Summum Bonum

Read all of this thoughtful post from the Belmont Club (commenting and expanding on a Chicago Boyz post by Shannon Love) on how the arrogance and contempt of the Left in Britain, and recent revelations about how cynical the Labor Party’s immigration policy really was, have driven a fifth of the British electorate into approval of the British National Party, which is not really a conservative party as the U.S. understands it, but truly fascist.

Among the shrewd observations here:

“What the Left and Fascism share is a belief in the transformative power of the state. Both regard government as the “high ground” of society and not, as some Americans still believe, simply a necessary evil. It is a prize to be seized by main force; the castle to be stormed.”

“Just as Global Warming can be understood at one level as an attempt to bring nature into the purview of politics, it is impossible to understand the Left’s fixation with abortion except as a sacramental affirmation of the state’s power over man. The strident insistence on abortion on demand goes way beyond any conceivable need to prevent backroom abortions, or even an affirmation of a woman’s right to choose. It is really an absolute display of the power of politics over life. Abortion’s principal utility is as a stake driven through the heart of the notion of human sacredness, which once performed, ought to prevent its revival entirely.”

The central point of this post is that once the individual has been desacralized and the state exalted as the supreme authority with no recourse to transcendent values, it’s a very short step from the kind of oppressive nanny-state Britons (and many European countries) now enjoy to a straight-up fascist state. Very little in the actual machinery of the government will have to change.

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