Opinion

The Totalitarian Consensus

REUTERS/Joshua Roberts

David Krayden Ottawa Bureau Chief
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Ask yourself just what is it that has angered the anti-Trump forces with such an adamant refusal to acknowledge the results of the last presidential election and infused their protests with a perverse vitality that chronically transmutes non-violent dissent into an angry mob of hate? Well, ask yourself and you will have to admit that it really has nothing to do with just losing an election or assessing President Donald Trump as “unfit” for office or engendering a plague of bigotry and isolationism across America.

The Left hates Trump because he has destroyed the totalitarian consensus that former president Barack Obama had assiduously built over the last eight years and is now in tatters.

The totalitarian consensus is a virulent and pervasive characteristic of the left-wing thought that used to be isolated to its more extreme manifestations but that now dominates and defines liberalism writ large. It does not seek a forum to express liberal ideas, nor does it even seek the hegemony of that liberal discourse; its goal is the elimination of any thoughts and opinions contrary to its prevailing notions and a consensus that there are indeed no other ideas worth considering — and it seeks the total surrender of any dissidents who still proclaim an opposing truth and ultimately a solemn confession that they have been wrong all along and please forgive their foolishness and revisionism.

This is precisely why liberals relish the opportunity to declare various issues as “settled” because they have deemed them to be so. Take the issue of abortion: for the pro-abortion forces that Hillary Clinton represented, it was not only an alienable right for a woman to choose to have an abortion; it was an obvious fact that was beyond discussion. Hence, the abortion movement decided to eradicate the word “rare” from the old Clinton mantra that abortion in America should be “safe, legal and rare.” Why rare if you really embrace abortion as both a sacred right and something to be celebrated?

But along came Trump and rather fearlessly declared Clinton’s position on abortion to be “extreme” because it didn’t represent mainstream opinion. He also shot down a host of liberal assumptions that had been “settled” during Obama’s reign or even before that. He had the audacity to suggest that the climate change swindle might demand some reappraisal, especially given the enormous cost of enforcing this environmental religion. Settled? Forget it.

But try to question the totalitarian consensus on climate change and you immediately confront a world view that demands subservience and labels opponents as “deniers” not worthy of rational consideration.

Is this not more than vaguely reminiscent of another brand of totalitarianism that sought utter and blanket ideological conformity?

It’s neo-Stalinism, isn’t it?

Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin was not just characterized by megalomania, paranoid and consciousness brutality; he also possessed a fervent passion to annihilate all opposition and to have his victims recant for their heretical thinking just before the NKVD bullet hit them in the back of the head. It was not enough that they were wrong; they had to publicly admit that they were wrong through a full confession.

Stalin was adored by the young communists, not only in the Soviet Union but around the world, for his toughness and refusal to tolerate dissent. The millennials who are mindlessly trashing campuses or carefully articulating intellectual obsessions around microaggressions and white privilege would have been lining up to shake Stalin’s hand because here was a man who insisted that everyone comprehend and agree with the party line.

Just as Marxist theory was a fantasy of double-talk that the working people it pretended to represent could not begin to decipher, so the liberals have become the ultimate elitists who have little time for the little people with their mundane lives and archaic belief systems that should have been exorcised decades ago.

Hillary’s anticipated victory was supposed to signal their ultimate silence.

But they have found their voice again and have decided that neither an apology nor acquiescence is in order.

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