Uncomfortable Truths
The Left and the Right might each be accused of many sins. One of which one side is not guilty, reports Alex Castellanos in the Spectator, is constructing the deadliest authoritarian regimes in human history. “That honor belongs not to the “oppressive right,” but to the (tyrannical) left.”
Mao Zedong alone snuffed out more than 65 million lives. Stalin was not far behind. Add in Pol Pot, Castro, Kim Il-Sung, and a few other “People’s Republics,” and you have a ledger of death that makes anyone else’s butcher’s bill look amateurish.
That uncomfortable truth, continues Castellanos, blinds the left, as it lobs “fascist” across the political stage.
(The left) sneered at the “fascist” Mitt Romney while excusing Mao. They mocked well-known fascists George W. Bush and John McCain while romanticizing Fidel.
Today on college campuses, where the ignorant instruct the unaware, they hiss at Donald Trump while sporting Che on a T-shirt.
The left calling the right “fascist” is like Bud Light calling Guinness weak. It’s as if they’ve outsourced historical memory to TikTok.
Frederik Hayek’s point, plainly outlined in his “The Road to Freedom,” was that Socialist planning, state control, and the “we’re all in this together” collectivism of Zohran “The Grocer” Mamdani cannot be enforced by polite suggestion. “It requires power. Lots of it,” notes Castellanos.
Socialist planning demands restrictions on liberty, suppression of dissent, and regulation of every corner of economic life. … once those tools are handed to the state, they are never returned to the people.
So Much Irony
The left insists on saving us from fascism. Yet the left is the political convention most prone to it.
What’s not to like about the left’s goals: equality, solidarity, justice? Never mentioned, though, is the vast machinery of coercion to achieve those goals.
A progressive ideology that promises to make you equal must also prevent you from becoming unequal. It must turn freedom of speech into freedom from speech. If necessary, it will do so at the point of a gun, as we have too recently seen.
Liberty Terrifies Weingarten
Randi Weingarten, the teachers’ union boss, warns readers of her new book that “Fascists fear teachers.” Alex Castellanos, writing in The Spectator, suggests an alternative, better title to her book – “Teachers Fear Freedom.”
Mirroring Tyranny
Freedom, Castellanos argues, is what makes state-run monopolies obsolete, exposes bad ideas to competition, and empowers parents to raise their own children.
Liberty terrifies Weingarten, and that tells us everything.
The left shouts “fascist!” at every opponent, but their own kettle is not merely black; it is the darkest history has ever boiled. If “fascism” means authoritarianism, a record-breaking body count, mass coercion, and suppression of dissent, then socialism, as it is practiced, not just as it is preached, checks every box.
Progressives should dial down this sort of rhetoric. For all their shrieking on social media, “fascism” is the mirror in which they can see their own image.
In the classical liberal tradition of John Locke, citizens are encouraged to let others order their own lives, speak freely, associate as they choose, and fail without dragging everyone else down.
Freedom is messy, warns Castellanos, “but it does not require firing squads to keep it neat.”
