As we count down the days until the federal mask mandate, and the federal economic regulations that are sure to follow it, it’s worth thinking about how America, once the world’s most stalwart opponent of communism, has come to embrace the notion that a small group of ‘experts’ — most of them not elected by anyone — should manage virtually every aspect of everyone’s lives in the name of ‘the greater good’, treating not just property, but even lives, as collective resources.
How does something like this happen?
In 2011, Czech President Vaclav Klaus said:
As someone who lived under communism for most of my life I feel obliged to say that the biggest threat to freedom, democracy, the market economy and prosperity at the beginning of the 21st century is not communism or its various softer variants. Communism was replaced by the threat of ambitious environmentalism.
That is, environmentalism replaced communism as the preferred form of justifying the elimination of individual rights and decisions in favor of centralized command and control over… well, everything.
Environmentalism, he was saying, is the new communism. Or as others put it, Green is the new Red.
From a branding perspective, it makes a lot of sense. The faces of communism are Mao, Stalin, Castro, and Bernie Sanders. The face of environmentalism is Greta Thunberg.
Okay, bad example. The symbols of communism are tanks and missiles and gulags and empty shelves. The symbols of environmentalism are baby seals and polar bears and whales. Who could possibly be against baby seals?
Communism was fueled by hope (‘We can create a paradise on earth!’) and jealousy (‘The bourgeoisie are hoarding wealth that belongs to all of us!’). But the hopes never panned out, and once you’ve destroyed everyone’s wealth, jealousy loses much of its ability to motivate.
Environmentalism is fueled by fear (‘The oceans are rising!’), and guilt (‘You’re killing the polar bears!’), but the threats are too far in the future to be effective for changing behavior. And when short-term warnings (‘New York City will be underwater by 2009… I mean, 2016… I mean, 2020!’) fail to materialize, it’s just embarrassing .
So now we have public health, which is replacing environmentalism as the new communism. That is, as we look around at a sea of medical masks, it’s clear that Blue is the new Green. And it seems to have succeeded where classic communism and environmentalism failed.
So what’s changed?
Like environmentalism, public health is also fueled by fear (‘Wear a mask or you’ll die!’), and guilt (‘Wear a mask, or you’ll kill everyone else!’). The difference is, the threats aren’t in some indefinite future. They’re right in your face. Literally.
And so ersatz dictators like Chris (‘Public Health Trumps Everything’) Sununu and Joe (‘Dark Winter’) Biden will succeed where traditional communist dictators Nikita (‘We Will Take America Without Firing a Shot’) Khrushchev failed, by leveraging the synergy between (1) decreased attention spans, (2) decreased understanding of even basic math, and (3) increased belief that the role of government is to prevent anything bad from ever happening to anyone.
These are being used to send people rushing with open arms towards an ideology that once terrified them. And they are all direct consequences of turning education over to the government, demonstrating why fighting school control is just as important as fighting gun control.
We used to teach kids to hide under their desks, because communists wanted to hurt them. Now we teach them to hide behind masks, because communists want to help them. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
