Totalitarian Ideologies 101

 

While we were looking the other way, it seemed, a new version of an old, toxic ideology drifted out of certain academic circles in Europe and into faculty lounges on this side of the Atlantic. In due course, it spread from the universities to K-12 schools. Now, a couple of generations later, candidates infected with the contagion have, with alarming frequency, been seeking and winning elections to municipal and state offices as well as the Congress of the United States.

Like the shapeshifters of science fiction, the scourge of communism has returned in a new and possibly more virulent guise, emphasizing race and gender rather than class. The ultimate goal remains the same—totalitarian control, this time around by the “woke” in place of the vanguard of the proletariat.

The equivalents of Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin are with us today, in the committees of the Democratic Socialists of America and among the acolytes of Zohran Mamdani, biding their time. Given the clear and present danger, how can we protect ourselves and preserve our republic? And nothing less is at stake.

One thing we can and should do is inoculate the next generation against the contagion. Teaching civics is a good first step. But, in addition, every high school and college student should be required to take a course on totalitarian ideologies so they can recognize one when they see it.

Such a course would isolate the elements common to these ideologies and put them under a figurative microscope. Instructors today rely on what’s called a “teaching module.” I offer the following as a preliminary “teaching module” for Totalitarian Ideologies 101.

My “module” starts with some general considerations about human nature:

1. Human beings are capable of the most magnanimous acts of generosity and benevolence, as well as the most horrendous displays of malevolence and depravity. The full spectrum of behavior is evident in all peoples and societies known to us.

2. Human beings will say anything and believe anything. What wasn’t said or believed yesterday may not only be postulated today but celebrated in some quarters tomorrow. If you doubt this, just look around and listen.

3. Human beings can be made to believe anything. The process has been documented by researchers since the “brainwashing” episodes of the Korean War. It consists of periods of tension and threat alternating with intervals of relaxation and reward. Plus constant repetition of dogma. It can take place just as effectively in a classroom as in a P.O.W. camp.

4. We think we control our beliefs, but in reality, our beliefs control us. If you believe deeply enough that your gender identity doesn’t align with the body you were born with, you may be driven to mutilate your own flesh to render it more amenable to your conceptions.

With this background, students can more easily grasp the nature of totalitarian ideologies:

1. Simple, Irrefutable Beliefs

Totalitarian ideologies typically divide a complex world into two simple factions: a malevolent, controlling group and the suffering victims. All the negative aspects of human behavior are attributed to the victimizers. Victims are considered fundamentally just and noble. These beliefs are irrefutable, because if you question them, you will be consigned to the malevolent group, and your views will be discounted.

2. Promise of Utopia

Totalitarian ideologies are expressed in intellectual terms to give what George Orwell called “the appearance of solidity to pure wind.” They also carry an emotional appeal. This is because they are usually grounded in authentic grievances and propound solutions to every social ill. In other words, they promise utopia.

3. Blame and Persecution

The issues may differ, but the path to utopia is always the same: eradicating the designated oppressors. This is how belief controls behavior. If you seriously believe that group X, Y, or Z is the source of all the evil in the world, your belief compels you to root them out.

4. Concentration of Power

To achieve a condition of harmony and grace, it then becomes necessary to concentrate power in the hands of the eliminators. Through the requisite concentration of power, totalitarian ideologies inevitably produce tyranny.

5. The Means Displace the Ends

The effort to eradicate the supposed oppressors ironically winds up inflicting more cruelty and brutality on otherwise innocent parties than before the totalitarians took over. An extraordinary amount of resources are simultaneously allocated to make people believe the beliefs that justify and sustain the revolutionary mayhem. Propaganda substitutes for news. Indoctrination (via tension, threat, reward, and repetition) substitutes for education. Maintaining the new world order becomes the new measure of success, rather than practical and effective solutions to the original problems.

6. The Illusion of Perfecting Humanity

Greed, envy, anger, and resentment are assumed to be engendered in suffering humanity by the social structures imposed by the ruling cohort. The purported objective of the new world order is to create a new human being, a creature purified of negative characteristics. This effort always fails, because you can turn society upside down, but you can’t alter human nature. No matter how many assumed oppressors you eliminate and no matter how you configure the governing institutions, you will be stuck with human beings. And human beings will continue to act like human beings, manifesting the spectrum of behavior described above.

By fleshing out this teaching module, designing a curriculum, and getting it into classrooms, the U.S. Department of Education can perform a vital function for truth, justice, and the American way. It can deny the communists the next generation.

To follow through, the Secretary of Education may have to threaten recalcitrant colleges and school districts with the loss of all federal funding. Considering what comes out of schools of education these days, she may also have to call for volunteers to teach the course.

by Sheldon Bart at americanthinker.com on August 19, 2026

Not Winning? Just Change the Rules

 

What binds the new Democratic Party to the new Democratic Socialists is a set of shared issues and values. That is, the radicalism of the Democrats in the age of Trump Derangement Syndrome — lawfare, de-balloting, the Mar-a-Lago raid, and calls to destroy the Electoral College, the nine-justice Supreme Court, and the filibuster — helped give birth to the socialists.

But the overriding commonality among those on the new Left is that if they do not get their way, they blame the "system." Then they seek to change the rules, no matter how hallowed those laws and conventions may have been or how much they themselves benefited from them in the past.

When the Left lost the White House, Congress, and, for the most part, the Supreme Court, it began clamoring to change the system. For left-wing Democrats, that angst also translated into calls to bring in two new blue states, weaponize the FBI and DOJ, ally with social media to suppress the news, and spy on congressional representatives. All the socialists and communists did was up the ante in destroying norms by calling for the end of the presidency, the Senate, the border, the police, and the Pentagon.

By 2021, it was time to destroy the southern border and welcome in some 10 million illegal immigrants — without audits, English proficiency, health checks, or the ability to support themselves.

Had Kamala Harris been elected in 2024, we would have had another four years and another five million illegal aliens. And perhaps America would have gone from 50 million foreign-born residents to 60 million, or about 18 percent of the population.

In this regard, the Left sees California as our most liberal — and most ideal — state and perhaps concludes that the reason is that 28 percent of its resident population is now foreign-born, with the majority arriving with vast needs for health, education, housing, and food subsidies.

Today, 50 percent of all births in California are paid for by Medi-Cal, which serves 40 percent of the population. When second-generation immigrants are added to the foreign-born population, the two groups together comprise roughly 45 percent of California's current population. This demographic transformation is one of the most profound in American history and came at a time when traditional civic education stressing assimilation, acculturation, integration, and knowledge of American traditions, history, and values was nearly nonexistent in California public schools.

So one way of achieving radical change was to alter the demography and welcome as many immigrants as possible who, in the first or second generation, might follow the examples of Reps. Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, or Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed.

They represent an entirely new sort of immigrant who arrives — or is born to immigrant parents — with both complaints against and dependence on their host country. They can see only the sins of America, never the catastrophes of their homeland that drove them or their parents here. This strange demand to change the rules whenever they do not bode well for angry and aggrieved parties permeates every possible manifestation of the Left, but is especially egregious when demanded by immigrants who came originally as uninvited guests but almost immediately damned their magnanimous host.

It is strange for so many new immigrants to act on an elemental desire to reach America — only on arrival to profess that it is full of toxic, sinful people, living and dead. Yet the damned hosts have inexplicably welcomed total strangers like themselves, and have allowed them to share in the freedom, security, and prosperity created by the dead whom the newcomers nonetheless endlessly slander and smear.

