How Totalitarianism Can Happen Here

Above, a slight change to the cover design of Live Not By Lies, based on recent reporting by The New York Times. 

Man, it’s been a busy time since the book’s publication last week. I’ve been doing lots of interviews with radio, podcasters (like Mortification of Spin), and even some TV. Today I taped a segment for CBN which will air next week. Publicists are trying to work out the details of a couple of cable news talk show appearances soon. A lot more to come.

The book has become popular because so many people understand that we do not live in normal times, that something big and sinister is happening to American life and culture — and not just in politics. I just finished doing media for the afternoon and see that some Michigan militia people have been arrested on charges that they were planning to kidnap the state’s Democratic governor. That’s horrifying, domestic terrorist stuff — and a reminder that though most of the political violence this year has come from the Left, there are bad actors also on the Right. So much of what we have seen this year really is straight out of late Weimar.

I’ve been meaning to write about Baylor professor Perry Glanzer’s thoughtful review published at The Gospel Coalition site, but there’s so much coming at me that I can barely keep up. That’s a shame, because the praise Prof. Glanzer has for the book means so much because he has done scholarly work on the post-Soviet period. He writes in his review:

Dreher makes his case in the first part of his book by pointing out that Hannah Arendt’s description of a pre-totalitarian society accurately describes America today. We share: (1) loneliness and social atomization; (2) a lost faith in hierarchies and institutions; (3) the growing desire to transgress and destroy; (4) an increase in propaganda and the willingness to believe useful lies; (5) a mania for ideology; and (the one I often see in American higher education); (6) a society that values loyalty more than expertise. Dreher draws upon observations of post-communist immigrants who saw them under communism and now see these characteristics emerging in America. Despite this evidence, in making this comparison between Soviet totalitarianism and the United States, Trevin Wax’s TGC review suggests that Dreher “overplays his hand.” Actually, I think he underplays it.

Dreher does not mention one of the most important ingredients that would allow American elites to turn soft totalitarianism into hard totalitarianism—the increasing concentration of political power in American life. Consider that before World War I, we had no federal income tax; Supreme Court decisions did not generally apply to the states; the federal government had no role in education; the vast majority of college students attended private colleges and universities; entities such as the FBI, CIA, and the Department of Homeland Security did not exist; federal regulatory agencies were almost nonexistent; and our military was miniscule. These things made us very different from the monarchies across the Atlantic Ocean, including Russia. All those things have now changed, to make us more like the former USSR. Today, one letter from one federal bureaucrat, or one decision with a one-person Supreme Court majority, can radically alter the price of faithfulness for Christians in education, business, or health care. As Ross Douthat recently noted after the death of Justice Ginsburg, “A system in which the great questions of our country are settled by the deaths of octogenarians is too close to late-Soviet Politburo politics for comfort.” Structurally, we are more like authoritarian and totalitarian governments than ever before.

Americans tend to be naïve about this concentration of federal power, since most do not recognize this historical change. The elites who do recognize it believe they have largely been a force for good. After all, the expansion of federal government power has helped us address great ills such as poverty (e.g., Social Security and Great Society programs), racial injustice (e.g., civil-rights laws and court decisions), health problems (e.g., Obamacare), the rights of minorities (with the Bill of Rights applied to the states), educational inequities (e.g., federal loans), educational advances (e.g., the mass growth of higher education) and more.

Of course, concentrated power does help get certain good things accomplished, but we cannot be blind to the possible future costs. This is where Trevin Wax is wrong. The potential increasingly exists for secret police (for the first time, we have what Czarist Russia had for centuries—a national internal police that watch citizens), strict censorship (ask most professors how they feel about their free speech these days), deprivation from jobs (ask people fired for posting and saying the “unwoke” thing), and more. An increasingly nationalized and centralized education system also makes it easier for governments to “reeducate” millions. Just ask the Chinese Uyghurs.

We also have newly woke revolutionaries to support the elites. I recently had a student defend communism on the basis that Lenin and Stalin did advance literacy and extend the life span of the Russian people. In response I seriously joked, “I guess those life span stats did not include the life spans of the tens of millions of deaths directly attributable to Lenin and Stalin in the Gulags or the Holodomor.”

There are so many good things in this review, things that made me think. For example:

Dreher advises that we need to engage in the work of resistance to evil with a small, praying community (a la Eph. 6:18-20). You pray together for the courage to resist, and as one Christian recounts, “When you were with your friends in these communities, you had freedom.” Not surprisingly, our recent Baylor Character and Spirituality Study of students found that the key to their spiritual and moral flourishing in college was involvement in Christian small groups. Although a staple of evangelical circles, Catholics and the Eastern Orthodox could learn from this insight. As my Russian friends would often tell me: if I want to pray, I go to the Orthodox Church, but if I want to understand something, talk to other believers, and experience fellowship, I go to Protestant small groups.

But Protestants have something to learn from us Orthodox too, says Prof. Glanzer:

Finally, as any good Eastern Orthodox Christian will do, Dreher reminds us in the end that to live for Christ involves suffering under either soft or hard totalitarianism. It is a timely lesson he illustrates with powerful examples. In the Baylor Character and Spirituality Study I mentioned, when we asked Baylor students what the good life looks like to them 10 years from now, what they describe is the opposite of suffering. They do not want riches; they merely want one of the most dangerous idols of them all, “to be comfortable.” As Father Kirill Kaleda says in Dreher’s book, “this current ideology of comfort is anti-Christian in its very essence.”

Read it all.  Prof. Glanzer says that I am not pessimistic enough about the capacity for American soft totalitarianism to remain hard, but not optimistic enough about the religious creativity of Americans to create means of resistance. Every writer hopes for readers as thoughtful and as engaged as Perry Glanzer.

Once again, if you have bought the book or intend to buy it, here is a link to the free downloadable Study Guide I wrote to accompany the text. From that document:

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