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Over the last half-century, the so-called “Progressive” Left has spread its tentacles throughout innumerable nongovernmental organizations, the federal, state, and local governments themselves, public and many private schools, the universities, the media, the corporate world . . . the list goes on and on. Whether we are looking at Yale University, ABC News, the Washington Post, the FBI, the CIA, the highest-ranking generals and admirals in the military, the Department of Education, the teachers’ unions, we find them all infested with far-left progressives. That’s not to say that each and every FBI agent is a leftist — far from it — but the leadership of the aforementioned organizations and in certain (but not all) instances the supporting staff are leftist Democrats.

It’s fashionable in Republican and conservative circles to call the Progressive Left “Marxist,” “communist” or “fascist,” but in truth, the Progressive Left is not any of these. Numerous billionaires are far left. A true Marxist would be dreaming up plans to strip them of their wealth, but the Progressive Left that exploded in power and influence beginning in the Obama Administration has absolutely no intention of doing that. That’s why the tycoon Governor Pritzker of Illinois can continue to be a Democrat and pretend he cares about the average guy. The Progressive Left is more oligarchic than it is Marxist or Communist.

Make no mistake about it, the Progressive Left is a huge danger to our liberty. Its principal goal is the permanent seizure of power. All of the Progressive Left’s major policies are pointed specifically in that direction. Packing the Supreme Court so the Left can seize total control of the Third Branch of government. Making Puerto Rico and Washington, D.C. states so the Left can gain four more Senate seats and achieve a permanent majority in the Senate. Ending the Senate’s filibuster rule. Abolishing the Electoral College. Allowing millions of illegal aliens to vote. Giving the right to vote back to felons.

The Progressive Left’s other major (and highly disguised) policy is to impoverish America’s working and middle classes so that they are dependent on the government. A person who can make a good living without help from the government (think of Thomas Jefferson’s yeoman farmer and the present-day successful small businessman) is despised by the Left because they cannot control him or her. The Green New Deal is intended to replace fossil fuels with far less efficient sources of energy generation so that utility prices can be hugely increased, thereby making it more difficult for the average guy to keep his family housed and fed.

The Progressive Left is not Marxist, communist, or fascist. It is Orwellian. Its aims are best exemplified by the comments of Inner Party member O’Brien in George Orwell’s novel “1984”: “The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power . . . Power is not a means, it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. . . . If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face — forever.”

Undoubtedly, in this late summer of 2024 the United States is still a long way from the absolute tyranny depicted in Orwell’s “1984” and his novel “Animal Farm.” But the Progressive Left is doing everything in its power to move the United States in that direction and has achieved notable successes, as shown below. Let’s review them one by one.

All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others. In “Animal Farm,” the farm animals boot out the human owners and establish a kind of animal democracy where all animals are equal. Gradually, the pigs take over and begin to substitute a new rule that although all the animals are equal, some are more equal than others (namely, the pigs).

In the United States today, we have “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion,” in which members of certain identity groups are given special rights and privileges above and beyond those possessed by the rest of the populace. Using the word “diversity” in this context is a big lie because only certain identity groups count when it comes to “diversity.” Universities with DEI departments have faculties where Republicans or conservatives are either scarce or nowhere to be found. Where is the diversity there? To take another example, if you happen to be an Italian-American or an Irish American or a White Anglo-Saxon Protestant, forget about “diversity” in your case — you don’t qualify. When was the last time the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division opened an investigation into the number of Italian-Americans or Polish-Americans (or Jews or Catholics or Presbyterians) in a police department or on corporate director boards? Clearly, in 21st century America some animals are more equal than others.

Newspeak. Oceania, the absolute dictatorship of Big Brother in Orwell’s “1984,” devotes resources to developing a new language named “Newspeak.” Newspeak is strongly related to standard English (known as “Oldspeak”) but has features designed to suppress dissent, advance Party causes and to generally force people into thinking the way the Party wants them to think. For example, the Newspeak word “thoughtcrime” brings to people’s attention that even thinking the wrong way is a crime.

The Progressive Left has begun taking baby steps in this direction. A prime example is the substitution of “enslaved people” for “slaves.” This substitution now abounds in academic journals and articles. I was taught in English class never to use two words when one word would do. So why are college professors and social justice warriors now using “enslaved people”? It’s obvious, isn’t it? “Enslaved people” emphasizes victimization, which is a key element of the Left’s narrative.

As another example of Newspeak in 21st century America, “gender-affirming care” has come to mean in many cases castration for males and radical mastectomies for women. Note how this paves the way for deluded parents to tell their confidantes that their psychologically-disturbed son received “gender-affirming care.” It’s so much easier to say that than to say, “my troubled son was castrated last week at the hospital.”

