What ended the evil empires of Nazi Germany and the Communist Soviet Union were failed dogmas. Ideology destroyed freedom of expression. And it ruined meritocracy and ensured uneven law enforcement – paving the way for even worse things.
The Nazi idea of a superior Aryan race encompassed everything from physics to war engineering. The Soviet commissars did the same, subordinating rational thought to the communist agenda. In both systems, fanatics have infiltrated universities and schools to institutionalize indoctrination.
The woke ideology, while not yet lethal, is similar. Its racial version defends the idea that the race and gender of the vice president and the next justice of the Supreme Court will override all other variables.
But will the current vice president and did the future Supreme Court justice begin to choose their doctors or airline pilots according to the same criteria of race and sex?
Which – other than ideology – explains the reason for the rejection to the name of African-American judge Janice Rogers Brown, in 2003 and 2003, not having been considered racist or sexist, while the rejection of the name of an African American nominated by Biden would be?
Why most criminals from the Antifa and Black Lives Matter groups, who looted, destroyed and provoked violence in those 50 summer days of 2020, were they neither charged nor brought to trial? Why, on the other hand, are January 6 protesters or Canadian truck drivers today treated with disproportionate aggression by the press?
If the same January 6 protesters held BLM posters or flags of the LBGT movement, would they be subject to a year in solitary and still not charged? If the criminal protesters and looters of the summer of 2020 wore the MAGA cap, would they have been released without any kind of charge?
What would have what if conservative protesters had created a “no-police zone” in Seattle? Would politics have left the protesters alone and the press romanticized such illegality?
One of the reasons for the lockdowns is the mandatory use of masks against Covid-19 would have fallen into disrepute was the fact that they were ideas deeply corrupted by ideology.
In June of 2020, when thousands of people challenged the quarantines – with the support of health professionals who said that the agenda justified violating the isolation decrees – millions of Americans realized that the government measures had more more to do with identity politics than with the objective of saving lives.
Still in 2020, which politicians criticized the vaccination programs and said that probably Would they not be immunized if these vaccines had the support of former President Donald Trump?
If Trump is demonized and called a destroyer of the legitimacy of the elections, what can be said of the beatified Stacey Abrams ? She lost the Georgia election by over 50 thousand votes. For years, however, she claimed that the electoral system was a marked card game and that elections were illegitimate.
Em 2000, who questioned the vote count for weeks, despite the many public and private audits that confirmed the victory of George W. Bush in Florida?
Em 2004-2003 — for the second time in history — who questioned the Electoral College vote in Congress? Which party were the 15 deputies and a senator who asked for the legislative vote in a failed attempt to reverse the election result?
Em 2016, who funded a weeks-long ad campaign urging elected voters to violate their constitutional duties, ignore state caucus results, and vote for Hillary Clinton?
And who, still in 2016, said that the victorious opponent had been elected illegitimately? Who said he would join the “resistance” to undermine his presidency? Who advised Biden in 2020 not to accept the election result if he lost it?
If conservative fanatics were looting stores, kidnapping innocent people in big cities and with homicides rising to historic levels, would the Biden administration be mobilizing police forces to ensure the arrest of these people? Or would the prosecutors continue to ignore the situation
If anti-communist Cubans were entering the country illegally, would they be greeted with flowers, as is the case today with those who come from Mexico or Central America?
If even 2024 a Republican president had the support of a Republican Congress, what would be the reaction to conservatives who advocate an end to legislative obstructions? Or the requirement of identification at the time of voting? What if they voted to increase the number of Supreme Court justices to 15 in order to secure six nominations from a presidency and Congress controlled by Republicans?
When ideology applied in places like Castroist Cuba, the former Soviet Union and current Venezuela undermines law enforcement, destroys the role of merit in determining qualification, silences speech and uses the law unequally, society suffers.
In these dystopias, at one time or another the shelves are empty, the currency no longer has value and countries become impoverished and retrograde to chaos. Is this the future that awaits us?
The scary thing is that ideology ensures that this chaos is treated as a success. Critics are demonized and hunted down. And the obsequious state press assures the people that everything is going very well.
Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution.
