You’ll notice a pattern emerging here. When O’Rourke encounters something that makes him uncomfortable, his instinct is always the same: Send federal agents to stick guns in somebody’s face until he gets his way. (And if you think the IRS is something other than a gun in your face, try declining to pay your taxes for a few years.)
O’Rourke’s politics — and the politics of the Left more generally — are increasingly totalitarian. “Totalitarian” is not only a scary-sounding adjective. It is a word that actually means something, and what it describes is a theory of government that recognizes no sphere of truly private life, no life outside the state — one that sees the scope of the state as total, hence the term.
Totalitarianism is in fashion on the Left. And so the Democrats have turned from such familiar proposals as health-care subsidies for the poor to the abolition of private health insurance, a measure endorsed by Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, among others. Democrats, no longer content to impose confiscatory taxes on income, now propose — here again, Sanders and Warren stand together — to seize Americans’ savings, confiscating their property rather than merely levying their income. If you don’t like that, you can organize a political campaign against it — maybe, if the Democrats will let you. But keep in mind that Democrats today also hold as an article of faith that the federal government should have the power to prohibit the distribution of videos critical of Democratic presidential candidates, which is what the Citizens United case was all about.
https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/10/orourkes-america/
O’Rourke’s politics — and the politics of the Left more generally — are increasingly totalitarian. “Totalitarian” is not only a scary-sounding adjective. It is a word that actually means something, and what it describes is a theory of government that recognizes no sphere of truly private life, no life outside the state — one that sees the scope of the state as total, hence the term.
Totalitarianism is in fashion on the Left. And so the Democrats have turned from such familiar proposals as health-care subsidies for the poor to the abolition of private health insurance, a measure endorsed by Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, among others. Democrats, no longer content to impose confiscatory taxes on income, now propose — here again, Sanders and Warren stand together — to seize Americans’ savings, confiscating their property rather than merely levying their income. If you don’t like that, you can organize a political campaign against it — maybe, if the Democrats will let you. But keep in mind that Democrats today also hold as an article of faith that the federal government should have the power to prohibit the distribution of videos critical of Democratic presidential candidates, which is what the Citizens United case was all about.
https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/10/orourkes-america/