Vivek is right: America is devolving into tyranny We can already see the troops deployed and the battle lines drawn: Roger Kimball
https://thespectator.com/topic/vivek-ramaswamy-right-america-devolving-into-tyranny/
Many commentators (including yours truly) have pointed out that America is divided more now than it has been since the late 1850s and the run up to the Civil War. But as usual, I may have understated the case.
That, anyway, is what Vivek Ramaswamy would say. In a remarkable, just-published interview with Tom Klingenstein, Ramaswamy several time insists that we are not in a pre-war situation. It’s worse than that. “We are,” he insists, “absolutely in a war with the fate of the country at stake.”
Hyperbolic? I don’t think so. The war, he acknowledges, could and likely will get worse. But we can already see the troops deployed and the battle lines drawn.
On one side are those who believe in the founding ideals of America, the ideals summed up in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, at the center of which are the ideals of individual liberty, freedom of speech and the rule of law.
On the other side are the “woke” haters of America as traditionally defined. These are the people who seek to tear the blindfold off the statues of justice at our court houses because, they assert, impartial justice is racist. What they want is not individual liberty, but group prerogatives based on sex, race or some other badge of supposed victimhood.
Pace well-meaning politicians and bureaucrats, compromise between these two groups is not possible because the “wokerati” regards those who dissent not as people with different opinions but as heretics. And heretics — whether the issue be race, the climate, Covid, Hamas or this week’s preferred species of sexual exotica — cannot only be met with utter suppression. “You know you are in a war,” Ramaswamy notes, “when there is no middle ground, no room to compromise.” That’s where we are now.
I think it very unlikely that Ramaswamy will be moving into 1600 Pennsylvania come January 2025. But he is telling the world some hard and vital truths. I hope the political class, as well as ordinary Americans, will pay him heed. Noting the many ways the financial sector, the law and the corporate and academic worlds have been “weaponized” against traditional American values, he warns that “if we lose this war, we will have full-fledged tyranny. You see, if people are free, then there will be group differences in outcomes because often groups have different preferences and talents. The only way you can make groups equal in terms of outcome is by force.”
This was a point that James Madison made in Federalist 10 in his discussion of faction. Americans chose the path Madison outlined as the best path and sought comity in compromise and the balancing of opposing interest. Now, the “woke” agenda is pursing the course that Madison descried only to dismiss: the tyrannous path of controlling faction by obliterating difference and enforcing ideological conformity.
If you think things are not that bad, you haven’t been paying attention. Already, some people with dissenting views about immigration, say, or Covid policy or “systemic racism” have been turned into second-class citizens. They have been denied checking accounts and credit, access to the internet and have found themselves blocked from college or employment. Lawyers who work for or supported Donald Trump find themselves threatened with disbarment and indictment; they, too, are rendered unemployable.
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