If particular minorities statistically did not do as well on the SAT as Asians and whites did on average, the solution was certainly not SAT tutorials in the inner city or K-12 SAT outreach, demands for tougher classes in grammar, math, and analytics, or a return to the melting pot rather than the current salad-bowl tribalist model.

Instead, after the George Floyd riots, the call went out to abolish the SAT entirely — as if there had never been a purpose behind its creation. In fact, merit-based SAT exams were designed in the 1920s and 1930s to allow anyone, regardless of race, gender, region, or class, to enter college through meritorious performance on the tests — and, in particular, to overcome old-boy insider preferences and regional and ethnic prejudices.

Yet when the SAT was mostly abolished for four or five years, higher education thought it had solved the problem of minority underrepresentation.

In fact, its racialist war on standards only magnified its dilemmas. The SAT had once informed admissions officers not only about applicants' qualifications but also whether admitted students could do the work once enrolled.

But soon liberal professors learned that many of the newly admitted cohorts lacked the K-12 training necessary to do customary university coursework. Yet if professors maintained their regular courses, requirements, and grading, they might soon be labeled racists once particular minorities were shown to do less well than Asians and whites.

So universities inflated grades. They introduced new remedial and gut courses. And they reduced the required coursework. But again, racialism is never a solution to problems. Instead, it is a catalyst that fuels them — as we have seen with the new notion that plagiarism is not an actionable offense when the culprit can plead victim status, whether a former president of Harvard or a current professor at Cambridge. But there are ancient laws and norms that insist intellectual theft is a crime and should be punished, not rewarded or ignored.

Soon employers noticed that the reading, writing, and analytical skills of graduates from prestigious schools were proving dismal. Alumni complained both that the reputations of their almae matres were in decline and resting on the fumes of the past and that their own children, who had prepared diligently to ensure suitably competitive grades and SAT scores for admission, were being rejected solely on the basis of their race.

The Left likewise pushed for lower physical standards for the military's ground-combat brigades so that women, on average far less strong than their male counterparts, could join elite units. Again, the same ignorance and arrogance were evident. Physical standards were based on a century of combat experience in which morale, group discipline, and unit success rested on ensuring that all soldiers achieved a common level of physical strength and endurance.

This neo-Marxist-driven demand to mandate equality — albeit now substituting racial and gender consciousness for class consciousness — requires the destruction of established traditions, laws, and norms. The radical Left's key agendas — defunding the police, destroying the border, granting mass amnesties to illegal aliens, subsidizing wind and solar energy while waging a war on fossil fuels, and expanding racial essentialism in hiring and admissions — have never won more than 30 to 40 percent support among the general public. Yet the solution was not to ask why, and then to reflect, reboot, and recalibrate in order to discover how the Left had lost public support.

Instead, the solution was to alter or destroy the system that had denied them power.

So communists, socialists, and radical Democrats prefer moving the goalposts. When equality of opportunity was largely achieved, next they demanded a mandated equality of outcome.

With the ascendancy of a large, affluent middle class, the Left, in its eternal search for a victimized class, pivoted and replaced class oppression with racial victimization.

And when there were not yet enough victimized minorities to guarantee a majority constituency of the aggrieved, the Left redefined the victimized to include anyone who was not a white heterosexual male, regardless of income and privilege.

And when the people finally tired of the leftists' totalitarian social engineering, the Left sought to change the system by radically altering the way Americans vote, the manner in which government is formed and functions, and, finally, the very demography of America.

The common denominator? Human nature revolts at forced statism, coercive redistribution, and government-mandated equality of results. It instead yearns for liberty and freedom.

No matter how much deception, camouflage, or brainwashing is employed, statism, socialism, and communism can never sustain public support. Throughout history, the Left has therefore begun by changing the rules and altering the demography — if not initially through changes to election rules, bureaucratic fiat, and biased court orders, then eventually through sheer violence.

by Victor Davis Hanson at townhall.com on August 13, 2026

The Shifting Voting Dynamic

 

Here’s my minority position – I think Republicans are set to do surprisingly well in the 2026 midterms and very, very well in 2028. Oh, I don’t put it beyond the Republicans to screw up any advantage they’ve been handed. Republicans have the uncanny ability to squander a good thing, but what the Democrats are handing over is pure electoral gold. If you look at the relative positioning of both parties in terms of future electoral success, there is zero question that the Republican Party is much better situated to begin a lengthy sojourn in power. The Democrats have walked themselves into a minefield, and they’ve got no map.

Let’s take a look at a few of these land mines. Some of them are obvious, some a lot less so. Will they all fully manifest by 2028? No, some will arise in later cycles. What’s important to remember is that even if the Democrats were aware of them, there’s not a lot they can do about them. One of the problems with the Democrats is that, ironically, the liberals are absolutely resistant to change; they not only don’t want to do it, but they can’t do it. They’ve confused their ideology with a religion, limiting the ability of Democrat politicians to exercise a key tool in any effective politician's toolbox – the flexibility to do a 180 on their most deeply-held beliefs when it makes sense at election time.

The first land mine is an obvious one, but that’s not going to stop them from stomping on it. The Democrats are going harder and harder left. Right now, the success of the socialist insurgents has been limited to deep blue districts. Where they try to do it in more purple areas, they have more mixed success. In Virginia, they managed to elect a sociopath as AG who wants to kill the kids of Republicans to teach them to be good people. It didn’t work in Maine, though; Herr Platner got punted after he was accused of going a rape too far.

Normal Americans don’t like the weird stuff Democrats are getting into. There’s the transsexual stuff, of course. Normal Americans are getting tired of that freak show, but Democrats are doubling and tripling down on it. It’s become a litmus test for them, depriving them of crucial flexibility. They need to reach out to normal people who don’t think some dude should be sporting his turgid pride as he walks through a girl’s locker room. But also, there’s their whole thing about criminals. Normal people are against being murdered. Democrats are going to get painted as enabling the worst of social pathologies, just like they did in the 70s, which helped Ronald Reagan and the GOP take over until Bill Clinton came along and was able to lead a Democrat Party back to at least a semblance of sanity.

There’s a procedural land mine that President Trump has been talking about for years – election fraud. Fraud is a huge part of how they win. It is not going to go away in one fell swoop – the GOP simps are too weak to pass the SAVE Act – but it’s going to be curbed over time. Take voter ID – it is unsustainable for the Democrats to keep to the 20 side of an 80/20 issue forever. Nor can Democrat judges sitting in the Tatooine Federal District Court protect the fraud forever. Between the reforms Trump can impose (it looks like his mail-in voting postal regulations are going into effect), the revelations from the multiple investigations, and the reputational damage to Democrats defending shady practices (is California still counting from last June?), we’re going to end a lot of the scams and run down their reputations as the die on the hill of protecting the remaining grifts.

Another land mine is the swap out at the top of the Democrats’ racial hierarchy. Democrats have always been about constituencies, knitting them together to form a majority. But it’s always in flux. The white working class used to be a big piece of the puzzle, and the Democrats dumped them. In the last few cycles, Democrats have lost their headlock on Hispanics, who don’t appreciate weirdness, and many of whom have personal experience with communism. There’s a lot of talk about how Dems grabbed the affluent college-educated whites who used to be Republican voters, and that’s true, to an extent. But a lot of these are wine women, particularly single ones and including young ones, and they’re psychotic and will further alienate normal people (married women still prefer Republicans).