The Use of Opposite Meanings. In Orwell’s fictional state of Oceania, government ministries include the “Ministry of Love” and the “Ministry of Truth.” In point of fact, what goes on in these ministries is the diametrical opposite of what is implied by their names. The Ministry of Love is where political opponents of the regime are tortured. The Ministry of Truth is a giant propaganda machine where inconvenient facts from the past are made to disappear (“memory-holed”) and where lies about the current state of affairs are rampant and all-encompassing. The Party’s slogans are also heavily loaded with opposite meaning: “War is Peace.” “Freedom is Slavery.”

In 21st century America, we have “Planned Parenthood.” This organization has virtually nothing to do with parenthood. Its main mission is non-parenthood. A more accurate name for Planned Parenthood would be Planned Non-parenthood. It currently operates hundreds of Death Camps for the Unborn.

Memory-Holing the Past. The Party’s slogan in “1984” is “who controls the past, controls the future; who controls the present controls the past.” This is the backdrop for a scene in the novel where Winston, the main character, is given the job of erasing for all eternity Big Brother’s past praise of a party functionary who later became persona non grata and was liquidated. We find a parallel in late summer 2024, where the mainstream media is now peddling the obvious lie that Kamala Harris was never really the “Border Czar” under Biden. (Note, however, that Donald Trump may have it right that she was really the “Invasion Czar” more than the “Border Czar.”). We find another parallel in the Left’s desperate efforts to prevent the public from learning about Kamala’s previous proposals to ban fracking, ban private health insurance, and replace it with Medicare-For-All, mandatory government repurchase of firearms, and other pet proposals of the Loony Left.

Forcing the Populace to Believe Obvious Lies. To really gain power over people, it’s essential to force them to renounce their true beliefs and to agree that obvious lies are actually the truth. We see this in “1984” where O’Brien holds up four fingers and asks Winston, who is tied up hand and foot to a torture machine, how many fingers he is holding up. Winston says “four” and is tortured. Suspecting that O’Brien wants him to say “five”, he says five and is tortured again. Finally, desperate to avoid any additional torture, Winston realizes that the correct answer is “whatever you want it to be.”

We see a similar, although less physically painful, pattern in 21st-century America when it comes to transgender issues. The Progressive Left wants us to believe that a biological man can actually become a woman and therefore must be treated by all of society as a woman. So does a man who decides to transition to a woman get all of his chromosomes to change from XY to XX? No. Does such a man acquire the ability to give birth to a child? No. Does such a man acquire a female pelvic and hip structure (for instance, wide hips and a uterus)? No. Can he change the pitch of his voice from lower to higher? No. Essentially, all that happens is that a biological man undergoing a surgical transition doesn’t become a woman but instead becomes a mutilated man. Yet we are supposed to believe the lie that he’s now a woman. And if we don’t, then we are characterized as “transphobic,” bigoted and cruel. Bonus Question: if a biological man decides to become a rhinoceros, does all of society have to treat him as a rhinoceros?

Thoughtcrime. In Oceania, to think even for a moment that Big Brother is a bad guy constitutes “thoughtcrime.” In 21st-century America, “hate crime” consists of (1) a criminal act such as murder or assault, and (2) certain kinds of thoughts internal to the perpetrator’s mind, such as a desire to hurt the victim on account of his race or other characteristics. Seen in this light, “hate crime” is, at least in part, thoughtcrime.

Persecution of Political Opponents. In “1984”, opponents of the Party were arrested, incarcerated in the Ministry of Love, and hideously tortured. In 21st-century America, opponents of the Progressive Left — ranging from Donald Trump to people praying outside abortion clinics— are arrested, subjected to political show trials and, if convicted, sentenced to fine or prison.

The Use of Intoxicants to Distract the Populace From Disastrous Government Policies. In “1984”, all or almost all goods and commodities are in short supply except one: Victory Gin. Victory Gin is plentiful, cheap, and most likely heavily subsidized. During the 2020-2022 Chinese coronavirus Plandemic, governors in Progressive Left states closed churches, synagogues, and gyms but kept the liquor stores open.

A new book underlines the desperate straits of the nation qua nation.

The Unprotected Class: How Anti-White Racism Is Tearing America Apart, Jeremy Carl, Regnery, 256 pages.

