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.
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.