The Left's Despotic Reign

A relentless search for total control

The Left is fond of saying that Trump acts like a king. Urbanites have frequently orchestrated “No Kings” protests. But look at history reveals the opposite of their narrative. In a case of classic projection, the Left claims others are doing what they do themselves. The history of the American Left has moved through several stages to reach its current phase—that of full-blown despotism.

The Progressive Era

From 1880 to 1920, left-wing progressives rejected many of the ideas in the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution. According to The American Left¹, an online course at Hillsdale College, “Progressivism largely focused on providing moral, social and economic uplift to the parts of society that were less developed than the white middle class.” Unfortunately, this pleasant-sounding goal took the form of eugenics and the forced sterilizations of minorities, the disabled and others leftist elites considered misfits.

Liberalism

Liberalism as it’s used by the Left today does not refer to classic liberalism. Those are the ideas that inspired America’s founding, including limited government, the separation of powers and the protection of individual rights. Instead, starting in 1912, during the presidential campaign of Woodrow Wilson, the Left redefined “liberal” to mean someone who supports an expansive welfare state. From 1920 to 1960, liberals made numerous changes in America. They created central planning in which private business and government worked together to plan the economy. They rejected individual rights and redefined democracy to mean that unelected bureaucrats would look at research and polls to decide what was best for the people. Any semblance of democracy was gone. The people would give government power and the government would give the people rights. These rights would be chosen by the government and would frequently change. Starting with FDR’s New Deal and expanding with LBJ’s Great Society, the new welfare-warfare state maintained welfare at home and undertook nation-building projects abroad to create massive federal deficits.²

Radicalism

The 1960s radicals broke with the Left’s liberalism. Cultural Marxists like Peter Adorno and Herbert Marcuse created critical theory, which substituted race and sex for class but was otherwise unchanged from classic Marxism. The long march through the institutions, advocated by Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, took place in the U.S. Radical leftists obtained powerful positions in education and government agencies. Teachers unions began indoctrinating children with critical race theory and political activism.³

Neoliberalism

Neoliberalism began in the 1970s and ended in 2009. It was characterized by vast growth of the government bureaucracy, increased government spending, and inflation with economic slowing (stagflation). Neoliberals promoted deregulation since they believed that only free markets could produce enough wealth to fund the welfare state. Reduced antitrust prosecutions resulted in the expansion of monopolies. Neoliberals also argued for global “free trade,” outsourcing, globalization and open borders. They promoted military expansionism, democracy-building abroad, and the surveillance of U.S. citizens at home. The neoliberal era resulted in a ruling elite, or oligarchy, and the erosion of the middle class.

Identity Politics

From the 1990s through the present, the Left embraced identity politics. “According to this philosophy, people are not viewed as citizens with inherent rights but subjects who receive rights, privileges, and duties from government based on their [group] identity,” explains The American Left.⁴ Using the oppressor vs. oppressed paradigm, Leftists pushed for inequality under the law with preferential treatment for groups they alleged were “historically oppressed.” Many on the Left adopted democratic socialism and demanded the government root out “oppression” in every aspect of life. The Left opposed free speech and censored dissident speech. In the “great awokening,” the ruling oligarchy—elites in business and government—took a hard left turn. They thought they could justify their anti-American globalist policies simply by funding groups that promoted diversity, equity and inclusion. The Left also attacked the idea of U.S. citizenship by elevating foreign cultures and illegal immigrants rather than promoting assimilation into the American way of way.

Despotism

Over the past 100 years, the American Left has established a massive bureaucracy that now systematically takes away the rights of U.S. citizens. Kevin Slack, author of War on the American Republic⁵ and an instructor for The American Left, says:

The tyranny you saw in 2020 is what the Left has in store for you—constant apology, constant subjugation and deprivation of all of your rights…Is America a republic? Not really. In a republic you would have laws passed by elected representatives. Instead, we have law-making power delegated to large bureaucracies by those who have no accountability—literally the definition of tyranny. Is America a democracy? Hardly. Democracy means rule by the majority of people. Instead, we have a ruling class that claims to rule in the name of the people, except when it doesn’t…The Left hates America…The citizenship rights we have are antithetical to the administrative state…The norm in human history is oppression and tyranny.

The Left would destroy equal citizenship rights under the law and return to oppression and tyranny. It is well on its way to doing so. The next issue will focus on what you can do about the Left’s despotic reign.

“No Kings” protests are examples of classic projection from the Left.

1. The American Left: From Liberalism to Despotism. Hillsdale College online courses. hillsdale.edu.

2. See footnote 1.

3. See footnote 1.

4. See footnote 1.

5. Slack, Kevin. War on the American Republic. Encounter Books, 2023.