The latter decades of the Ottoman empire are occasionally held up as a golden age of pluralism and tolerance; in some respects, they were, particularly after the British put the kibosh on the lion’s share of the Arab slave trade. The empire’s non-Turkish, non-Muslim populations were organized into millets, or “nations,” governed by the laws particular to their religious and national groups. Armenians, Syrian Christians, Greek Orthodox, a variety of Jews, Arab Catholics—all were able to practice their religions and participate in public life with relative impunity under their own leaders, who answered to the sovereign of the sublime House of Osman, sultan of sultans, khan of khans, kalif, padishah, etc., who generally had more pressing concerns than micromanaging the affairs of the millets.

The problem was that the Ottoman state didn’t end up doing the things we expect states to do very well at all. Inefficient revenue-collection techniques and the marginalization of the Silk Road as a central trade route sent the fisc into a long period of decline. The farther-flung polities notionally under the suzerainty of the Sublime Porte did more or less whatever they wanted, including committing various violations of the rights of the millets. (The Iraqi Jewish Sassoons, the great trading dynasty of the 19th century, fled Baghdad for British India because of the depredations of the Mamluks, who were so independent as to wage occasional wars on the central government in Istanbul.) Various Western powers exploited the independence of the millets to meddle in Ottoman internal affairs under the guise of “protection.” This administrative and fiscal chaos meant that the sultan had difficulty doing things like fielding a modern army, which became a serious, even thematic weakness in the First World War.

The aftermath is well known: the last-ditch Ottoman efforts to modernize and homogenize, which featured what are characterized as the first modern genocides; and the failure of those efforts, which led to the collapse of the empire. The secularism, nationalism, and official monoculturalism of the modern Republic of Turkey, particularly the enforcement of Turkish language use irrespective of ethnic background, were ultimately a reaction to the failure of the millet system. The unified nation-state is the way we moderns have balanced the particular and the universal in human society. It hasn’t been perfect, but it has worked.

In one of the characteristic backwards steps from more sophisticated to less sophisticated political systems in the past 60 years, the Western world has moved away from nationalism and embraced milletization, particularly in the face of mass immigration. Western milletization has some peculiar twists, though. First, it is everywhere inflected through the peculiarities of American racial dynamics, even in places where those dynamics are almost unintelligible. (Why were there Black Lives Matter marches in Sweden, where there is no history of African slavery and blacks make up less than 1 percent of the population?) Second, the institutions of the nation are themselves identified with “whiteness,” which is denigrated, but those institutions are then expected to be used to dole out compensatory privileges to historically disfavored millets.

Jeremy Carl, a senior fellow at the Claremont Institute, has addressed the dangerous oddities of the American millet system in The Unprotected Class: How Anti-White Racism Is Tearing America Apart. His argument is that, thanks to the civil rights regime as codified in 1964, America has undergone milletization that is totalitarian—it affects every aspect of public life—and incomplete—as applied, it does not address protections for the declining share of the population that is identified as “white.” His remedies focus on dismantling the legal structures of affirmative action and disparate impact.

It is not a comfortable book to read, but it is important. The central contradiction in our system—treating the characteristics of the American nation, from the Constitution to the English language, as manifestations of “whiteness,” and the consequent direction of institutional power inward against the institutions themselves—threatens the very substance of our shared public life. (The traders in identity politics agree with George Lincoln Rockwell that America is a white nation—they just think that is a bad thing, and use it as cover for attacking America itself.) Carl argues that, while a future in which Americans’ primary identification as American is desirable, the slide toward such conspicuous multicultural success stories as South Africa cannot be arrested so long as whites are a disfavored class and America itself is identified with that disfavor: “As people who, for better or worse, are soon to be just another patch in the American quilt, whites need to be able to speak up unapologetically for their own rights…. If we do not correct the course we are on, I fear we are headed for the civil strife and racial violence that has characterized so many other multiracial countries over the centuries, including, in the past, our own.”

Carl is fundamentally arguing for steps toward renewed national unity, rather than for white identity politics as an end per se: “That I am criticizing the way America has sacralized diversity does not mean I hate the diverse groups of people who call themselves Americans. It means I hate the social dynamics we are creating through anti-white discrimination, unfettered immigration, and a declining focus on cultural assimilation.” This is a worthy goal, but the very problems he identifies make it doubtful that this disclaimer will save him from the usual accusations. They also make implementing solutions difficult. The traders in identity politics, even when they are in power, no longer exactly think of themselves as part of the American body politic; if enough people follow them, there won’t be an American body politic left.

“Being a nation is a baffling thing; for it is wholly subjective,” Enoch Powell, himself a strenuous opponent of the color bar and race-based disparity of legal rights and privileges, wrote, “they are a nation who think they are a nation: there is no other definition.” It may be too late for our shared subjectivity.

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This article was published by The American Conservative and is reproduced with permission.