Sleepwalking into totalitarianism – Part 2

How and why we are destroying our democracies in the name of saving them.

This is the second part of my two-part essay on my observations of the totalitarian tendencies in the West. In the first part, which you can read here, I argue that initially 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 this second part I provide evidence of how Western governments are now becoming increasingly totalitarian in the name of 'saving democracy', as they say. I 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 explore what might be the reasons that have led us to this situation.

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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.

This battle is most often explicitly aimed at the national populist parties that have recently gained strength, as well as their voters and sympathisers. But this is by no means exclusive. If you happen to be on the wrong side of any of the issues mentioned above, you run the risk of becoming the target of serious defamation. In Germany these days, for example, anyone who expresses too much support for the people of Gaza runs the risk of being labelled an anti-Semite and immediately excluded from polite society.

I have no doubt that many politicians, journalists and other public figures fully believe in the narrative they promote. This total conviction that there is an evil enemy, however nebulously defined, which is growing stronger and which must be defeated to save democracy, rather than listened to and debated, makes them firmly believe that any means of fighting the enemy is justified, be it public defamation, ostracism, censorship or even criminal prosecution. 

The most fascinating and frightening thing is that all this is being done in the name of 'saving democracy', when in fact it is a step-by-step programme to dismantle all the key elements of what we once knew as Western democracy.

The invention of disinformation and of hate speech

The way in which this 'fight for democracy' is operationalised is through the fight against what has come to be called 'hate speech', and through the push to eliminate 'disinformation'. In practice, the two concepts, while sounding like separate problems, are used interchangeably. In reality, they both mean that the ideas and words that the ruling establishment doesn't like should be eliminated from public discourse, which mostly, though not exclusively, means from digital platforms.

Speaking at the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting last January, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said that "misinformation and disinformation" pose a greater threat to the global economy than war and climate change. The solution, according to von der Leyen, is for businesses and governments to work together to combat disinformation.

In line with von der Leyen's speech, the mainstream media are constantly warning their audiences about the growing dangers of hate speech and disinformation and the need for decisive action by lawmakers and law enforcement against them. The media is usually quite vague about what exactly is being said that is so dangerous, but the fact that ordinary people are constantly hearing about these concepts and how bad they are probably makes people more receptive to cracking down on them.

The EU itself had already taken a big step towards enforcing its vision of policing speech on major digital platforms, when the Digital Services Act (DSA) came into force in August 2023. Using vague and highly bureaucratic language, the DSA pushes platform companies to remove or reduce the impact of what the EU considers 'harmful information' or disinformation. In order to do this, platform companies must work with 'vetted researchers' who have been pre-approved by the EU.

The term 'vetted researchers' refers to what are more commonly known as fact-checking organisations, which have become very influential in recent years. While some people may still believe that fact-checking organisations play a useful role in improving our public discourse and reducing lies and fake news, the reality is that most of these organisations actually make things worse due to their own often very biassed perspectives. Behind the veneer of neutral journalism, these organisations behave more like activists who see fact-checking as a way to fight a political enemy. Moreover, the idea that we can easily separate lies from facts is an illusion, especially given the fact that our public discourse is often about highly contentious issues that are far from settled. The fact that a majority holds a view does not mean that it is true.

In the case of these EU vetted researchers, who will play an important role in auditing platform companies, it is foreseeable that their political bias will be highly favourable to the dogmas of the EU's political powers and that this will influence what is considered harmful or disinformation.

For a deeper insight into how powerful the global fact-checking anti-disinformation industry has become, and what the consequences are, we need only look at the case study of the Global Disinformation Index (GDI), brilliantly researched and recently published by the British heterodox media outlet Unherd.

Founded in 2018, the UK company began with the ambition to disrupt the business model of online disinformation by starving offending publications of funding. They originally defined disinformation as “deliberately false content designed to deceive”. As discussed above, this is problematic in itself, but the organisation has since broadened this definition to include "anything that uses an 'adversarial narrative' - stories that may be factually true but pit people against each other by attacking an individual, an institution or 'science'", as Unherd reports. 

