RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.city-journal.org/how-progressives-enforce-ideological-conformity

Politics today seems to have crawled out of some Hobbesian muck. It is a nasty, brutish little runt wherever it appears, which is almost everywhere. Its act—for these days everything is performance art—is a tragic farce. On the streets, its watchword is riot; on the Internet, abuse; in the academy, the boardroom, and the media, a coordinated equalization of attitudes that borders on the totalitarian. At the highest levels of government, it is too lazy or stupid to persuade, preferring rather to manipulate, bully, spy, and punish.

Hobbesian man is moved by powerful passions of pride and fear. His vainglory and the joy he takes in standing above others give rise to war. The horror of anarchy and the fear of death make him seek peace. The ugly and ubiquitous politics of the Left is now channeling these passions into a massive project of social engineering: the construction of a new Tower of Babel.

Fear and pride raised the old Tower of Babel, built by anonymous wanderers who sought to “make us a name, lest we be scattered over all the earth.” Their anonymity is fitting, for there was then only “one language, one set of words. . . . one people” in the world. The Babylonians formed bricks out of the soil—adamah in Hebrew, the same stuff God breathed life into to make the first human being (ha’adam)—and began to “build a city and a tower with its top in the heavens.” These hard-baked bricks, all cut to the same measure, are images of human beings from whom the breath of individual life and particularity has somehow departed.

Modern attempts to construct the Tower have unfolded before, most notably in the Soviet Union and China. Today an inhumanly univocal tongue, asserting itself as the measure of all things, once again threatens to swallow the rich particularities and multiple languages of individual thought, speech, and creative expression.

The foundations of the new Tower have already been laid. In a recent interview, the Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei was asked if he thought that Donald Trump was an authoritarian. He did not:

If you are authoritarian, you have to have a system supporting you. You cannot just be an authoritarian by yourself. But certainly, in the United States, with today’s condition, you can easily have an authoritarian. In many ways, you’re already in the authoritarian state. You just don’t know it.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2021/11/22/fake_white_house_is_a_fitting_home_for_fake_president_146769.html

News last month that President Biden makes electronic appearances from a pretend White House brought to mind another president whose image was carefully crafted to assuage the American people that all was well even when things were at their most dire.

No, I’m not referring to Franklin Roosevelt, although his facade of the strong, virile man was as much of an invention as Biden’s carefully crafted persona as a reasonable moderate who would unite our country.

Instead, to fully comprehend the essence  of the invented Joe Biden, we must visit the paranoid fantasies of one of our greatest writers — Philip K. Dick, whose 1964 novel “The Penultimate Truth” imagined a future where the leader of the Western world was in fact nothing but a simulacrum programmed to reassure the masses that their sacrifice of toiling underground for decades was noble when in fact it was the equivalent of the turkey’s sacrifice on Thanksgiving. Given a choice, the turkey would have politely declined. 

I’m hardly the first columnist to suggest that Biden is parroting lines written for him in an effort to convince the American public of their need to sacrifice for the general good, but his banal bromides have an unmistakable Orwellian feel: “Lockdowns are freedom,” “inflation is wealth,” “moms and dads are domestic terrorists.” But when it was revealed that Biden got his COVID vaccine booster shot in a fake White House, it became easy to picture his presidency as some political variant of “The Truman Show,” or as I propose, a Philip K. Dick novel.

Dick was the mid-20th century’s answer to Kafka — an author in search of the ultimate truth who taught us that the truth mostly consisted of disappointment and deception. So too might we conclude about the puppet presidency of Joseph R. Biden. Even the majority of those who accept the legitimacy of his presidency can have a hard time believing in the legitimacy of his leadership.

According to Donald Trump adviser Stephen Miller, “The reason Biden uses this bizarre virtual set for televised meetings — and not an actual room like East Room, Cabinet, Oval, Roosevelt, Sit Room, etc. — is because it allows him to read from a script directly from a face-on monitor (& w/out teleprompter glass that can be seen on camera).”

That doesn’t in itself make Biden an ersatz president. Lots of politicians are nothing but empty reflections of what their handlers put in front of them, but in his case there is ample evidence aside from the fake White House that he is a product of the imagination of those around him, a figurehead whose policies and even his press conferences (“I’m not supposed to take any questions”) are scripted by others.