I ended "Two Kinds of Leftism?" with this:
The existing order in America has to be overthrown again and again to keep it from becoming what America has become and is becoming. Whoever said “Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty” got it right.
Americans have been insufficiently vigilant and far too ready to go along with schemes that aggrandize government power. They have ignored, to their own detriment, the inescapable fact that there is only one kind of leftism: the leftism of government control. That is a thing entirely different from the night-watchman government which protects Americans from each other and from foreign enemies — though even that government must be carefully and constantly circumscribed.
Today, I opened Diana West's American Betrayal: The Secret Assault on Our Nation's Character. It ends on a similar note:
As far back as 1934, The New York Times [yes, The New York Times] trumpeted NEW DEAL PATERNALISM IMPERILS ALL INDIVIDUALISM. The article describes a speech by Massachusetts governor Joseph Ely at a conference of America’s governors. “There is no stopping short of the end of the road,” Ely said, “and at the end of the road we shall have a socialistic state.” Invoking Stalin in Russia, Mussolini in Italy, and Hitler in Germany—all newly minted dictators—Ely pointed out that where these despots ruled, “individualism had passed from the people to dictators making the people the ‘children of government.’”
Echoes of de Tocqueville. One century earlier, the French visionary described the infantilizing effect of a paternalistic despotism in America. Imagining the “immense, protective power” of a state with “absolute” power, and likening such power to “parental authority,” which keeps citizens in “perpetual childhood,” he wondered, “Why should it not entirely relieve them from the trouble of thinking and all the cares of living?” It would seem that the mortal blow against the “grown-up”—the free citizen—was struck, softly, once liberty was no longer paramount in this country, once ideology began to take precedence over facts, once we traded in the American ideal of “rugged individualism” for the material markers of “the American dream.” If once upon a time Americans subscribed to our Founders’ belief that our Creator endowed us with the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, there came a time when we expected a package of perks—car, house, Play Station—to sweeten the deal. Suddenly, those perks became darn near an entitlement, an attitude entirely befitting the subjects in Tocqueville’s absolute state. In fact, measured in material goods as it is, the contemporary “American dream” is a vision driven by the Marxist belief in the primacy of the economic....
No wonder Norman Thomas was tickled by the direction of the country in the Eisenhower years. By 1958, he was beside himself. “The United States is making greater strides toward socialism under Eisenhower than even under Roosevelt,” he enthused. By 1962, the man who had run for president on the Socialist ticket six times had concluded that “the difference between Democrats and Republicans is: Democrats have accepted the ideas of socialism cheerfully, while Republicans have accepted them reluctantly.”41 Just not by name. As Upton Sinclair put it in a 1951 letter to Thomas, “The American People will take Socialism, but they won’t take the label.”
We take the Big Lie instead. Euphemism. Official vocabulary. Language of ideology. The “PC” pact with the devil. The Big Lie as big con. The narrative of authority. How to stand athwart false history and yell “Stop!”? The answer finally seems clear. If once it was vitally important to shore up America’s bastions, something else is called for now. What’s needed is a full-scale assault on those bastions of unreality, those safe houses of secrets, all in a painful but restorative effort to upend the narratives of authority, to break open the conspiracies of silence, which have endured through too many lifetimes. Put another way, it’s time to avenge the victims and the truth tellers, the voiceless and the voices of one. It’s time to avenge the American betrayal of Liberty herself.
I have elsewhere drawn heavily on West's book. My post and her book are well worth your time.