The GDI is used by advertisers around the world. Media companies that score low on the index struggle to attract advertising for their websites. This is what happened to Unherd. Because Unherd has published a number of high quality writers who are critical of the mainstream narrative on trans ideology, it was deemed by the GDI to be publishing "anti-LGBTQI+ narratives" and therefore spreading disinformation. Most interestingly, the GDI is partly funded by the UK government, the European Union, the German Foreign Office and the US State Department.

This example illustrates the forces and hidden dynamics that are increasingly at work to keep our public conversation within narrow ideological parameters and to punish anyone who tries to break out of the apparent consensus. And, importantly, Western governments are playing an active role by funding these activities.

Western governments are also stepping up their direct efforts to criminalise what they perceive to be hate speech or hate crime. In Scotland, the new Hate Crime and Public Order Act recently came into force. The Irish government has its own new Hate Speech Bill in the pipeline. The problem with all these efforts is that while they purport to punish clearly defined bigotry, in reality these laws fail to define what constitutes hate, and the law becomes an easy tool against anyone who disagrees with the ruling establishment. 

The anti-hate crime structures being built up across the West are not dissimilar to what the former East German Ministry of State Security, commonly known as the Stasi, did to its citizens. Everywhere, the state, the police and their NGO allies are compiling lists of people who have said things that are allegedly anti-feminist, racist, anti-LGBTI+, etc. So far, only some of the people on these lists have faced any real life consequences, but the very fact that these lists are allowed to exist should be of great concern.

In Germany, the new Self-Determination Act, which allows children to change their official gender from the age of 14 and then once a year if they wish, also includes a clause making it illegal to reveal or research the previous gender marker and previous forenames. Violations of this law can result in fines of up to €10,000. Given that such laws are highly controversial and opposed by large sections of our society, these draconian penalties are particularly problematic. De facto, the law decides who is a woman and who is a man, and anyone who challenges this definition can be prosecuted and heavily fined.

Also in Germany, a Bundesliga football club was recently fined €18,000 because fans had put up a banner saying “There are many styles of music, but only two sexes”. This was obviously because the banner was considered offensive to trans people.

Many things can be offensive to some people, but the more words and ideas that are banned from being expressed in public, the more totalitarian the atmosphere in our society becomes. And in any case, hatred, let's assume it's real hatred, which is outlawed, doesn't disappear, it goes underground where it's much harder to challenge.

Saving democracy from the threat of the far right 

Most of these dynamics are very similar across the West, but the hysterical idea that we are in the fight of our lives to save democracy from the threat of the far right reached new heights in Germany between January and February this year (2024). 

While I still believe it is a good thing that my generation of Germans has been thoroughly educated about the horrors of our own past and how to ensure that nothing like it ever happens again, this sensitivity and self-consciousness also has a downside: that we are too easily seeing the phantoms of a new Nazi regime. It also means that we can be easily manipulated into thinking that the Nazis are about to take over again.

On 13th February the German Minister of the Interior, Ms Faeser, and the Minister of Family Affairs, Ms Paus, gave a remarkable press conference. I thought I couldn't believe my ears. Ms Faeser began by saying that democracy was in danger because of the activities of right-wing circles and that therefore measures against right-wing extremism had to be strengthened. 

She and Ms Paus then suggested that it wasn't enough to use the criminal law to prosecute extremists and that "hate on the internet also takes place below the criminal threshold". Ms Paus said: "Many enemies of democracy know exactly what is meant by freedom of expression." And Ms Faeser added: "Those who mock the state must be confronted with a strong state". What the two were suggesting was nothing less than that the state could from now on take completely arbitrary action against dissidents. And if we were to take Ms Faeser literally, any comedian or satirist who poked fun at the government could now expect retaliation from the state.

But as the German author and journalist Ijoma Mangold succinctly puts it, 

The state is not a community of shared beliefs; its monopoly on the use of force is justified by a single purpose: to secure the freedom of its citizens. And this freedom of the citizen always includes freedom from the State itself. That is why civil rights are rights of defence against the state - this fundamental insight, which goes back to the beginnings of civil society, has been forgotten today.

This press conference was preceded by a month of highly orchestrated and successful mobilisation of large sections of the German population against what they perceived as a right-wing attack on democracy.