But the big problem for Democrats is their biggest and most loyal constituency, blacks. We’re already seeing the fallout in Texas, where the darling of the faculty/Chardonnay set, heretical imp James Talarico, defeated noted particle physicist Jasmine Crockett in the Senate primary. Well, Jazzy C and black Texans aren’t taking that very well. They believe, not without merit, that they have been ripped off. And they have been. Democrats take blacks for granted, which is the fault of blacks because they’ve allowed themselves, until now, to be taken for granted. But a black woman just roasted Talarico at one of his rallies, bringing this to a head. He’s already a problem because, well, blacks tend to be religious, and this guy is a blasphemous demon in human form who spreads satanic lies that will lead the unwary to eternal damnation. Black folk aren’t down with that. And it’s only going to get worse for the Democrats because blacks across the country are going to demand their share of the power, power that the ascendant leftists want for themselves.

There is also the 2030 census, which will likely put the House out of reach of Democrats for a decade. Democrat failure is driving people from blue states to red states. The coming redistricting, along with the intermittent demonstrations of GOP manhood via gerrymandering, are going to crush the Dems. And if we go for the big enchilada, banning the counting of illegal aliens in the census, the Dems are screwed.

There is another land mine, the baby bomb. Democrats aren’t breeding like conservatives. A lot of them are single women who have no intention of settling down and having children; when they do get knocked up, abortion remains readily available in blue states, and they make use of it. This blends with another problem for the Democrats, which is that a lot of their boomer base is aging out. If you recall those rallies for the Nazi tattoo guy, behind him on stage were always a bunch of gray crones who all looked like Billy Jack’s girlfriend. They’re not going to be around that much longer, and they are some of the Dems’ most devoted voters. Gen X is much more conservative; we have the advantage of being around for another couple of decades.

And there are other effects that come from Democrats not reproducing, besides upping the average IQ and attractiveness of Americans. The birth dearth means fewer kids being indoctrinated in grade schools and colleges. Academia is where the Democrats not only found places for their members to get paid but gave them a chance to corrupt our youth. But fewer kids mean fewer unionized teachers paying union dues, while a lot of colleges are going away in the bankruptcy. That's fewer dollars and fewer worker bees making mischief. Combined with new technology that is making old education methods obsolete, as well as cost considerations and conservative attention that is going to work to undermine the leftist hold on these institutions, academia writ large is going to stop being so influential. Democrats have become fatally over-invested in their own version of the buggy whip industry.

Immigration is going to continue to be a huge problem for the Democrats because they’re not going to be able to import a brand-new electorate from the Third World to make into welfare clients and electoral serfs. Deportations are ongoing, but the Republican goal isn’t to drag them all out of the country. It’s to drive them all out of the country. Initiatives like Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent leaning on the banks and other industries not to do business with them, as well as other reforms that make it unbearable to live here as an illegal, are going to make them pack up and go home in numbers that dwarf what ICE is doing. With the open door at the border slammed shut, the only way to generate more of these people is through birthright citizenship, and the recent Supreme Court decision, while not overturning it, began a discussion that’s inevitably going to lead to reforms that limit it.

Here are some other things that the Democrats might find blow them up. The mainstream media may dismiss the government handout fraud stuff that we’ve been seeing, but fraud resonates. From California’s high-speed rail that’s cost billions of dollars and built about 15 inches of track, to massive Somali learning center schemes, to corrupt USAID payoffs to leftist NGOs and beyond, the crackdown is both going to starve the Democrats of money looted from the treasury and laundered into the pockets of the left and closely associated Democrats with fraud in the minds of the voters.

Then there’s something they really can blame on the Jews. The Dems will have to deal with Jews’ sense of self-preservation as the Democrats fully embrace their new Hamas constituency and work to ensure Israel and the Israelis are annihilated. That’s not putting it too harshly – if you’re Jewish, you can’t take any threat too seriously, and this is a threat. Jewish Democrats are enormous donors to the Democrat Party, and that flow of dollars is going to shrink to a trickle that’s not going to be made up by a bunch of new Dems just imported from Goatbangistan. The money might not go to Republicans – that’s a bridge too far for a lot of liberal Jews – but it isn’t going to the Palisimpian Democrats. We’ve seen massive shortfalls in Democrat donations this cycle, and that was before half of the House Democrat caucus voted to render Israel defenseless in the face of the psychopaths who committed the October 7th attacks.

Here’s another ka-boom that’s coming that only a few people are talking about right now. Cuba is about to go under. The clock is ticking, and the commie dictatorship has maybe got a year or so left. Here’s the Dems’ problem. The Dirección de Inteligencia (DI) has spent over 60 years infiltrating the left in the United States. Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass went to Havana and trained with these communist bastards, but there are a lot more big names on the left of the party who are tied in with Cuban intelligence. Cuba is going to fall; Marco Rubio has that as one of his 87 jobs.

And when that grotesque regime’s collapse accelerates, a lot of DI officials are going to want to ensure that they don’t swing from a lamppost or worse. I married a Cuban – they’re not a forgiving people, and they’re going to make the people who oppressed them pay. So, if you’re a high-ranking DI officer, you’re going to want to make American intelligence an offer it can’t refuse to save your worthless hide, and that means trading stolen records on the DI’s intelligence network in the United States that includes prominent Democrats. That’s going to happen, and it’s going to be earth-shattering. People throw the word “treason” around a lot, but working with the communists to subvert the United States is literally treason, and it’s been happening. Do not expect the Trump administration to forgive and forget, and even the regime media is going to be unable to hide the indictments. The Democrats will, correctly, be painted as the party of traitors.

Let’s also not forget the collapse of captured institutions. We mentioned academia’s decline, but look at the mainstream media and Hollywood. Both are going away. Moreover, the decades of corporate footsie with Democrats will end as the business world realizes that the DSA types can’t be bought off like the old school Pelosi Dems could be. Plus, there is a generalized anti-woke counter-reaction that places PC Democrats with their spouting off on woke nonsense outside of the zeitgeist. Their own base won’t let them moderate; they’ll be telling us dudes can menstruate for another decade even as over-it normals shake their heads in disgust.

So, I like how the Republicans are positioned over the next decade or so. In the short term, the Trump economy is going to take off again. We’re going to clear out the illegals one way or the other, and we’re going to continue to drive crime down. Long-term, we’re having babies, and the future belongs to people who show up. Importantly, we’re not traitors colluding with a foreign government to undermine our country.

But then again, we are Republicans, and the fact remains that the Republican Party is the only party that can summon up enough dumb to squander these advantages.

by Kurt Schlichter at townhall.com on July 23, 2026

Recently, The Atlantic presented the Democrat Party’s new election strategy for 2026 and 2028. “The Party has a New Campaign Strategy: Masculinity” carefully details what the party is now defining as “masculinity” and how, after the debacle of the 2024 election, it is attempting to reverse four decades of white male-bashing by focusing on so-called masculine attributes. In other words, it is an ill-conceived strategy born of desperation that is doomed to failure.

In 2024, Donald Trump overwhelmingly captured the white male vote in 42 states (he won 80% of the white male vote in two states, 70 to 76% in seven states, 60 to 69% in 20 states, and 51 to 59% in 13 states). Those stark statistics forced the Democrats to realize that they needed to capture a larger percentage of the white male vote in future elections, especially as black male working-class voters are also abandoning the party in increasing numbers.

