“The world must be made safe for democracy,” President Woodrow Wilson declared in his 1917 war message to Congress.
To engineer support for the cause, he proceeded to shut down civil liberties, create a national propaganda machine, and set the modern administrative state in motion. In the name of democracy, he instituted compulsory conscription and jailed “disloyal” adversaries.
A generation later, Brave New World author Aldous Huxley scornfully observed that a holy impulse had turned democracy into a “universally and absolutely true theology, which it is all humanity’s highest duty to put into practice.”
Huxley’s theological imperative is now in its terminal, flamboyant state. It comes to life, Elmer Gantry-style, on MSNBC, where all things Trump-related and Republican are a threat to representative government and the great chain of being.
The Left talks of “our democracy” but seeks to advance a coercive regime hostile to traditional due process, religion, family, and merit. Uncontested power is its evident aim, and slandering and ruining adversaries along the way is only a means to an end.
Huxley thought that democratic theology was a fraud. He warned of hidden government and interlocking networks (the federal complex we now call the deep state) able to shape and defy popular will.
“Under the relentless thrust of accelerating over-population and increasing over-organization, and by means of ever more effective methods of mind-manipulation, the democracies will change their nature,” Huxley predicted. “The quaint old forms — elections, parliaments, Supreme Courts and all the rest — will remain. The underlying substance will be a new kind of non-violent totalitarianism.”
As democracy withered, the changes would be almost imperceptible, Huxley believed: “All the traditional names, all the hallowed slogans will remain exactly what they were in the good old days.”
“Democracy and freedom will be the theme of every broadcast and editorial,” he concluded. “Meanwhile the ruling oligarchy and its highly trained elite of soldiers, policemen, thought-manufacturers and mind-manipulators will quietly run the show as they see fit.”
The deep state is not a conspiracy but a consortium of shared statist assumptions. It includes most of the federal civil service and its subsidiaries, the military and national security apparatus, banks and multinational corporations, public schools and research universities, and, above all, the electronic ether and search engines that make mind manipulation and thought manufacture possible.
Aggressive coalitions active in government, private enterprise, and education claim that any performance results that contradict pure equality are the outcome of unfair discrimination based on race, gender, religion, origin, disability, or perhaps mental illness.
Repairing these injustices supplants freedom and equal opportunity as an essential public objective. Any deviations are ipso facto deplorable, including censure of nonbinary sexuality.
In 2016, Donald Trump was the unexpected event, the ultimate, unwelcome black swan usurping established power. Two years ago, the former president looked like a sore loser and has-been, a shadow of Virginia’s Gov. Glenn Youngkin or Florida’s Gov. Ron DeSantis. Thanks to malicious prosecutions, serial race-baiting, and the spectacular incompetency of the White House, he recently looked unstoppable. Now 34 felony convictions and three pending criminal trials obstruct a steady march toward the presidency.
The radical Left and its allies insist Trump will finish off democracy and the American nation. “I think it would be the end of the republic,” Princeton University professor Sean Wilentz has declared.
“The most immediate concern of Trump returning to the presidency is it would provide the greatest domestic terrorist threat of our time — violent white supremacist organizations — the ability to rebuild and spread and engage in even more violence and terror,” anti-white zealot Ibram X. Kendi said shortly before news of gross grant mismanagement dimmed his luster.
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Between now and November, democracy’s theologians intend to present the public with a morality play of good and evil. But the ol’ time religion is not working. The show trials of 2024 and hush money verdict confirm popular suspicion of stop-at-nothing partisanship and news management. A large number of people remain attached to fair play.
The deep state’s clerics intend to render convicted-on-34-counts Trump radioactive and unelectable. In their ruthless pursuit of power, they might end up doing the reverse.
Gilbert T. Sewall is a co-author of After Hiroshima: The United States Since 1945 and the editor of The Eighties: A Reader.