A meeting in November 2023 of about 20 people with a right-wing orientation, including some considered right-wing extremists, was portrayed as a conspiratorial secret meeting to plan the deportation of millions of people with a migrant background. In January, an investigative media organisation called Correctiv, which is also a fact-checking organisation, published an investigative report on the meeting and cleverly linked it to the Wannsee Conference, where in 1942 the Nazis planned the details of the so-called "final solution of the Jewish question", the mass deportation of Jews and ultimately the genocide of Jews by the Germans, even though the meeting had nothing to do with that dreadful conference except for the fact that the two meetings took place not so far apart geographically. 

On the day of publication, the media response was massive, with everyone emphasising the link with the Nazi mass deportations; a week later, miraculously, a play about the inquiry was already being staged in Berlin; and two weeks later, millions of Germans rallied after the government and NGOs called for demonstrations against the right-wing threat. Chancellor Scholz said: "Let me be clear: right-wing extremists are attacking our democracy. They want to destroy our social cohesion.

What exactly was discussed at the meeting is only partially known. Participants deny allegations that anyone at the meeting suggested the forcible deportation of people with German passports. But while the discussion at this private meeting may have had an ugly flavour, it wasn't an AfD meeting, it wasn't secret, and apparently no master plan for mass deportation was discussed. The importance of the meeting seems greatly exaggerated, and the timing of Correctiv's publication seems orchestrated. The organisation is known to be well-connected in government circles and receives a large amount of state funding, and it looks suspicious that the publication came six weeks after the actual meeting took place, conveniently helping to distract the public from a deep government crisis.

In January, discontent with Germany's left-wing government over high energy costs, poorly conceived climate change policies and high levels of illegal immigration had reached new heights. The populist right-wing AfD benefited from this discontent, reaching an unprecedented 23% in some polls. Farmers' protests, supported by a majority of the population, had also peaked, putting additional pressure on the government.

The whole hysteria was also hypocritical because Scholz himself had called for mass deportations after Hamas attacked Israel on 7 October and many people of Arab origin in Germany took to the streets to show their support for Hamas. At the time, Scholz said in an interview:  "We must finally deport on a large scale.”

But the idea that any means are justified to fight the political enemy is not unique to Germany. In mid-April, the mayor of Brussels tried very hard to cancel the big National Conservatism conference in Brussels, claiming that he couldn't guarantee security against left-wing protests. In reality, it is more likely that he saw it as a threat to Brussels' reputation that a genuinely conservative conference was successfully held in his city.

Under pressure from the mayor, several venues had cancelled their contracts with the organisers. At the last minute, Brussels' Claridge nightclub agreed to host the conference. The following is a flavour of what happened next:

The mayor’s lackeys repeatedly threatened the Tunisian-Belgian owner of the Claridge, Lassaad Ben Yaghlane, to force him to cancel the conference. They towed away his car, threatened his family and said they would take away the venue’s licence to put him out of business. They forced the  company providing security for the conference to cancel its contract. They did the same to the companies providing catering services such as crockery or food. They threatened to cut off the venue’s electricity.

In a last-minute, late-night decision, a court ruled against the mayor and the second day of the conference went ahead as planned.  

This was not a conference of far-right extremists as portrayed by the mainstream media. It was a conference of conservatives discussing issues such as the democratic deficit in the EU or the problem of unregulated immigration in Europe. To believe that such a gathering should not be allowed to take place in order to protect the EU and liberal democracy is ultimately a completely undemocratic and, I would say, totalitarian belief.

But the new norm of denying the right to speak to people whose ideas one doesn't like doesn't just affect conservatives and people on the right. The Palestine Congress planned for mid-April in Berlin was a high-profile gathering of left-wing activists, politicians and intellectuals. It was cancelled by the police, allegedly to prevent threats of 'anti-Semitic and violence-glorifying statements'. Previously, former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis had been officially banned from speaking at the conference and is now banned from entering the country altogether.

All these phenomena show us elements of an increasingly illiberal order of censorship and thought-policing in which all opposition to the dominant political opinion is sought to be suppressed.

It is clear that all these efforts will not solve any of the real problems that cause people to rebel against the current establishment. They will only further polarise society and make it more likely that the most extreme version of the Right will eventually gain the upper hand.

Why is this happening?

In fact, I don't think many of the political and social leaders who are responsible for all these activities are even remotely aware of how illiberal and undemocratic their actions have become, and how what they are doing is laying the foundations of a totalitarian regime.