What remains of the ossified Democrat party establishment now wants to thread the needle and appeal to white male voters while, at the same time, placating its irascible social justice wing and those who identify as Democratic Socialists of America (“DSA”), as both factions are now de facto allies and the dominant forces within the Party.

How is it going to do this? Another Atlantic piece detailed two theories for how to win back men:

Two theories for how to win back men, I found, are bubbling up. One is to improve the party’s cultural appeal to men, embracing rather than scolding masculinity. The other is to focus on more traditional messaging about the economy, on the assumption that if Democrats build an agenda for blue-collar America, the guys will follow.

However, there are several problems with these two approaches. First, DSA will determine the Democrat party’s messaging and agenda when it comes to the economy. The DSA’s proclaimed reason for being is to transform the United States into the consummate socialist “paradise” while eliminating “the carceral forces of the capitalistic state,” which necessitates scrapping the U.S. Senate, defunding the Department of War, granting amnesty to all illegal immigrants, and replacing the president and Supreme Court with an executive and judiciary chosen by and subordinate to Congress.

There is no room for compromise with what remains of the Democrat party establishment to promote any “traditional” messaging about the economy, which would, by necessity, have to include references to free enterprise, self-reliance, and American exceptionalism, all bedrock principles of blue-collar America and the vast majority of American men. (A recent poll indicated that 65% of men are extremely or very proud to be Americans, as compared to 45% of women.)

Second, it will be the social justice wing of the Democrat party that will ultimately define “acceptable” masculinity. Its entire movement is so ingrained with four decades of white male-bashing and fighting the so-called “patriarchy” that it is incapable of compromising with what remains of the Democrat party establishment, as it would essentially have to renounce DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) as part of any viable strategy to capture a significant percentage of the male vote.

A recent email I received from a self-proclaimed member of the DSA underscores the amalgamation of social justice and socialism that currently dominates the Democrat party.

After excoriating me for a recent column I wrote about the DSA’s takeover of the Democrat party, the author told me that white men were responsible for all the evil in the world and that, if this group of greedy, racist “genocidal maniacs” were eliminated, the United States, thanks to the magic of Democratic socialism, would be a more “equitable, loving, and hospitable” place for all people.

Attached to this harangue were two links. The first was to an article entitled “White Men Must Be Stopped: The Future of Mankind Depends on It.” It was a tedious and implausible exercise in how American white men (who account for less than 1.5% of the global population) have, over the past five centuries, created untold worldwide misery without doing anything positive for mankind.

The second link, the “DSA Platform, Workers Deserve More,” was a juvenile, 19-page rehash of the wonders of socialism/Marxism, if only the anointed members of the DSA were in charge.

My immediate thought after reading all this inanity was that the Democrat party has gone past the point of no return in its anti-Americanism and anti-male bigotry. This is bigotry that has, over three decades, alienated the vast majority of the white male population, as it has repeatedly been told that, due solely to its members’ sex and skin color, virtually all of them are repressed sexual predators, inbred racists, misogynists, and xenophobes, as well as genocidal maniacs, latent white Nationalists, and rapacious reprobates.

Accordingly, because of all this back-breaking guilt, America’s white males must willingly step aside for untold millions of unvetted, unskilled, and illiterate immigrants from the third-world nations that they supposedly exploited. Additionally, white men should further assuage this guilt by groveling at the altar of DEI and meekly marching into the maw of yet another iteration of repressive socialism/Marxism.

What if the Democrat party succeeds in imposing this agenda on the nation and all white men are, by law, relegated to the immutable rules of DEI? What sort of country would Americans be living in?

In 2022, 71% of the population identified as white (that includes 60+% of Hispanics who self-identify as white). White males account for 35% of the overall population. Per the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, white men exceed their proportion of the population in more than 60% of all major categories of occupations but are particularly significant in the following:

•85% of aircraft pilots and flight engineers

•84% of logging, fishing, oil and gas drilling, and refinery workers

•78% of carpenters, plumbers, electricians, and masons

•78% of mechanics, installers, and service technicians

•77% of farmers and ranchers

•76% of construction managers and supervisors

•76% of automobile, bus, truck, and heavy-vehicle service technicians and mechanics

•74% of police, firefighters, and security workers

•73% of aerospace, electrical, and mechanical engineers

A question for the mind-numbed social justice warriors and DSA members: How would Americans feed and clothe themselves, travel, stay warm in the winter and cool in the summer, build roads and housing, maintain infrastructure, and secure and defend the nation if DEI were rigidly enforced and, within all occupations, the workforce was limited to 35% white men? Further, who would fund the insatiable revenue demands of their socialist “paradise”?

The key to the Democrat Party capturing a majority of white male voters is very straightforward. The social justice and DSA factions controlling the Democrat Party must, by word and deed, abandon their allegiance to DEI and the adolescent mindset that they can successfully implement socialism/Marxism when all before them have failed.

As that will never happen, the obvious pandering of paying lip service to “masculinity,” as if it were a costume that can be changed at whim, will succeed only in further alienating not only white American men but all American men.

by Steve McCann at americanthinker.com on July 23, 2026

The Unlikely American Embrace of Socialism

 

Socialists and communists did not just hijack the party.

Rather, youthful radicals were spawned and nurtured by aged Democrats, irate over their impotence and loss of influence.

What is behind this bizarre and destructive support of socialism in the United States? In part, the Democrats are struggling to make sense of their existence, particularly the economic, spiritual, and relationship challenges they have encountered. In a primal, immature, and desperate effort, the people who are embracing socialism are also striving to “return to the womb,” dreaming of a return to complete physical safety, freedom from all responsibility, and endless, effortless sustenance.

There are all sorts of theories for what’s driving socialism’s takeover of the Democrat party. People argue that the new socialists don’t understand (or care) that socialism and communism have always failed, or that they don’t comprehend that this is not a pretty Scandinavian version of a deadly belief system.

However, what too few notice is that, more than anything, these new socialists want to be saved, comforted, and taken care of.

We should have seen this mindset coming when we saw college graduates returning to live in their parents’ homes. They complain about this “necessity” and the subsequent lack of privacy and freedom. Yet how much effort do they put into being independent and self-sufficient?

People who gravitate to Socialism feel that they will get the benefits of a “womb-like” environment. Socialism will provide them with sustenance. They think they won’t have to earn a living. They won’t have to take on the stresses of ordinary life. They will not require much to survive, only enough to get them through each day. They won’t be the only ones who pursue this lifestyle: they will see many others who have chosen to rely on and want to be protected by the governmental womb, which will take care of all their needs and wants.

Spiraling costs during the Biden years established a foundation for what we are seeing today. Growing fear about “affordability” has fueled the new, strident socialism. Annual inflation during Biden’s four years averaged almost 5 percent. It peaked at over 9 percent, while prices for some key staples rose by 30 percent over his tenure—all to silence from the Left. (By contrast, annual inflation during Trump’s first term averaged 1.9 percent. In his second term, it averaged 2.6 percent in 2025—and may rise to 4.5 percent in 2026, given the war with Iran.)

The socialists were not just quiet during Biden’s four years; they were themselves responsible for the rampant Biden inflation. They had implemented an inflationary de facto third Obama term, ramming through the most radical and costly agenda in decades under the veneer of that cognitively challenged waxen effigy, good ol’ Joe Biden from Scranton.

