For thousands of years civilizations have been governed by a ruling class usually made up of warriors, landowners or priests.  The legitimacy of the ruling class was divine.  A possible exception was the Roman republic, which had a system of checks and balances that most of the time protected the plebe from the whims of the aristocracy.

The divine legitimacy of the ruling class was questioned, for the first time, by the philosophical ideas of the Enlightenment.  One of the main goals of this movement was to have the individual rights of all citizens recognized by the rulers.  The French and German Enlightenment either completely abandoned God or replaced transcendence with an abstract concept.  The English Enlightenment was different, as philosophers like John Locke considered that natural law had a divine origin.  Inalienable rights originated from the Creator and could not be altered by governments.  In contrast, to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the leading philosopher of the French Enlightenment, people initially lived in an idyllic natural state that was later altered by the greed and inequality generated by private property.  The natural state could only be restored by submitting the individual will to a general will, most likely embodied by the government.  The French revolution was influenced by the ideas of Rousseau; it was an attempt to overthrow the ruling class and redistribute their wealth that failed miserably, ending in self-genocide.  The revolution led by the Jacobins went through several stages: first it decimated the aristocracy, then the more moderate factions of the Girondists and Hébertists, then the rich in general. Finally, as the Great Terror unfolded, it turned against just about everybody, regardless of their social status.  A similar pattern will reemerge in the twentieth century revolutions.  In contrast, the American revolution succeeded in establishing a Constitutional republic that withstood the test of time until the nineteen sixties.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, the traditional ruling class was replaced with technocratic governments.  The old elite was only interested in perpetuating their power and managing the general affairs of the state.  In contrast, the new managerial class was much more ruthless and methodical.  Their ambition went further than any tyranny of the past; not content with preserving their power, they believed that they had a quasi-divine mandate to reshape society in their image.  The main purpose of their political activities was to find the optimal governing model that maximized their power and the ideology that legitimized it.  Religious myths were replaced with an ideological narrative.  As a direct consequence, the twentieth century has shown that, in the absence of an absolute reference, words can justify any atrocity.

A totalitarian ideology aims to impose a vision on society and transform the individual mindset to fit a collectivist pattern.  All ideologies pretend that they respond to a social necessity and that they are the end of history.  Ideologies are a means of transferring morality from the divine to a human level, thus shifting the emphasis from truth to power.  The growth of government in the past hundred years has created a bureaucracy that, like some feudal aristocracy, considers that their power is derived from their social status rather than the consensus of the governed.  The progressive ideology is only a tool that legitimizes the implementation of radical transformative policies by an oligarchic bureaucracy.  Progressives oppose the natural law that is central to the Declaration of Independence and believe that government should not be limited by enumerated powers.  The entire progressive rule, from Prohibition to open borders, has been a sequence of escalating social engineering experiments.  Permanent tinkering with the public education system has produced functional illiterates with the political worldview of Maoist guards.  Like apprentice sorcerers with an infantile mind, progressives like to play God while watching the peons squirm.  They are masters of propaganda, always blaming the failures of their social experiments on capitalism, Wall Street or climate change.After the collapse of Communism in 1989, the way was open for a progressive New World Order.  The oligarchic bureaucracy of the Deep State became part of a criminal global organization with supranational managerial power.  Ideologies competing with Progressivism like Fascism, National Socialism and Communism had ended in enslavement, genocide and war, so a new narrative was required.  The dangerous myth of the end of history was revived; this time, the future will belong to liberal democracy. The new narrative is Globalism, which is supposed to be the ultimate ideology that will save the world.  In reality, it is a mismatched combination of totalitarian ideologies, social movements, and the half-baked, pseudo-Marxist philosophical ideas of the Frankfurt school and Antonio Gramsci.  Socialism has been replaced by the socialization of perceived injustices.  Feminists fighting the white patriarchy for equal pay or free abortions cozy up to Islamists who carry out soon-to-be-legal female genital mutilation.  Unions fight for a legal status for illegal aliens even when that undercuts their wages.  The motto of this ideology might well be Wolves and Sheep Unite against the Patriarchy.  Globalism considers nation-states as obsolete entities that are responsible for war and genocides.  In the name of ill-defined concepts like diversity or multiculturalism, the demographics of Western nation-states have been irreversibly altered. We have fallen down the rabbit hole to a place where the Mad Hatter is not just mad but evil.  Social experiments continue in states where progressives have a clear majority. Misdemeanors and even some felonies are not punished anymore, thus creating the level of chaos and violence necessary for a radical change.  Illegals that break the law are protected by sanctuary cities, authorities can declare that your nine-year-old son is in fact a girl and some guy gets fifteen years in jail for burning the LGBTQ flag.  These are only the early signs of the onset of a totalitarian regime.  The connection between morality and the rule of law that is essential to the good workings of a Republic has been broken; the rule of law is gradually being replaced with ideological concepts like social justice, while morality has become just a cover for “humanitarian” propaganda.

To the politically engaged citizen it is important to understand that, because of demographic changes and public school indoctrination, representative democracy is becoming less and less effective.  Even on the rare occasion when a president gets elected without first being selected, the best he can hope for is to slow down an irreversible process.  Our society is becoming neo-feudal, consisting of the ruling class and their serfs, with the indigenous middle class gradually losing political influence.  A narrative that becomes a state ideology is all-encompassing, changing and altering everything from entertainment to education and the media.  The ideological tone is increasingly strident and hysterical, with any attempt at moderation gone out the window; it is as if a doomsday cult has monopolized any form of communication.  Capitalism is irredeemable, and the world will end in ten years if we don’t change our sinful consumerist ways.  Any minor potential danger is amplified in the media, threatening to end the world as we know it.   Propaganda is successful when millions of people believe in a narrative that is guaranteed to make their life miserable.  We do not have a self-defense mechanism against this permanent aggression, and it is possible that this time we will not be able to reverse the changes effected by apprentice sorcerers drunk on their power.