[Frontpage] Poet Sylvia Plath’s slur against women, that they "adore a fascist, the boot in the face, the brute," is more true about progressives, with one big difference: they want to be the ones wearing the boot. Behind their facade of therapeutic concern for the "people" and the "oppressed" lies something that Vladimir Lenin was honest enough to express in 1906: the lust for "power, which is totally unlimited by any laws, totally unrestrained by absolutely any rules, and based directly on force."Thankfully, those impulses so far have been checked by our Constitutional order, which was created to inhibit the concentration and excesses of power that threatens citizen freedom. But as we have seen over the last century, at times of crisis the technocratic progressives have chipped away at those Constitutional guardrails and serially encroached on our freedoms. The current virus crisis is the latest opportunity for the Dems to indulge their inner despots.
We’ve all seen the catalogue of overweening unilateral diktats enforced by police power coming down from Democrat governors. Under the guise of enforcing social distancing in order to slow the spread of the disease, governors have quickly violated the Bill of Rights: closing gun stores at the same time they release felons from prison; shutting down church services while leaving liquor stores open; criminalizing the right to peaceful assembly; arbitrarily deeming some economic activities as "essential," like abortion clinics and pot dispensaries, while proscribing others like buying paint or vegetable seeds. Even our freedom of movement that doesn’t endanger others, such as surfing alone or playing with our children in a deserted park, has been interdicted by overzealous police.
At one level, this permanent temptation to seek and abuse power is part of human nature, as both our Judeo-Christian and Classical traditions recognized. The story of the Fall in Genesis is about choosing power to exercise our free will as we see fit, over being obedient to our Creator: "Ye shall be as gods," Satan lies to Eve. The Greeks invented tragedy to make the same point about power. Success and achievement lead to hubris that makes us cross the lines defining our humanity and its limits. Instead we believe we can be like gods and use our power to tyrannize our fellows: "Hubris breeds the tyrant," as Sophocles said of Oedipus.
On a more mundane level, we have all experienced the effects of power-hunger, from playground bullies to arrogant bosses, from despotic teachers to power-drunk cops, from petty tyrants at the DMV to Stalinoid school administrators. But progressivism and its leftist cousins go far beyond that all-too-human tendency to abuse power. It endorses an ideology predicated on the assumption that those properly trained in the "human sciences" can be trusted with expanded power, for their aims are the fruit not of unscientific religion, tradition, practical wisdom, or common sense, but of reason and science. As such, the progressive policies are self-evidently true and rational, and anyone who resists them are like flat-earthers to be reeducated, ostracized, or if necessary eliminated, but at least subjected to the superior knowledge of the technocratic elite.