So the current Jacobin takeover of the Democratic Party was not sparked by concerns about “affordability”—or at least not if by “affordability” we mean the middle-class struggle to buy a house, a car, or groceries.

Instead, the socialist moment was merely the logical culmination of years of boutique radicalism within the Democratic aristocracy—the ossified leadership of Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi, Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, and Hakeem Jeffries, along with the aging Black Caucus, the incoherent Squad, the DEI crowd, the open-border zealots, and the radical greens.

The grandees of the party also normalized the crazy mobs of BLM and Antifa long ago.

Almost every weaponized scam and national hysteria in the last two decades was amplified and spread by mainstream Democrats: the farcical claim that the Wuhan-lab-hatched COVID virus came from pangolins or bats; the Duke Lacrosse and Covington Kids hoaxes; the Jussie Smollett scam, the “Hands up, don’t shoot” lie; the deification of George Floyd, often portrayed with wings and a halo; Fauxcahontas Liz Warren, touted as the first Native American Harvard law professor (thanks to her grandfather’s high cheekbones); the radical diminution of in-person voting; the canonization of Trayvon Martin and Karmelo Anthony as blameless model children; and the mythology of a 1619 national founding.

Who allowed not just one, two, three, or four million border-jumpers into the country, but over ten million—illegal, unvetted, viewed as an assumed new political constituency, and instantaneously dependent on the welfare state?

Who gave us three, four, five, or even more genders and biological males showering with teenage girls or female prisoners? Who sloganeered about “defund the police” and “no cash bail”?

All this was about as radical as it gets.

The Democratic establishment’s unhinged hatred of Donald Trump mainstreamed radicalism even further and helped birth the socialist-cum-communist Frankensteinian monster that is now devouring its mad-scientist creators.

“By any means necessary” was a Democratic mantra over a decade ago. By 2016, the Democratic leadership and the Clinton campaign were hatching the Steele-dossier farce to warp an election.

In 2020, the Democratic deep state—Antony Blinken, Mike Morell, John Brennan, James Clapper, Leon Panetta, and others—had fabricated the farcical claim that the Hunter Biden laptop was Russian disinformation, a hoax that, this time around, likely did alter an election.

The Democratic establishment, working with its appendages in Silicon Valley, had censored news attesting to the authenticity of Hunter’s embarrassing laptop contents. (For an account of what the establishment was doing in 2020, read Molly Ball’s Time essay describing the “conspiracies” and “cabals” that worked behind the scenes to change voting rules and ensure a Biden victory through mail-in, no-ID balloting.)

Then came four unhinged years of lawfare: special counsel Jack Smith’s seizure of the communications of senators and congressmen, the Mar-a-Lago raid on Trump’s home, the effort to de-ballot Trump, and the five civil and criminal circuses that resulted in half a billion dollars in fines.

All those perversions of the legal system were accompanied by a host of mainstream Democrats, retired generals, politicos, and athletes shouting that Trump was a Nazi, a fascist, a Mussolini, a traitor, or a Putin asset. Meanwhile, a host of loudmouth actors, Democratic activists, and celebrities competed with each other about how best to kill him—whether by shooting, stabbing, poisoning, beheading, burning him alive, or blowing him up.

Trump supporters were libeled over the years by establishment Democrats as irredeemables, deplorables, chumps, dregs, and garbage.

Even an establishment figure like Rosa Brooks, a former Obama-appointed Pentagon lawyer, called for a military coup in Foreign Policy just 10 days after Trump first took office in 2017.

Three would-be assassins got close enough to killing Trump to draw return fire from the Secret Service—near-death encounters that elicited both unapologetic applause for the attempts and lamentations that the shooters had failed from the now truly deranged social-media Left. Murderers themselves were normalized as leftist icons, as seen in the canonization of Luigi Mangione and the glee that followed in many Democratic social media circles after the murder of Charlie Kirk.

Yet did the establishment Democratic apparat calm these waters? Or did it set them boiling?

It was Chuck Schumer who threatened conservative Supreme Court justices, screaming in front of a mob outside the court’s doors, “I want to tell you, Gorsuch, I want to tell you, Kavanaugh, you have released the whirlwind, and you will pay the price. You won’t know what hit you if you go forward with these awful decisions.” Schumer sounded more like a pink-haired anti-ICE street protester than a U.S. senator.

No surprise, then, that two years later a left-wing would-be assassin turned up at Kavanaugh’s home, along with crowds of enthusiastic protestors.

Does anyone recall Maxine Waters urging the public to bird-dog Trump administration officials and harass them whenever they were seen in public? “If you see anybody from that Cabinet in a restaurant, in a department store, at a gasoline station, you get out, and you create a crowd, and you push back on them, and you tell them they’re not welcome anymore, anywhere.”

Does anyone also remember Nancy Pelosi, then-Democratic House Minority leader, greenlighting “uprisings” over ICE deportations? “I just don’t know why there aren’t uprisings all over the country. Maybe there will be.” So spoke the radical owner of two mansions, who entered Congress with little net worth and will leave it worth over $100 million. A Tip O’Neill she wasn’t.

Then there was soon-to-be Vice President Kamala Harris egging on the George Floyd demonstrations, which, weeks earlier, had already turned violent and indeed deadly (despite what the “fact-checkers” asserted):

[Block]This is a movement, I’m telling you. They’re not going to stop. And everyone beware, because they’re not going to stop. They’re not going to stop before Election Day in November, and they’re not going to stop after Election Day. And that should be—everyone should take note of that, on both levels, that they’re not going to let up, and they should not, and we should not.[End]

After four months of rioting in 2020—which left 25 people dead and 1,500 law enforcement officers injured, inflicted $2 billion in damage, and saw a police precinct, a federal courthouse, and an iconic church set ablaze—who gave the perpetrators a pass, with 14,000 arrests followed by few convictions and fewer jailings?

What happened during the violence against ICE in 2025–26? Did the Democratic apparat at least pretend to deplore the violence, or did it instead egg it on?

And who, as sore losers in 2016 and 2024, normalized the idea of dismantling the constitutional order—first by calling for the abolition of the Electoral College and later by planning to pack the court, end the filibuster, and admit two new left-wing states?

So the socialists and communists did not really hijack the party. Rather, these youthful radicals were spawned and nurtured by aged Democrats. They became irate over their impotence and loss of influence—and simply upgraded the methods and message of their elders.

The upper-middle-class Mamdanis, Pikers, and AOCs did not storm the party parapets but were invited in by a party that had already radicalized itself—amid its hatred of Donald Trump, its growing estrangement from the majority of the American people, and its fury at becoming increasingly powerless without the White House, Congress, or the Supreme Court.

Socialists did not lower the bar for extremism; establishment Democrats had already destroyed that standard altogether.

Given all that, the Democratic Socialists of America scarcely had to be invented.

After a decade of establishment Democrats destroying norms and traditions, deliberately dividing us by race, seeking to eliminate life-giving fossil fuels, and trying to implement dangerous crackpot ideas like critical race theory, critical legal theory, no cash bail, and defunding the police, the only change is that the now-electrified socialist monsters have awakened. They have mocked their stagnant creators, reenergized the old messages, and simply sought to replace the messengers.

Gone or going soon were the old white people like Pelosi and Schumer—despite their pathetic efforts to appease the Jacobins. In their place arose a cohort of upper-middle-class, degreed but otherwise poorly educated white urbanites, furious that their empty university certificates, student debt, inflated sense of self, and precious titles and jobs—but low salaries—had not delivered the affluent lifestyles enjoyed by lawyers, doctors, stockbrokers, and other professionals in their urban circles who had real jobs.

