at the time. They treated a section of the population as if they had leprosy.

At the height of this hysteria in the winter of 2021/2022, the word "unvaccinated" became synonymous with "dirty and dangerous" in public discourse. At some German Christmas markets, fences were erected to prevent the unvaccinated from entering certain areas.

The cold-blooded demagogy used by so many officials and public figures was very similar to that used by totalitarian regimes in Europe's past, and it was so successful that most ordinary people still don't understand what really happened. And almost none of the perpetrators have since shown any sign of genuine remorse for the vile things they said and did.

But perhaps the most shameful example of rampant authoritarianism during the pandemic happened in that lovely country called Canada. One of the world's most respected liberal democracies suspended the most basic civil rights and turned authoritarian when, in early 2022, Canadian Prime Minister Trudeau invoked the Emergencies Act to end the large but almost entirely peaceful protest by Canadian truckers against the Covid vaccine mandate for truckers. Trudeau's justification was that the truckers held "unacceptable views". Invoking a War on Terror law, the Canadian government froze the protesters' bank accounts and blocked their credit cards. Thousands of donors who had tried to support the truckers financially through a fundraising website faced financial retaliation from the Canadian authorities. Two years later, a Canadian court has declared the government's actions unconstitutional. At the time, however, almost the entire Western media, governments and NGOs remained silent about this extremely serious violation of the most basic civil liberties. In fact, it's likely that most people in the West have never heard of the Canadian truckers' protests because our elite institutions have decided to pretend they never happened.

Most people have moved on since the pandemic and don't want to continue talking about lockdowns, mandatory masks, mandatory vaccines and vaccine passports. But this is not a closed chapter, a one-off event that was badly managed but won't happen again. In fact, it is quite likely that the same portfolio of measures will be pulled out of the drawer the next time a novel virus emerges, or even in response to a seasonal flu outbreak. The baseline has shifted. Governments have learned that they can get away with extreme authoritarianism and will continue to use these powers when they feel it's useful.

The battle against the enemies of democracy

If the pandemic was the turning point that introduced us Western citizens to a new culture of extensive censorship and a mainstream media landscape that marches in lockstep with governments, reporting the facts as they fit their predetermined narrative, then what has happened since is the consolidation and perfection of these tools.

While the pandemic has disappeared from the headlines, the narrative of crisis and the moralisation of everything has not. The overarching narrative that has dominated public discourse since then is that we are fighting the battle of our lives against the so-called enemies of democracy. It is the story of a battle between the good guys - those who do not question the dogmas and elite consensus on the most contentious issues such as immigration, climate change, lockdowns, gender ideology, Ukraine or Gaza - and the bad guys on the other side - those who dare to question or fundamentally disagree with the dogmas. This narrative implies that we no longer debate who has the better arguments. Instead, those who disagree are automatically seen as evil and their motives are portrayed as obviously bad. (to be continued)

Watch out for the second part of this two-part essay. I will provide evidence of how Western governments are now becoming increasingly totalitarian in the name of 'saving democracy', as they say. I will show how the 'fight for democracy' is being operationalised through the fight against what has come to be called 'hate speech' and the push to eliminate 'disinformation', and I will explore what might be the reasons that have led us to this situation and some ideas about what we can do about it.