The Federalist: What If We Used The Government To Stop Liberals From Existing?

Full fascism ahead.

If there is one question the Reasonable People of Political Punditry love to ask, it is "Has the Left gone too far ?"

Notably, this is rarely actually asked in response to anything the Democratic Party actually does or any laws that get proposed or passed. Sometimes it is in response to things the Right made up themselves and sometimes it is in response to the mere existence of people that those on the Right do not personally care for, particularly when those people do things they do not like. The gist of it is always that, yes, Republicans are voting for terrible people to do terrible things, but who can blame them when they are being pushed so far by people who do not actually hold any political office? There's only so much they can take! 

Last week, Bill Maher devoted a segment on his show to this premise, explaining that Republicans feel that they have to elect "monsters" like Donald Trump and Herschel Walker out of a desperation to show us how much they dislike us as people.

"So let me try to translate, not endorse but translate, for liberal America. Part of the appeal of a Herschel Walker or a Donald Trump or any number of the egregious assholes Republicans have backed is, in their mind, the worst a candidate is, the more it says to Democrats, 'Do see how much we don't like what you're selling?'" Maher said, adding "All that socialism, and identity politics, and victimhood, and oversensitivity, and cancel culture, and white self-loathing, and forcing complicated ideas about race and sex on kids too young to understand it, literally anything would be better than that. That's their view. That's why you can be a really bad dude in Republican politics and it's not a dealbreaker."

If one comes from the perspective, as I do, that it is not the job of politicians to force people to be more likeable or socially acceptable to one another, this is objectively insane. It's also fascism. And that, it seems, is exactly where the Right is headed.

On Thursday, The Federalist published an article by political editor John Daniel Davidson, a favorite on Fox News and other conservative programming, in which he argued that conservatives must stop calling themselves conservative, stop believing in small government (which they only ever did when it came to using the government to help people, anyway) and declare themselves "radicals, restorationists, and counterrevolutionaries."

More specifically, and without using the term, Davidson said if the world was going to insist upon changing without their express permission, conservatives will need to become outright fascists in order to force it to go back to the way they like it. And of course, this will be justified by the fact that the Left "has gone too far."

Western civilization is dying. The traditions and practices that conservatives champion are, at best, being preserved only in an ever-shrinking private sphere. At worst, they are being trampled to dust. They certainly do not form the basis of our common culture or civic life, as they did for most of our nation’s history.

To talk now of “family values” is to assume that there are enough Americans able and willing to marry and raise children together for something like “family values” to matter in the public discourse, much less in the halls of power. To talk of defending “religious freedom” is to misapprehend that the real risk today is widespread irreligion, which will leave so few religious Americans in the coming generations that the government and large corporations will inevitably — and easily — persecute them.

No one is obligated to get married or have children or practice a certain religion for someone else's comfort. It is utterly childish to think that way. It's weird. As is any idea that the "irreligious" have any interest in "persecuting" the religious. Although given the fact that the Right tends to define persecution as refusing to allow them to force other people to practice their religion, it's easy how they might see things that way.

Conservatives are still invoking these things as if they are magic incantations that can roll back time, just as they did during the crucial decades of the past half-century when a cultural and technological revolution was re-making America before their eyes, and they did nothing to stop it.

They did! They tried everything! They failed, because they can't actually force everyone else to want to live in the society they want to live in. Because people grow and change and evolve whether they like it or not.

So now Davidson is arguing that the only option for conservatives to get things the way they want them is full-on totalitarian rule.

They might, looking to American history for inspiration, conjure up the image of the Pilgrims — those iron-willed and audacious Christians who refused to accept the terms set by the mainstream of their time and set out to build something entirely new, to hew it out of the wilderness of the New World, even at great personal cost.

Yeah, that's not exactly what happened though. Like most immigrants to the United States, the Pilgrims actually came here largely for economic opportunity. Most of the separatists had already left England years ago and had been living in the Dutch Republic, where they enjoyed lots of religious freedom but had to earn a living in textile mills rather than as farmers.

Put bluntly, if conservatives want to save the country they are going to have to rebuild and in a sense re-found it, and that means getting used to the idea of wielding power, not despising it . Why? Because accommodation or compromise with the left is impossible. One need only consider the speed with which the discourse shifted on gay marriage, from assuring conservatives ahead of the 2015 Obergefell decision that gay Americans were only asking for toleration, to the never-ending persecution of Jack Phillips .

To be clear, Republicans have always "wielded" power. That's why we've had to fight them on civil rights issues every step of the way. They only despise power when it is held by those other than themselves.