The downwardly mobile whites who formed 85 percent of the official ranks of the Democratic Socialists of America were joined by first- and second-generation immigrants, many from failed socialist states.

These were ingrates who, once safe and prospering in America, learned that boutique radicalism and identity chauvinism won cultural acceptance and conferred DEI leverage in their blue-state urban circles—and so sought to dismantle the very host nation that had saved them.

For both groups, anger was fed by envy of others with more stuff and by furor at a Middle America that plowed ahead, ignoring both their supposed talents and their hyped plight. And the Democratic Party provided the radical model—which, in their youthful ignorance, the new socialists pledged to enhance and exceed.

No longer, they thought, would hardcore leftists have to hide their agendas for fear of losing elections. In their folly, they attributed Harris’s 2024 implosion not to her clumsy efforts to disown and disguise her radical past (including the most left-wing voting record in the Senate), but to her not being left-wing enough.

In other words, a milque toast socialist had lost in 2024 not because she was too radical for America, but because she was not socialist—or indeed, communist—enough.

The crazed new socialists bragged that they could win by loudly and brazenly broadcasting the old agendas: open borders, mass amnesties, defunding the police, ending fossil fuels, attacking—and now seeking to destroy—the Senate and Supreme Court, and scapegoating whites and white “privilege.” To this old mainstream Democratic farrago, they added one new element: openly embracing anti-Zionism and indeed antisemitism.

America will soon see how this insanity works out.

by Susan Quinn at americanthinker.com and Victor Davis Hanson at amgreatness.com on July 28, 2026

The Next Twenty Years: The New American (Worldwide) Revolution

 

Last week the LA and California primaries were stolen by the left wing regime in power. This video explains, chapter and verse, how they do it. It is, as we all know now, done by NGOs, who use our tax money to steal our will. I include billionaire donations to NGOs in this, otherwise that money would have been paid in taxes. They work after the election to cure the vote. It is, as Omega4America describes, an industrial scale operation.

The U.S. was founded on private enterprise... which has been methodically crushed by the socialist/globalist machine all over the world. So people are angry and it is young men under 40 who are marshalling the power to fight. The regime wants the fight. They’ve been hungering to set the army on populists and crush us once and for all.

Good luck with that. It’s not happening. The anger out there is cold, methodical, and willing to die for it. The threat of violence though... that they should be afraid of. The power simmering just below the surface is Unbeatable.

The disasters of the past ten, thirty, fifty years have triggered a massive cross-the-globe awakening that is being called The Great Awakening. This is happening among people who do not pay attention to politics or culture or read a book or an essay, or even watch a complicated Youtube video. They see the devastation, they see the profound corruption in the state, in business, in media without the help of people like me. And there are a billion of them, easy. In every country.

The system is losing its grip, and the cracks are starting to show. Despite every distraction, narrative shift, and barrier placed in front of society, a collective awakening is underway. It’s a bold perspective on how mainstream control mechanisms—from media narratives to systemic conditioning—are failing to hold back a growing wave.

Everything is on the table for revision. Election theft is just the last barrier they can find since slander isn’t working. No one cares about being called racist anymore.

What we are looking at on the streets of Europe, the U.K. and in the Republic of Ireland, is a revival of the culture that was deliberately replaced by a fully evil ideology. It is my opinion that this will not result in violence. Important as the rallies and protests are, what is happening is a massive cultural retrenchment based on the founding of America.

It is why there are American flags at the marches, and why so many wear a MAGA hat. MAGA is world-wide now, it will take over the entire world, including China, including Russia. Going forward in the next few years, there may be scraps on the U.K. streets with Muslim gangs but if - as Muslims did last week in England - go hunting British men with baseball bats, they will swiftly learn how Britain conquered the known world with muskets. There is simply no force on earth that can fight it. The ferocity is based in the thousand-year heritage of the northern clans and it has no match on earth, in this or any other century.

And it transferred to America slowly, relentlessly, during the 18th century, as the British oligarchs and their bankers - essentially the same vicious bastards as the ones exploiting us today - sent off all their unwanted to the colonies. These men, their character marked by their ancestral memory, formed the base of the American army and the American economy today. It is they that all the skanks and skunks, the army of migrants, “legal” immigrants, filthy Marxists, and our wretched socialist/globalist intelligentsia, who have never earned an honest dollar, are stealing from. How much? Estimated by Scott Bessent to be $1 trillion annually.

And now, today, they, and we know it. We know we are human cattle being farmed by the worst people on earth, all of whom are fully, without mitigation, evil.

But they overplayed their chaos monkey hand. We are sick of violence and emotionality. These kids coming up want stern common sense. They want God. They want their lives to have meaning. They want their time to be sacred again.

What I see across the Anglosphere resembles, more than anything else, America’s Puritan founding. Which itself was spurred from the sickening corruption of the Tudor and Stuart courts.

This, not rationalism, not the touted Greeks, Roman law or Old Testament morality is the culture that birthed the modern world. It is the culture that the Fabian/Frankfurt imports destroyed first, picking away at its moral seriousness, mocking us in the founding generations as primitives, starting with Arthur Miller and his specious play, The Crucible, about the witch trial in Salem. First of all, he sneered, how backwards are these people that think witches and witchcraft are real. Second, they are ungoverned hysterics, not to be taken seriously.

While all the time, the people who celebrated him, who elevated him were practicing demonic magic. Today, Catholic exorcists believe that 25% of us are demonically obsessed and that number rises every year. And that does not count the Luciferians, who run the world now, who are fully possessed by evil.

Of course Satanism was afoot in the 1600’s. Of course it was happening when Jonathan Edwards kicked off the First Great Awakening in 1734. The First Great Awakening seeded the American Revolution. The Second, the Civil War. The Third was the social gospel, and the Fourth is happening to us right now. Today.

That evil, that corruption, and decadence, and the wish to create a Godly civilization, was precisely why those few hundred souls, then thousands, took the precarious voyage to the New World. The evil they were fleeing has been erased from the history books. The Puritans were fighting what we are fighting today.

I am not speaking about the Southern slave-holding Tidewater bastards who were fully aligned with Empire and international bankers, from the beginning. The muggles celebrate Jefferson and Washington because they like the grace of Southern plantation living blah blah blah. That grace was bought by the blood of slaves. Just like today, our grace is paid for by factories filled with slaves or indentured workers in the Mariana Islands, Vietnam, China. Pick one .

Jonathan Edwards, the man who created the religious fervour that triggered the American Revolution, was anything but a backwoods fanatic. He was one of the most sophisticated minds produced in the colonies, operating at an almost terrifying intellectual altitude. We remember “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” but forget he was also grappling with consciousness, free will, beauty, metaphysics, revival, psychology, the nature of divine perception itself. He had eleven children and fifty-one grandchildren, all of whom married into prominent Puritan families, including mine.

When the Puritans fled England four hundred years ago, they weren’t coming to prosper, they were building a godly civilization in contrast to the feculance of British aristocratic culture.

And what they wrought in those first two hundred years, that conscious practice of virtue, forms the structure, the systems that shelter us today. A virtuous man blesses a thousand generations. We live still on their grace.

