...Perhaps totalitarianism is the very name that Tocqueville would have given to the kind of despotism he foresaw:
So I think that the type of oppression by which democratic peoples are threatened will resemble nothing of what preceded it in the world; our contemporaries cannot find the image of it in their memories. I seek in vain myself for an expression that exactly reproduces the idea that I am forming of it and includes it; the thing that I want to speak about is new, and men have not yet created the expression which must portray it. The old words of despotism and of tyranny do not work. The thing is new, so I must try to define it, since I cannot name it.
No previous tyranny or dictatorship has been willing or able to exercise so absolute, so penetrating, and so expansive a power: a power that destroys everything in society that is spontaneous, autonomous, and pluralistic, and that takes over anything that is private or social by the political. No dead autocrats ever attempted to “subject all his subjects indiscriminately to the details of a uniform rule.” As autocratic as Caesar’s rule of Rome was, for instance, his subjects preserved their diverse customs and mores, and although all Roman provinces were subjected to the emperor, most of them ruled themselves independently. Caesar and other autocrats were satisfied with exploiting (mercilessly sometimes) a few while leaving the rest alone.
What I observe in America today is the development of the kind of totalitarian democracy about which Tocqueville warned. I do not make this observation easily or lightly. It is based on 30 years of living in China under the totalitarian rule of the Communist Party, and more than four years of witnessing in America a cultural, social, and political situation shifting rapidly towards an experience with which I am all too familiar.
Democracy can be autocratic when decision-making is concentrated at the apex of the official hierarchy, the decision-making process is not accountable to anyone else, and other authorities who are supposed to share power in the government come to exist in name only. How is it not autocratic and tyrannical when New York lawmakers are mulling a bill (Bill A416) that would allow the state to remove and/or detain any person or a group of persons who are carriers of communicable diseases? This is a policy that the Chinese government has been implementing nationally since the outbreak of COVID19. The difference between the two regimes is merely procedural in that the same policy in the China case was made behind closed doors whereas in the New York case its decision-making process will be transparent to the public. But the difference does not matter because insofar as the explicit ruler or group of rulers possesses absolute power in deciding what is in the public interest and acts upon that decision in unquestionable authority, the public must obey.
Tyranny can be the rule of the one, the few, the well-born, or the many. A privilege to select leaders through voting via a democratic system is not equivalent to the people ruling themselves. I observe that Americans are bound by a gigantic and intricate web of regulations formulated with almost no reference to the public will. Not only does government prescribe uniform, public conduct, governors now even mandate masks in private homes amid the pandemic....
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Originally Posted by RMNIXON
