Daily Beast: How Liberals Are The New Autocrats

03 Jan, 2016 by William Teach

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It pleases me to no end when people notice that today’s liberals, particularly the noxious far left, made up of Progressives, Socialists, Marxists, and even Anarchists (yes, they are), and wholly in control of the Democratic Party, notice their Big Government inclinations. In this case, the Daily Beast’s Joel Kotkin

This could be how our experiment with grassroots democracy finally ends. World leaders—the super-rich, their pet non-profits, their media boosters, and their allies in the global apparat—gather in Paris to hammer out a deal to transform the planet, and our lives. No one asks much about what the states and the communities, the electorate, or even Congress, thinks of the arrangement. The executive now presumes to rule on these issues.

For many of the world’s leading countries—China, Russia, Saudi Arabia—such top down edicts are fine and dandy, particularly since their supreme leaders won’t have to adhere to them if inconvenienced. But the desire for centralized control is also spreading among the shrinking remnant of actual democracies, where political give and take is baked into the system.

Yes, I ran across this while searching news on ‘climate change’.

The will to power is unmistakable.California Governor Jerry Brown, now posturing as the aged philosopher-prince fresh from Paris, hails the “coercive power of the state” to make people live properly by his lights. California’s high electricity prices, regulation driven spikes in home values, and the highest energy prices in the continental United States may be a bane for middle and working class families, but are sold as a wonderful achievement among our presumptive masters.

This autocratic impulse is very much present among the Cult of Climastrology, which looks to force Other People to practice what Warmists preach, yet mostly fail to implement these same measures within their own lives. They want Big Government control of people, economies, energy, private entities, yet, interestingly, fail to notice that this will effect themselves. This is all what Kotkin notes as the Authoritarian Impulse

Under President Obama, rule by decree has become commonplace, with federal edicts dictating policies on everything from immigration and labor laws to climate change. No modern leader since Nixon has been so bold in trying to consolidate power. But the current president is also building on a trend: Since 1910 the federal government has doubled its share of government spending to 60 percent. Its share of GDP has now grown to the highest level since World War II.

Democrats yammer about democracy and voting rights and getting signatures for petitions and such, but they seem to be intentionally ceding all their collective citizen power to unfettered elected officials and unelected bureaucracies, investing them with this autocratic power, which is one of the main points of Progressivism.

Today climate change has become the killer app for expanding state control, for example, helping Jerry Brown find his inner Duce. But the authoritarian urge is hardly limited to climate-related issues. It can be seen on college campuses, where uniformity of belief is increasingly mandated. In Europe, the other democratic bastion, the continental bureaucracy now controls ever more of daily life on the continent. You don’t want thousands of Syrian refugees in your town, but the EU knows better. You will take them and like it, or be labeled a racist.

This domineering autocratic/Progressive (nice Fascist) impulse is alive and kicking among the Democratic Party, and even the protests, such as Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter, have this same Big Government fondness.

Anyway, it’s a very long article, well worth the read, which ends by noting that the United States will soon no longer be able to fulfill a world leader role as a beacon of freedom in world dominated by centralized tyranny, because the U.S. would be the same. “Nice Fascism” is about the Central Government doing things “for your own good”, but it is still tyranny.

Crossed at Pirate’s Cove. Follow me on Twitter @WilliamTeach.