Absurdistan’s regular readers know that I am descended from two Puritan families, and that my parents’ ancestors arrived in 1630 and 1632. On my mother’s.side, Thomas Hooker was one of the great prelates of the founding. Hooker is sometimes called the Father of American democracy because he rejected the elite system being established by Winthop etc., and moved to the River Colony, where my father’s ancestors, the Phelps, had settled. From these families rose three of Washington’s generals, assorted congressman, senators, and signers. One of which, a cobbler, signed all four documents of the American founding. They were grand and great and humble. Second sons of the aristocracy, shop keepers, blacksmiths, cobblers.

I have their letters. I have their diaries. I have their family trees, deeds, wills, anything they wrote for the newspapers of the times. I have about fifty thousand pages of PRIMARY RESEARCH. And it stands in direct and furious opposition to anything published by the current crop of skeezy, amoral, grasping, Marxist, globalist academics who rewrite our history and pollute our children’s minds. Everything that emerges from our culture today is a lie. A specious, self-serving, destructive, morally abhorrent lie.

That black ho who wrote the 1619 Project was in the pay of Satanists. I’m sorry, that is who she is. She lied for money, she slandered hundreds of millions of people who still are the beacon of the universe, not the world, the universe. Her slander entered the public record. It is taught in schools. It is slop, a grotesque defamation of the founding generations of America. The people she should have levelled her criticism at, the descendants of the slaver Tidewater bastards in the pay of the British aristocracy, are the ones who paid her to traduce our history.

But today’s youth have a great deal in common with that history, as if it is rising in their souls, like a fierce unstoppable fire. And that is because Fabian culture stripped life of meaning, purpose, sacredness, eternity.

And, it turns out, we can’t live without it.

To the Puritans, life had meaning, history had direction, individuals were accountable to God, and every action mattered eternally. That produced a very different human being than a culture organized around comfort or consumption.

We’re sick of consumption. We’re sick of our sexuality being inflamed, by porn, by public erotic writhing, by the sickening sexuality of public figures. We are sick of comfort. There are entire TikTok series from random young women saying my life is so convenient, comfortable and easy, I have never been more miserable.

The Puritans were scholars, all of them. They believed that everyone must read, must study. That is happening now among the young. As our true history opens up, they are interested again, and they are consuming massive amounts of information, all of it impossible at this point to censor. Hollywood and publishing are dying because their audience has fled to the margins where they find fascination. The rabbit hole is the new university.

The Puritans were willing to suffer, to get right up to starving, to clear fields, to work and work and work, and that ethic too is rising. Within a few generations of that, they produced publishing houses, universities, constitutional government, global trade systems, scientific institutions, industrialization, missionary networks, and eventually the cultural machinery that shaped the modern world.

Contrast that to the fruit of modernism: the rape of hundreds of thousands of children a year. While boomers, GenXers, and even Millennials ignore it, the younger generations do not.

The rebellion against our current civilizational filth means that they are starting to see their time and work as sacred. And that is far far better than chasing the ghastly prizes of modernism.

Finally, that imposed, forced culture? It’s dying. Fabian culture, the “arts” are dying. There is nothing being produced but screeching filth. Hollywood is dead, the lots are empty, film people are living in their cars.

Literary fiction is garbage, no one reads it but those in the business. History is a lie, no one reads it unless forced. No one but the sodden elites goes to the theatre, no one goes to movie houses. No one leaves the house. There is no reason to leave the house. All you see is decay, degradation and filth. Women read fairy smut. That’s it for literature. Without fairy smut, every publishing house would close its doors. Fairy smut is about heroes and heroines taking action against evil with the help of the supernatural, ie God.

The next twenty years are going to be transformative. With moral seriousness, work will transform. To the Puritans every person had a calling. A blacksmith glorified God through excellent blacksmithing. A mother through raising children. A minister through teaching. A merchant through honest dealing. This sanctification of ordinary labor was revolutionary.

The sanctification of daily life gives every individual a shining purpose.

Puritan virtue and rigor created punctuality, bookkeeping, long-term planning, delayed gratification, reliability, obsession with improvement. The sociologist Max Weber called this the “Protestant ethic,”

The deeper truth is that they believed God watched everything.

For indeed, He does.

That level of internalized accountability creates and recreates civilization very quickly.

This, the Puritan founding was the founding of America, the most critical moral imprint on the world since Christ.

It’s coming back.

May we all live to see it happen.

by Elizabeth Nickson at Substack on June 06, 2026

Finding Heroism to Escape a Meaningless Life

 

“One third of all the sorrow I must endure is unavoidable. It is the sorrow inherent in the human condition, the price we must pay for being sentient and self-conscious organisms, aspirants to liberation, but subject to the laws of nature and under orders to keep on marching, through irreversible time, through a world wholly indifferent to our well-being, toward decrepitude and the certainty of death.” ~ Aldous Huxley, Island

When we suffer, it is common to believe that the cause of our distress lies within the story of our life. Childhood wounds, destructive habits, unresolved conflicts, regrets, or painful memories are factors we often point to as responsible for our sorrow. But a lot of suffering results not from past events, but from an inability to reconcile ourselves with, and courageously face up to, the fundamental problems inherent in the human condition.

In this post we investigate two of these problems – the problem of death and the problem of meaning. We explore how our awareness of death and our need for meaning are deeply connected, and how our response to these problems determines whether our life is marked by growth and fulfillment, or burdened by suffering and neurosis.

In his book Existential Psychotherapy, Irvin Yalom writes:

“The fear of death plays a major role in our internal experience; it haunts as does nothing else; it rumbles continuously under the surface; it is a dark, unsettling presence at the rim of consciousness…death itches all the time, and our attitudes toward death influence the way we live and grow and the way we falter and fall ill.” ~ Irvin Yalom, Existential Psychotherapy

Our deepest drive is to continue living, yet we know that one day we will die. This awareness creates a fear of death that permeates our being. Some believe the best way to deal with this fear is to shut it out of awareness and immerse ourselves in the business of living. This overlooks the profound influence death exerts on us. For much of what we do and pursue is shaped, often unconsciously, by the fear of death.

“…the idea of death, the fear of it, haunts the human animal like nothing else; it is a mainspring of human activity.” ~ Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death

In his 1974 Pulitzer-Prize winning book The Denial of Death, Ernest Becker argued that the primary way the fear of death shapes our life is by motivating us to strive for heroism. “…heroism is first and foremost a reflex of the terror of death.”, he wrote.

Becker’s concept of heroism refers to the pursuit of “symbolic immortality.” This involves striving after ends we believe will persist following the death of our physical body. Some pursue heroism through the creation of works of art, others through invention, achievement, the creation of family, or the building of a legacy; while others devote themselves to social, political, or religious causes.

The desire to live a heroic life is a basic human need. “The urge to heroism is natural, and to admit it honest,” wrote Becker. For heroism is the primary defense we have to protect us from the fear of death.

