The Wuhan coronavirus carries a heavy ideological payload of conformity and submission to authority. The Chinese are aggressively using it to promote their model of fascism. Others of an authoritarian bent are making political use of it as well.
The basic idea that the virus is a form of divine punishment for failing to implement and obey the "right" policies is clearly false - there are far too many case surges in places that did everything "right" - but it's irresistible for believers in centralized authority.
It also has some appeal to the public, because they want a frightening and confusing epidemic to be made simpler. Do X, Y, and Z and you won't get the virus; if you got the virus, you must have failed to do X, Y, and Z. It's comforting because it's simpler than the truth.
This is a very old compulsion, going all the way back to using supernatural mythology to explain the weather and natural disasters. Please the gods and there will be no famine; if there is famine, you must have displeased the gods. We hunger for simplicity and assurance.
The inherent problem with such ways of thinking is they invite mob psychosis. People who think famine was caused by displeasing the gods become violently angry at suggestions to the contrary. Those who profit from the enforced belief system will eagerly fan the flames of anger.
The enforced belief system quickly acquires heavy moral overtones. Obedience is righteous; disobedience is sinful and evil. Debates become one-sided crusades. Information that contradicts the simplified, moralistic belief system is suppressed.
Human beings have a great appetite for living this way. It's not entirely irrational. People working hard to provide for their families just want to know a simple formula for living safely, a clear set of procedures they can follow to make everything be okay.
The coronavirus is dangerously useful to people who want to create fusions of ideology and morality, people who seek to forcibly restore faith in authority after it fell to an all-time low, and those who assert the superiority of centralized control over individual freedoms.
In truth, the big advantages authoritarians have in such a crisis is their callous disregard for individual lives and their ability to lie without consequence. China was trapping sick people in their homes by welding the doors shut. They quarantined cities bigger than New York.
And of course they constantly lie about how many cases and deaths they really had, and even though everyone knows they're lying, everyone implicitly treats the lies as truth by only comparing more honest and open societies in their "worst coronavirus responses" analysis.
You really don't want to live under any of the authoritarian regimes that claim to have done a bang-up job of handling the coronavirus. Even if their claims were true - and they aren't - you wouldn't want to live through the measures they imposed on outbreak areas.
What the coronavirus DID reveal in many Western societies was bureaucratic sclerosis, bloated agencies that forgot about their core missions, hyper-politicization, and media-driven panicky stampedes. We should address those problems without becoming MORE authoritarian. /end
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Among the strangest features of GOP internal battles - be it NeverTrump, or conservatives displeased with nominees like McCain or Romney - is this notion that it would be better to throw an election to the Dems and hope a better Republican nominee comes along next time.
How can anyone still seriously think that way, especially after Obama's "Pen and Phone" dictatorship and Biden wiping his posterior with the Constitution to plow ahead with his student loan vote-buying scheme? No, guys, it is NEVER safe to just toss a few wins to the Dems.
Maybe it's a form of projection, a stubborn illusion that the Dem candidate might be relatively harmless and inert in office, as GOP leaders sometimes are. Those illusions should have been utterly shattered by now.
When pundits wrote a decade or two ago that corruption would become the big story around the world, I was skeptical. People love to COMPLAIN about corruption, sure, but few electorates are prepared to take decisive action against it.
Corruption is absolutely inherent to Big Government. Repeat after me, and teach your children: THERE ARE NO CLEAN BIG GOVERNMENTS. Amassing huge amounts of power and money in a central State is like dropping sugar cubes amid anthills.
One reason Big Governments never get clean is they have so many weapons at their disposal to distract the public from anti-corruption initiatives. Key segments of the electorate get paid off, too. Big Media is easily drawn into the cesspool and made comfortable.
It is difficult to combat totalitarianism through electoral politics because the whole point of totalitarianism is to seize control of elections. They terrorize and propagandize people for years, then hold a "vote" to find out if their techniques were at least 51% effective.
Defeating totalitarianism requires spirited resistance and good humor. Mock them and make them look ridiculous. They can't stand it, because they are driven by self-righteousness. Totalitarians are small people who need to feel large by joining herds and crushing outsiders.
Defy them at every turn. Go where you aren't supposed to go, say what you're not supposed to say, and do it all with a smile. Exhaust their resources while refusing to become demoralized. Raise the price of totalitarianism by bankrupting its corporate partners when possible.
The greatest threat to democracy at present is the deliberate effort to erase nationhood and citizenship through mass migration, against the express wishes of citizens.
You don't have much of a "democracy," much less a constitutional republic, if the ruling elite can ignore voters to erase the border and shower benefits and privileges on foreign nationals. It's an explicit rejection of national sovereignty.
You don't have any kind of "democracy" if the Ruling Class can use mass migration to create a new electorate that votes the way it wants. Votes have little power if the rulers can dilute them at will.
The Democrat Party grows increasingly less interested in pretending it cares about American citizens, or feels any sense of duty toward America as a nation. The Party was never really good at this, but at least it used to make some modest efforts.
As I've written previously, every Democrat thinks their Sacred Agenda is far more important than any vestigial sense of duty they might feel toward the American people. There is no "American people" to them, just groups of favored constituents and despised enemies.
America isn't really a legitimate nation under Dem ideology, which frees them of feeling any sense of responsibility to the country as a whole, or any weight of tradition that might interfere with their quest for power. They see not one nation under God, but the Balkans.
This once again has me thinking about how everything went nuts in American youth culture during the Great Anti-Bullying Crusade, which was really more about the Left studying and adopting classic bully tactics to impose its ideology on vulnerable young people.
One element of the growing social discontent in America today is that you have an entirely feminized Mean Girls ruling class wielding increasing levels of compulsive force to impose its ideology on an essentially masculine middle and lower class.
It's like those Middle Eastern countries where a Shiite minority rules over a restless Sunni population, or vice versa. Centralized power has grown to totalitarian levels, and it's concentrated in the hands of a political elite that shares nothing of the majority's worldview.