Friday Frights

{You may not have noticed, but America is beset by tyranny and totalitarianism. Fortunately, astute observers like Glenn Ellmers and Walter Kirn are here to enlighten us. Wake up, sheeple!}

Despite the promise inherent in its title, Glenn Ellmers’ “You Got a License for that Tyranny?” does not discuss tyranny at all. Instead, the brief essay is a lesson in how to substitute invective for argument--which is not to say that Ellmers is incapable of presenting substantive anti-Left arguments, only that in this case he eschews them.  When you’re preaching to the converted, I suppose, there is no need for apologetics; you can safely assume that the congregants (in this case, readers of The American Mind) will be satisfied if you simply invoke the familiar epithets.

Which is precisely what Ellmers does (and all that he does), making the case against our Liberal overlords with nothing but a barrage of pejorative language, unleavened by even the slightest hint of respect or charity. Ellmers captures the flavor—not to say, the essence—of Liberal tyranny with a string of well-chosen words and phrases:  

Leftist ruling class, dysfunctional, sanctimonious, deranged, urban hipsters, moral superiority, social parasites, ruthless self-interest, ideological purity, insane, urban barbarism, bureaucratic oligarchy, anti-rational postmodernism, genteel Mafiosi, self-conscious managerial class, elite education and training, expertocracy, misplaced arrogance, unserious leadership, hostile incompetence, ideological posturing, absurd academic dogmas, propaganda, self-contradictory, incoherent, nihilistic.

That, it seems, is all we know about Liberalism and all we need to know.

I give Glenn Ellmers enormous credit for not having used the words “woke” or “Wokeism”. I also give him credit for noting, more or less as an aside, that “The United States is still relatively peaceful, prosperous, and secure.” That is something for which we should all be grateful, especially given all the unlicensed tyranny to which we are being subjected.  

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You Got a License for that Tyranny? - The American Mind

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In an interview worth quoting at some length, Montana-based author Walter Kirn (Up in the Air) bemoans the fact that “America has lost the plot”:

I’m 60 years old. I went to grade school in Minnesota, in very small rural public schools. I was aware from maybe the fourth or fifth grade, through film strips and prepared lesson plans from textbook companies, that we lived in an endangered world. Outside of basic teaching, we were given the overriding message that we should be optimistic about things like computers and space, but there was a louder drumbeat about pollution, racial division, and the Cold War.

Because I was an ambitious kid who wanted to succeed in school, I was always attempting to discern the lesson behind the lesson. What I saw was that I was being asked to be very concerned and anxious about mankind’s stupidity and selfishness. That seemed to be the lesson underlying the pollution lectures—that people in their cars and their desire to have too many things were dirtying up the world.

The Cold War lesson was more sophisticated and went on even longer into junior high and high school. It centered on books like Nineteen Eighty-Four, Animal Farm, Fahrenheit 451, and other depictions of the dangers of a totalitarian world. We were asked to congratulate ourselves as young Americans on our freedom and clarity and basic goodness compared to this lurking threat from the Soviet Union, in which the citizens were all forced to think alike, act alike, and be alike.

Over the years, it has caused me great consternation that the heavy aversion to totalitarian, dictatorial, and top-down systems that was implanted in me is now kind of useless—and even dangerous. As I discern trends in our society that seem to resemble those I was warned against and raise my hand to say that I don’t like this, I’m told that, somehow, I’m out of step, I’m overly alarmed, and I’m maybe even on the wrong side.

But, I want to reply, this is only what a seventh-grade Minnesota public school student was taught to fear, taught to be on the lookout for, and now you’re telling me it constitutes some kind of dissident position to be afraid of these things? ¹

The final lesson wasn’t that any of this was inevitable, but that by growing up and being good citizens and standing with the right kind of people, it could all be averted. It was portrayed as navigable. It wasn’t portrayed as catastrophic but merely as a set of challenges that we would no doubt overcome. Even the Soviet Union and the threat of the atomic bomb were construed as something that would probably not occur because we were so strong, so influential, so virtuous.

Kirn, who was born in 1962, is perplexed that his seventh-grade understanding of America (“so strong, so influential, so virtuous) and of the world (“a set of challenges that we would no doubt overcome”) has to be either amended or defended. If only his rural Minnesota public education had included lessons on America’s unresolved racial conflicts, its political, social, and cultural turmoil, its foreign interventions and entanglements—really, if only Kearn had been exposed to anything that would have complicated, in the best sense of the word, his Midwest naivete.   

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Walter Kirn on How America Lost the Plot (palladiummag.com)

¹ Analogously: as a child, I was taught to be afraid of lions and tigers. Now that I’m seventy-five, you’re telling me that it’s neurotic for a grown man to be afraid of kittens?