According to Danielson, Jack Phillips, the owner of Masterpiece Cake Shop (yes, that Masterpiece Cake Shop) is being "persecuted" because he got in some legal trouble when he refused to sell a cake to a transgender woman. Note that this cake did not have any messaging on it and was merely meant to be a pink cake with blue frosting to celebrate her transition. As he certainly would have made a pink cake with blue frosting for anyone else who asked, this was clearly discrimination based on the fact that he did not like what she was celebrating. That's not persecution, that's not being allowed to break the law.

The left will only stop when conservatives stop them, which means conservatives will have to discard outdated and irrelevant notions about “small government.” The government will have to become, in the hands of conservatives, an instrument of renewal in American life — and in some cases, a blunt instrument indeed.

 The left will only stop when conservatives stop them . What an absolutely horrific, tyrannical, oppressive thing to say. Especially when you consider what that means to someone like Davidson. He wants to force people to practice his religion, to stay married whether they want to be married or not, to stay in the closet if they are trans, to force their children to stay in the closet if they are trans and to generally Wandavision him an entire fake world to live in so that he and others like him can feel happy and comfortable.

To stop Big Tech, for example, will require using antitrust powers to break up the largest Silicon Valley firms. To stop universities from spreading poisonous ideologies will require state legislatures to starve them of public funds. To stop the disintegration of the family might require reversing the travesty of no-fault divorce, combined with generous subsidies for families with small children. Conservatives need not shy away from making these arguments because they betray some cherished libertarian fantasy about free markets and small government. It is time to clear our minds of cant.

You know, we hear about people staying together "for the kids," but rarely do we hear about them staying together "for the adult man we don't know who works at The Federalist." I realize that this must make John Daniel Davidson feel incredibly unimportant, that it probably hurts his feelings to be discounted in this way — but that is because it is none of his damn business why people choose to get a divorce.

It goes without saying that he believes he should be able to control other people's reproductive futures as well.

In other contexts, wielding government power will mean a dramatic expansion of the criminal code. It will not be enough, for example, to reach an accommodation with the abortion regime, to agree on “reasonable limits” on when unborn human life can be snuffed out with impunity. As Abraham Lincoln once said of slavery, we must become all one thing or all the other. The Dobbs decision was in a sense the end of the beginning of the pro-life cause. Now comes the real fight, in state houses across the country, to outlaw completely the barbaric practice of killing the unborn.

No.

Conservatives had better be ready for it, and Republican politicians, if they want to stay in office, had better have an answer ready when they are asked what reasonable limits to abortion restrictions they would support. The answer is: none, for the same reason they would not support reasonable limits to restrictions on premeditated murder.

I too think Republicans should proudly get up and say that they support forcing 11-year-old rape and incest victims to carry their fathers' nonviable fetuses to term even if doing so will kill them. That should go over very well.

On the transgender question, conservatives will have to repudiate utterly the cowardly position of people like David French, in whose malformed worldview Drag Queen Story Hour at a taxpayer-funded library is a “blessing of liberty.” Conservatives need to get comfortable saying in reply to people like French that Drag Queen Story Hour should be outlawed; that parents who take their kids to drag shows should be arrested and charged with child abuse; that doctors who perform so-called “gender-affirming” interventions should be thrown in prison and have their medical licenses revoked; and that teachers who expose their students to sexually explicit material should not just be fired but be criminally prosecuted.

Because they love parental freedom, right? Again, their goal was never to "protect" their own children from Drag Queen Story Hours no one is asking them to attend or gender-affirming care, but always to regulate what other parents are allowed to do.

Also no one is showing kids any sexually explicit material. That's not a thing.

To those who worry that power corrupts, and that once the right seizes power it too will be corrupted, they certainly have a point. If conservatives manage to save the country and rebuild our institutions, will they ever relinquish power and go the way of Cincinnatus? It is a fair question, and we should attend to it with care after we have won the war.

Twist: they're already corrupted. And fucking insane.

For now, there are only two paths open to conservatives. Either they awake from decades of slumber to reclaim and re-found what has been lost, or they will watch our civilization die. There is no third road.

Enjoy the show, I guess?

There is a third road, of course. The third road is to live their lives the way they want to live their lives and to stop worrying about what everyone else is doing. For all the flak the Left gets over "cancel culture" and the "woke mob" on Twitter and social media, we're not going around trying to enact laws that legally bar people from being annoying to us on a personal level. Yes, we will push for laws that make it more difficult to discriminate against people, but if people want to be personally sexist or racist or transphobic or homophobic in their free time, they are more than welcome to do so as long as they aren't bothering anyone else. They are free to have creepy "traditional" marriages where the wife is submissive to the husband, they're free to go Quiverfull and have 19 kids who all have the same first initial, they're free to practice their religion, they're free to believe and do all kinds of things we might find personally annoying or obnoxious or even immoral (so long as they don't hurt anyone).

It's the Right that seeks actual, legal control, that seeks and indeed demands fealty and obedience — and, as Davidson points out, they can't meaningfully exist without it.

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