Illiberalism does not necessarily arise from bad intentions and evil motives. It can arise insidiously from trends in our political culture that many people do not understand, or only half understand. In the Western world, it seems, we have lost the appreciation of true plurality.

The hyper novelty of the internet

The analysis of why all this is happening now cannot be separated from the fact that it was only yesterday that the whole of humanity began to be connected through the internet, social media and smartphones. Before the internet age, we had the broadcast age, where elites controlled the narrative, but it allowed for more plurality than today's media landscape. Partly due to online subscription models and paywalls, most online media started to be captured by their audience and their reporting became much more biassed.

What's more, social media algorithms do not encourage pluralism and do not promote the most sensible ideas and views, but those that attract the most attention and outrage. The algorithms also reinforce our own ideological views, leading over time to more extreme views and epistemic filter bubbles.

All of this has led to a real sensemaking crisis that should rightly concern us. Even for people who are fully aware of all these dynamics, it has become much harder to figure out what is true than it was, say, 20 years ago.

It is also true that people often behave badly in the online world and say things they might not say to the real person in front of them, especially if the accounts are anonymous, but even if they are not anonymous, social media encourages aggressive behaviour.

None of this justifies journalists and media organisations putting narrative first and only caring about the truth if it fits the narrative, but it does explain why this is happening. Few have the courage to rebel against the forces, most conform and adapt to the new dynamics, if only to avoid losing their jobs and income.

Controlling the despised working class

While the internet is not the utopian world of free flow of information dreamed of by the early internet pioneers, it has clearly changed the power dynamics and democratised the information ecology. The working classes have benefited, at least so far, from the opportunity to participate, at least to some extent, in this new information landscape.

For example, Trump wouldn't have won the presidency in 2016 if he didn't have more than 11 million followers on Twitter (at that time). Twitter allowed him to communicate directly with his followers without filters. The filter that traditional broadcasters put between politicians and their audiences would have made it much harder - or perhaps impossible - for him to win without Twitter.

As the American writer and academic Michael Lind describes in his book The New Class War, since the 1970s the working classes across the West had lost their influence on politics and culture. Working class dissatisfaction with an increasingly powerful urban liberal-progressive elite was the energy behind the success of national populism, or what many refer to as the far right, in recent years.

A growing number of ordinary people feel that many of the political developments of recent years have not been in their interests and that most of what is discussed in public has nothing to do with the reality of their everyday lives. They feel economically neglected and culturally patronised by a new elite that seeks to impose its progressive ideology on everyone through the institutions it controls.

The whole programme of hate speech and anti-disinformation laws, and censorship in general, is to a large extent a response to the right-wing working class rebellion of recent years, which is increasingly threatening the power of the liberal-progressive establishment.

The urban elites now live distant lives and operate in a different universe from most ordinary people. The elites find the ordinary people's overt displays of national patriotism vulgar and distasteful, and their religious views are viewed with suspicion and contempt.

The elites don't trust the people they rule. They feel morally superior, so they can justify to themselves that they don't have to take into account the interests and views of ordinary people. As the American philosopher Matthew Crawford argues:

The idea of a common good has given way to a partition of citizens along the lines of a moral hierarchy. The decision-making class has discovered that it enjoys the mandate of heaven, and with this comes certain permissions, certain exemptions from democratic scruple. The permission structure is built around grievance politics. Very simply: If the nation is fundamentally racist, sexist, and homophobic, I owe it nothing. More than that, conscience demands that I repudiate it.

The harder it is for governments and the elites in general to control the working class through traditional means, such as public broadcasting in Europe, the more they resort to crude censorship on social media platforms and well-orchestrated campaigns, as seen in Germany with Correctiv.

Another reason why this illiberalism is emerging now is that it is much cheaper and easier for governments to control the masses in our digital age than in previous analogue times. The Chinese government has perfected the digital control of its people. The way Western governments and elite institutions are increasingly controlling discourse is looking more and more like the Chinese way, as also lamented by Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei, who ironically sought refuge from Chinese totalitarianism in Europe years ago.

