Resisting the Authoritarian Impulse

April 17, 2020 By Mike Gonzalez

The old distinction between authoritarian and totalitarian regimes is as pertinent today as when Jeanne Kirkpatrick first drew it in a now-famous essay more than four decades ago. We can see its relevance in Sen. Bernie Sanders’ suspension of his presidential campaign and, at a deeper level, in an internal roiling struggle between both camps for the soul of America. The essay’s most salient point today is that authoritarians accept the pre-existing status quo, in fact often exist to bolster it by force, while totalitarians seek force to burn everything down and recreate society entirely. Kirkpatrick, a little-known academic when she wrote the essay in 1979, caught candidate Ronald Reagan’s eye with it and was propelled into his administration........

But we have also have home-grown authoritarians. There has been increased interest in positively using the coercive power of government to do the opposite: restore the status quo-ante or a romanticized perception of the past.

The Harvard law professor Adrian Vermeule has attracted a great deal of attention with an essay in the Atlantic in which he enunciated the rules of “common-good constitutionalism,” which he said should replace among conservatives the “originalism” they have championed for decades............To Read More