Yet there are clear parallels—parallels that those who once lived under communism can identify.
Like the early Bolsheviks, SJWs are radically alienated from society. They too believe that justice depends on group identity, and that achieving justice means taking power away from the exploiters and handing it to the exploited.
Social justice cultists, like the first Bolsheviks, are intellectuals whose gospel is spread by intellectual agitation. It is a gospel that depends on awakening and inspiring hatred in the hearts of those it wishes to induce into revolutionary consciousness. This is why it matters immensely that they have established their base within universities, where they can indoctrinate in spiteful ideology those who will be going out to work in society’s institutions.
As Russia’s Marxist revolutionaries did, our own SJWs believe that science is on their side, even when their claims are unscientific. For example, transgender activists insist that their radical beliefs are scientifically sound; scientists and physicians who disagree are driven out of their institutions or intimidated into silence.
Social justice cultists are utopians who believe that the ideal of Progress requires smashing all the old forms for the sake of liberating humanity. Unlike their Bolshevik predecessors, they don’t want to seize the means of economic production but rather the means of cultural production. They believe that after humanity is freed from the chains that bind us—whiteness, patriarchy, marriage, the gender binary, and so on—we will experience a radically new and improved form of life.
Finally, unlike the Bolsheviks, who wanted to destroy and replace the institutions of Russian society, our social justice warriors adopt a later Marxist strategy for bringing about social change: marching through the institutions of bourgeois society, conquering them, and using them to transform the world. For example, when the LGBT cause was adopted by corporate America as part of its branding strategy, its ultimate victory was assured.
Futuristic Fatalism
To be sure, neither loneliness, nor social atomization, nor the rise of social justice radicalism among power-holding elites—none of this means that totalitarianism is inevitable. But they do signify that the weaknesses in contemporary American society are consonant with a pre-totalitarian state.
Like the imperial Russians, we Americans may well be living in a fog of self-deception about our own country’s stability. To recap:
Faith in most major institutions has declined sharply. Politics are so divided by rigid ideologies that it is difficult for the US federal government to get anything done. Participation in civic life is cratering. As the state drowns in oceans of debt, wealth inequality is at nearly a one-hundred-year high, with the middle class shrinking.
Younger generations are abandoning religion, which binds and gives purpose to societies. Church leaders don’t know how to deal with this chronic crisis; as with the out-of-touch Orthodox hierarchy and clergy of the late imperial period, many don’t seem to realize what’s happening, much less how to address the decay.
Pornography is ubiquitous, but marriage and family formation are petering out. Ours is also an intensely sensual age, one that emphasizes sensate experiences over spiritual and rational ideals. That sexual desire is taken to be the central fact of contemporary identity is not seriously contested (it is telling that in the irreconcilable conflict between religious liberty and gay rights, the latter is winning in a blitzkrieg). The swift acceptance of gender ideology is a clear sign that Prometheanism and sensualism have been joined and have overturned the old order. The internet has acculturated at least one generation to pornography, far exceeding anything that those who overturned Russia’s censorship law in 1905 could have envisioned.
The Prometheanism that drove prerevolutionary Russians predominates in twenty-first-century America. As inhabitants of the quintessential modern nation, Americans have always celebrated science, technology, and the self-made man. Today Silicon Valley is our dream factory, generating spectacular wealth and manufacturing belief in utopian change through advanced technologies.
A collapse, followed by revolutionary reconstruction, could happen much faster than we think. As Dr. Silvester Krčméry, one of Father Kolaković’s disciples, put it:
We live, contented and safe, with the idea that in a civilized country, in the mostly cultured and democratic environment of our times, such a coercive regime is impossible. We forget that in unstable countries, a certain political structure can lead to indoctrination and terror, where individual elements and stages of brainwashing are already implemented. This, at first, is quite inconspicuous. However, often in a very short time, it can develop into a full undemocratic totalitarian system.26
It only takes a catalyst like war, economic depression, plague, or some other severe and prolonged crisis that brings the legitimacy of the liberal democratic system into question. As Arendt warned more than half a century ago:
There is a great temptation to explain away the intrinsically incredible by means of liberal rationalizations. In each one of us, there lurks such a liberal, wheedling us with the voice of common sense. The road to totalitarian domination leads through many intermediate stages for which we can find numerous analogues and precedents. . . . What common sense and “normal people” refuse to believe is that everything is possible.27
Social justice warriors and the theorists of their cause are not “normal people” who live by common sense. Fanatical belief in Progress is a driving force behind their febrile utopianism. The ideology of progress, which has been with us in various forms since the Enlightenment, explains their confident zealotry. It also explains why so many ordinary people who aren’t especially engaged by politics find it hard to say no to SJW demands. We cannot understand the hypnotic allure of left-wing totalitarianism or figure out how best to resist its advocates unless we grasp its most dedicated advocates as cultists devoted to the Myth of Progress.
CHAPTER THREE Progressivism as Religion
People fascinated by the idea of progress