Safetyism

The Covid pandemic not only showed how quickly our Western governments can become authoritarian, it was also a moment when it became clearer than ever that large parts of Western societies now value their safety more than their civil liberties. Of course, this was not the first sign of a new safety culture in the West. Safe spaces on campuses were a warning sign years ago. A whole generation has now been brought up with the idea that speech can be violence, rather than making a clear distinction between actual physical violence and, say, ugly words.

In 2018, in their seminal book The Coddling of the American Mind, Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff wrote that a culture of safetyism and safety parenting is creating fragile children. They argue that today's generation of young people (Gen Z) have grown up without the opportunity for unsupervised and unstructured play, and have therefore been prevented from learning key parts of childhood development, including how to deal with moderate levels of risk and fear through games such as hiding, exploring and climbing trees. 

In the book, Haidt and Lukianoff argue that denying children the freedom to explore for themselves deprives them of important learning opportunities that help them develop a range of social skills central to living with others in a free society. 

A society that weakens children’s ability to learn these skills denies them what they need to smooth social interaction. The coarsening of social interaction that will result will create a world of more conflict and violence, and one in which people’s first instinct will be increasingly to invoke coercion by other parties to solve problems they ought to be able to solve themselves. (Steven Horwitz, cited in The Coddling of the American Mind)

It is no coincidence, then, that during the pandemic it was the Zoomers (Gen Z) who were most likely to call for lockdowns and masks, and who feel most unsafe from too much hate speech on social media.

Conservative author N.S. Lyons argues that even the United States, the society best protected from attacks on freedom of speech by its First Amendment, is ultimately not immune to the fact that a growing segment of Western societies now "values security over freedom and top-down control over self-governance". He argues that this new intrinsic constitution, "the spirit that governs the American people", will ultimately prevail over the written constitution. We're already seeing this shift in the way several Supreme Court justices seemed to interpret the First Amendment in a recent hearing of the landmark censorship case Murthy v. Missouri, about whether the federal government can collude with social media companies to systematically suppress its citizens' communications.

Mass formation

Last but not least, we're in the midst of an epidemic of loneliness in the West, linked to the sharp decline in birth rates and family formation, and exacerbated by the fact that we now spend most of our time in front of screens rather than with real people.

In addition, Christian affiliation is plummeting across the West and the void left by religion has led to a crisis of meaning.

Mattias Desmet, a clinical psychologist, argues that the crisis of meaning and social isolation increases the rate of depression in society and leads to what he calls 'free-floating anxiety'. He believes that these conditions make people susceptible to manipulation by propaganda and lead to mass formation: When people collectively find a cause that gives new meaning to their lives, they move from social isolation to massive social connection, feeling that they are waging a war against the cause of their collective anxiety.

People who feel unfulfilled by their individualistic lifestyles inevitably develop a longing for orientation and community, and for an escape valve for accumulated aggression.

In such a situation, a powerful media announcement of an emergency can have a surprising, even revolutionary, effect. When the population is told in an authoritative manner that a general threat has materialised and that overcoming it requires decisive and above all collective action, many feel existentially relieved and gratefully commit themselves fully and completely to the given direction.

Desmet argues that this is exactly what happened during the pandemic and how the propaganda against the so-called unvaccinated could be so effective. These patterns seem to be repeating themselves now that we are supposed to be saving our democracy from the threat of the far right.

Desmet describes very similar dynamics and patterns to those described by Hannah Arendt in her seminal book, Origins of Totalitarianism. The (potentially tragic) irony of this story is that many of the academics and researchers who have studied Hannah Arendt and the developments that led to totalitarian systems in the past seem to have missed the important lesson that totalitarian regimes can emerge from different ideologies: Instead of looking for superficial similarities, we should look for patterns that signal totalitarian tendencies, such as those Desmet has explored.

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In this essay I have given some examples which I believe show that our Western societies are moving away from the principles of liberal democracy and instead moving closer to the characteristics of totalitarian societies. I have suggested some ideas about what might be at the root of these dynamics. I don't pretend that this analysis is complete, and I would love to read your comments on other possible causes.

I was going to write a short final chapter on ideas about what to do about the situation we find ourselves in, but I realise that this essay is already far too long, so I'll leave that for another time.

In any case, I see this discussion as part of the activities of The Protopia Lab: I encourage you to check out our new website.