Don's Tuesday Column

          THE WAY I SEE IT   by Don Polson  Red Bluff Daily News   12/12/2017

                Utopianism, partner of despotism

The inherent and historic conflict, an existential struggle, between the individual and the state has always been with us—only more intensely so over the last 100 years since the rise of the Marxist/Leninist movement of international Communism. Mark Levin wrote a book in 2012, “Ameritopia: The Unmaking of America,” that documented that conflict going back to the earliest efforts at self-government, and continuing into the founding and recent struggles of our nation

Levin used an Abraham Lincoln quote, from an 1838 address in Springfield, Illinois, as well as some of President Ronald Reagan’s words, to illustrate the point that even in a nation designed and dedicated to the enshrining of individual liberty, enemies espousing the antithesis of freedom would spring up among our own people. Lincoln wisely and prophetically stated that such danger, “If it ever reach us it must spring up amongst us; it cannot come from abroad…As a nation of freemen we must live through all time, or die by suicide,” ushering our own destruction.

Likewise, Reagan admonished our nation that “freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction…It must be fought for, protected, and handed on…or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it was once like in the United States where men were free.”

A couple of local anecdotes illustrate that conundrum: When the news first came that a wolf with a tracking device crossed the border from Oregon into California, I remember saying that it was as predictable as heat in summer that that random event would eventually produce a regulatory reaction, even an overreach. “Habitat” and protection would be pronounced as a necessary requirement for said wolf and its eventual offspring, extending onto land privately owned and grazing acreage with private rights for ranchers.

The elimination of predators to secure the freedom to pursue ranching and cattle production is a right predating our state and the creation of America; it is as unalienable as the rights enshrined in our founding documents. No outside nation would be allowed to take over and negate such rights necessary for productive agricultural activity.

No foreign entity would be allowed to reach its controlling, dictatorial hand into Northern California and tell ranchers that they have no right to destroy wolves killing their cattle, and that they must inconvenience their operations and simply move entire herds away to safer, valley grazing. And yet, outside of the understandable “shoot, shovel and shut up” response of ranchers to preserve their valuable four-legged commodity, that is exactly what our own governmental overlords, with the same dictatorial powers, have imposed upon otherwise free people.

“But what is this ideology, this force, this authority that threatens us, and its destructiveness, which Reagan, Lincoln, and the Founders so feared? What kind of power both attracts a free people and destroys them? In Ameritopia, I explain that the heart of the problem is, in fact utopianism…the ideological and doctrinal foundation for statism.” (Levin)

We have friends that retired from their dairy operation and converted much of their grazing acreage into orchard production. They were belabored by regulators over just how much of their land could be planted, including details of acreage that must be left in riparian status due to seasonal drainage. No Canadian or Mexican officials would be allowed to impose such mandates on free Americans owning their own land and risking their own capital. Indeed, the very value of their land is thereby reduced, “taken” would be the term, due to the limitations.

Enter the election of Donald J. Trump and the reduction of agency mandates and picayune intrusions into their “pursuit of happiness.” They will be measurably richer by being able to plant additional trees, investing and expanding their crops on their own land. MAGA! “Make America Great Again” one farm, orchard, and ranch at a time. Now, start killing wolves.

You can see the tendrils of utopianism that justifies intrusive, burdensome, even religiously themed, state-control policies surrounding “sustainability,” “global warming/climate change” and universal health care. “Utopianism has long promoted the idea of a paradisiacal existence and advanced concepts of pseudo ‘ideal’ societies in which a heroic despot, a benevolent sovereign, or an enlightened oligarchy claims the ability and authority to provide for all the needs and fulfill all the wants of the individual—in exchange for his abject servitude.”

Levin traced this utopian tendency and fantasy through historical, philosophical writings like Plato’s Republic, Thomas More’s Utopia, Hobbes’s Leviathan, and Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto. “They are essential works that have in common soulless societies in which the individual is subsumed into a miasma of despotism—and each of them is a warning against utopian transformation in America and elsewhere.”

Our Founders, conversely, took inspiration from “philosophical pioneers John Locke and Charles de Montesquieu, who described truisms about the nature of man—liberty, rights, and life—that informed the Founders (and our documents).” Indeed, in the early 1800s, Alexis de Tocqueville’s prescient insights countenanced “democracy’s tendency to descend into a soft tyranny…drawing attention to the historical weaknesses of democratic institutions…and liberty.”

               All of this informs the conflicts of the last century, the progressive movement, the hypocrisies of leftist opposition morphing into support for WWII, the “Red Scare” of real communist infiltration, and the courageous patriotic military wars against communist aggression in Korea, Vietnam and elsewhere. The existential threat of communism was fought and defeated from Truman to Kennedy to Reagan, only to rise among us in current leftist militancy.