 It has long been my habit now and then to point out new conservative Southern writers. So I am happy to call attention to Auron MacIntyre’s recent book The Total State: How Liberal Democracies Become Tyrannies (Regnery, 2024).
This work is an insightful chapter and verse account of how the old constitutional republic of the United States has now become a regime under the near-total control of globalist capitalists and bureaucrats entirely antagonistic to the will and interests of the American people. What we are living under ain’t no “government of the people.” One of several virtues of the work is, as one reader puts it: “The Total State is a detailed analysis of modern political power that is still accessible to the average guy.” A basic point of the writer is the damage that has been done by the institutionalising of a false concept of “individual rights.” The right of the individual to do as he pleases without reference to others makes him into a lonely member of a cultureless society. He has lost the identity formed by family, group, and religion. The inevitable fate of a society of such individuals is collectivism, the loss of genuine individual will. MacIntyre writes that in such a society, human beings “become a concept rather than an essence.” The author stresses that the recovery of self-government by the American people will not be easy. He kills off the shallow reformists’ hope that a change of officeholders or restoration of the Constitution is all that is needed. As any Southerner knows, the Constitution ceased to mean anything long ago, except for trivial matters. Another reader rightly comments: "Bold, lucid, and chilling. The Total State takes a flamethrower to every comforting belief conservatives hold about how our political order really works.”
4 Comments
Paul Yarbrough
4/27/2025 03:44:31 pm
It is only dumbfounding whenever I hear so many of these speechifying pretentious “conservatives” refer to the Constitution as “The greatest document put together by man”; with their qualifying “system of checks and balances.” Although I realize they cannot hear me, I always internally scream “Are you nuts, you d*** fool! Checks and balances? WHERE?”
Clyde N Wilson
4/28/2025 04:53:23 am
Paul, how right you are! It was a silly artificial theory made up by John Adams which John Taylor took completely apart. To expect different parts of the federal government to check each other Flies in the face of history and common sense.
General Kromwell
5/13/2025 11:56:00 am
The Constitution is like the shadow of a tree. It is there, but possesses no substance. The tree still stands, but it’s all rotted out. Such is America and its constitution. Nothing but a shadow and a dead tree.
Billy P
5/18/2025 07:13:07 pm
America existed from 1776-1865. The republic was put on a path to tyranny, a path to being a meddling empire, in 1865 unfortunately. America was "reborn" into Lincoln's Lost Cause. Led by the puritan North, the neocons and the socialists, the founding principles, the depth of individual rights and the western culture of America has been in steady decline since, some losses more gradual than others, but some losses kicked into high gear (as seen in the last administration). It is now a "unified" country on life support, one arguably far too big in land mass and population to be run by the few hundred corrupt souls in the centralized government in DC. Leave a Reply. |
