The Total State: How Liberal Democracies Become Tyrannies

https://www.amazon.com/dp/1684515580?tag=lrc18-20&linkCode=ogi&th=1&psc=1

This might be a good read. Libertarian writer Jeffrey Tucker gives it a great review even though he ends up agin it!

Particularly intriguing to me is where Tucker writes: "MacIntyre... believes that the liberal project of the 17th and 18th centuries were the product of rationalistic arrogance, the belief that whole societies and cultures could be cajoled into a single model of organization by virtue of pieces of parchment, governmental architectures, slogans about human rights, and strict models of what defines the very notion of freedom and progress.

"He attempts to map out how the freedom of past centuries gradually mutated into the total state of today, a political order in which the entrenched and global bureaucratic elite face no limits to their power and ambition. He is not even slightly shocked that the center of the empire is the US simply because the US was the most successful deployment of the liberal democracy in history, and hence the one most vulnerable to the trajectory of arrogance, corruption, decadence, bloat, and hegemonic imposition without limit." đź‘€

https://a.co/d/0cYIOQk2

Added to my reading list...

From the Introduction:

"No legislation had been passed, no war had been declared, but most of the population suddenly found themselves locked in their homes.

"...The experts who had locked down the entire country were drunk on the incredible power they had amassed in the space of only a few months and had no interest in letting it go. Many state and local governments worked in concert with federal agencies to treat those who opposed the lockdowns as the equivalent of public-health terrorists. Business owners who attempted to open shop were fined millions of dollars, parents who took their children to the park were threatened, and pastors who attempted to hold church services were arrested.

"...Little to no action was taken to challenge the constitutionality of these restrictions and punishments.

"I was absolutely blown away by what had unfolded before me. The US Constitution was the bedrock of my American identity. I had been told all my life that the carefully crafted checks and balances built into the system limited the government’s ability to seize power in exactly this manner. Even if all the branches of government were to work in unison to encroach on people’s freedom, the Bill of Rights stood as a final bulwark against the destruction of our liberties. I had been told the Second Amendment existed primarily to make sure nothing like this could ever happen. Yet freedom of assembly and worship had been summarily abolished and very few people seemed to care. Obviously the politicians had buckled under but even those around me who I’d known for decades and who largely shared my political views were happy to go along. Conservatives and libertarians who had spent their whole lives railing against government tyranny found ways to excuse and deflect. When tyranny came, nothing happened. The Constitution I’d believed in my whole life did nothing. Those who had parroted the myth of limited government seemed to go on as if nothing important had been lost."

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Discussion

"Internationally, the control that governments could exercise in the name of #COVID mitigation appeared almost limitless. #Canada made it impossible for the unvaccinated to leave the country. #Germany and #Austria locked down their unvaccinated, with the latter even making the injection a legal requirement. #Australia seemed to return to its roots as a prison colony, beating protesters, arresting families in parks, and placing large numbers of their aboriginal population in detention camps in the name of reducing the spread. Footage of police in #Amsterdam turning dogs on “unauthorized” lockdown protesters was shared widely on the internet.

"These are, in theory, Western liberal democracies that respect individual rights to assemble, protest, move freely, and have bodily autonomy over medical decisions. Yet those rights quickly vanished as the state moved to consolidate its authority." (from Ch. 2)

"...despite its impressive legacy, the US Constitution does not, and cannot, restrain the total state. The founding fathers were deeply inspiring, but the problem of tyranny has spread far beyond anything they ever envisioned" (from Ch. 11)

"American conservatives love to quote John Adams, who said, “Our constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” But they rarely consider the deeper implications of what Adams was saying. If the Constitution is only meant for a moral and religious people, and Americans are no longer moral or religious, then the Constitution is no longer adequate to govern them."