Through the pursuit of heroism, we sublimate the fear of death; we take the energy inherent in this fear and use it to create and strive towards meaningful ends. The more convincing and effective our striving for heroism – the more meaningful our life feels – the less the fear of death haunts us. But the reverse is also true. When we feel that our life is unheroic, the fear of death weighs us down. Becker even argued that many forms of mental illness are, at root, failures to sublimate the fear of death through a convincing form of heroism. Or as he wrote:

“…mental illness is really a general theory of the failures of death transcendence…..When the average person can no longer convincingly perform his heroics or cannot hide his failure to be his own hero, then he bogs down in the failure of depression and its terrible guilt…Man cannot endure his own littleness unless he can translate it into meaningfulness on the largest possible level.” ~ Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death

A heroic life is a deeply meaningful life. But how do we structure our life to live heroically and find the meaning we need to sublimate the fear of death? Here we encounter another problem inherent in the human condition. For while we need to live a meaningful life, human existence appears to have no objective meaning or purpose, at least none that we can discern with certainty. Or as Yalom writes:

“The problem of meaning, then, in its most rudimentary form is, How does a being who needs meaning find meaning in a universe that [appears to have] no meaning?” ~ Irvin Yalom, Existential Psychotherapy

In his book On the Genealogy of Morality, the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche called the problem of meaning “the curse that lay over mankind so far”. The Russian author Leo Tolstoy is an individual who felt the heavy weight of this curse. At the age of fifty, at the height of his literary fame, surrounded by wealth, land, servants, and family, Tolstoy was seized by a crisis of meaning so severe that he called it a “life arrest.” As he wrote:

“I asked: ‘What is the meaning of my life?… or to put it still differently: Is there any meaning in my life that will not be destroyed by my inevitably approaching death?… I clearly saw that there was nothing ahead except ruin. And there was no stopping, no turning back, no closing my eyes so I would not see that there was nothing ahead except the deception of life and of happiness and the reality of suffering and death, of complete annihilation… I grew sick of life.” ~ Leo Tolstoy, A Confession

Since there is no obvious meaning to human existence, to solve the problem of meaning we must create or discover our own. To help us in this task, we can examine the various forms of meaning human beings have used to ward off existential despair.

The most obvious meaning that has sustained people throughout history is a religious or cosmic meaning. This is the idea that the universe is purposive – it is moving towards some definite end – and that our life, in some heroic way, is contributing to that purpose. In the Western World, this cosmic meaning has been encoded in the Judeo-Christian religious tradition which maintains that the universe and human life are part of God’s divinely ordered plan. But a cosmic meaning to life can be found outside the bounds of institutional religion. In his final interview before his death from cancer at the age of 47, Ernest Becker wrote:

“I don’t think one can really be a hero in any really elevating sense without some transcendental referent like being a hero for God. I think this is the most exalted type of heroism. Being the hero for the creative powers of the universe. Feeling that one has lived to some purpose that transcends one.” ~ Ernest Becker, Interview with Sam Keen

Carl Jung suggested that the purpose of human existence is to participate in the completion of God’s creation via the expansion of consciousness. The more conscious we become, the more God, through us, becomes conscious of his creation. God needs us to realize his divine purpose.

“Man is indispensable for the completion of creation.” ~ Carl Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections

Or as the great 20th century German author Thomas Mann echoed:

“With the generation of life from the inorganic, it was man who was ultimately intended. With him a great experiment is initiated, the failure of which would be the failure of creation itself…Whether that be so or not, it would be well for man to behave as if it were so.” ~ Thomas Mann, Life Grows in the Soil of Time

In our secular age, belief in a religious or cosmic meaning to life is untenable for many. The existentialist philosophers of the 20th century gave voice to this skepticism, arguing that the universe has no inherent meaning and that human existence has no objective purpose. Jean-Paul Sartre, for example, wrote:

“All existing things are born for no reason…It is meaningless that we are born; it is meaningless that we die.” ~ Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea

Although Sartre believed that life has no objective meaning, he recognized that we have a deep need for meaning, and thus it is our task to create our own. Or as Yalom noted:

“What is important for Sartre is that human beings recognize that one must invent one’s own meaning (rather than discover God’s or nature’s meaning) and then commit oneself fully to fulfilling that meaning.” ~ Irvin Yalom, Existential Psychotherapy

There are several secular paths through which we can create our own meaning. One is altruism, which involves serving others or working to reduce suffering in the world. Another is dedication to a worthy cause. This involves choosing a value or ideal and committing ourselves to its realization, whether it be the struggle for political freedom, or the effort to bring more beauty, truth, or goodness to the world. The historian Will Durant advocated this path to meaning as he understood that when we devote ourselves to something larger than our personal self, we gain the sense that we are living heroically, and this helps prevent the fear of death from weighing us down. As he wrote in his book On the Meaning of Life:

“Join a whole, work for it with all your body and mind. The meaning of life lies in the chance it gives us to produce, or to contribute to something greater than ourselves. It need not be a family (although that is the direct and broadest road which nature in her blind wisdom has provided for even the simplest soul); it can be any group that can call out all the latent nobility of the individual, and give him a cause to work for that shall not be shattered by his death.” ~ Will Durant, On the Meaning of Life

Another source of meaning that has sustained many individuals is creativity. In the act of creation we give outward form to our inner life. We take what is subjective within us – our ideas, experience, suffering, insight, and perception of the world – and we embody it in a creation that, perhaps, will influence other people and outlast us. Through the creative act we attempt to objectify and immortalize the self, which is one of the reasons it is felt as deeply meaningful.

“By the creative act we are able to reach beyond our own death.” ~ Rollo May, The Courage to Create

Or as Becker wrote:

“In some sense, some kind of objective creativity is the only answer man has to the problem of life…The artist takes in the world, makes a total problem out of it, and then gives out a fashioned, human answer to that problem. This, as Goethe saw in Faust, is the highest that man can achieve.” ~ Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death

Being a hero for God, or devoting ourselves to altruism, a worthy cause, family, or creative work, can feel deeply meaningful because these paths carry us beyond the narrow boundaries of our ego. They give us the sense that we are serving, creating, or participating in something that will outlast our physical body. And this seems to be one of the requirements of a meaningful life: in finding or creating our own meaning, we must choose something that directs our thoughts and energies beyond mere survival and the gratification of egoistic desires.

“All heroism is relative to some kind of “beyond”; the question is, which kind?…What is one’s true talent, his secret gift, is authentic vocation? In what way is one truly unique, and how can he express this uniqueness, give it form, dedicate it to something beyond himself?” ~ Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death

Or as Yalom continues:

“A long tradition in Western thought counsels us not to settle for a non-self-transcendent purpose in life. Martin Buber notes that, though human beings should ask the question “What for? What am I to find my particular way for? What am I to unify my being for?” The answer is: “Not for my own sake.” One begins with oneself in order to forget oneself and to immerse oneself into the world; one comprehends oneself in order not to be preoccupied with oneself.” ~ Irvin Yalom, Existential Psychotherapy

Whether we satisfy our need for meaning through religious or secular means, Becker believed it is important not whether our chosen path is “true” in an absolute and objective sense. The decisive question is whether it is life-enhancing. Does it help us transcend the narrow boundaries of the self, enrich our experience, strengthen our character, and grant us the symbolic immortality that diminishes the fear of death? If so, then our pursuit of meaning serves its purpose and promotes well-being, even if its ultimate validity remains uncertain.

In this respect, the pursuit of meaning requires we adopt an attitude similar to Soren Kierkegaard’s knight of faith. The knight of faith cannot prove, with objective certainty, that God exists or that his life serves a higher purpose. Yet he lives as if God exists and his life has ultimate significance. Or as Kierkegaard explains:

“Faith is precisely the contradiction between the infinite passion of the individual’s inwardness and the objective uncertainty. If I am capable of grasping God objectively, I do not believe, but precisely because I cannot do this I must believe.” ~ Soren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript

In a similar manner, the task is to discover a self-transcendent meaning to which we can commit ourselves wholeheartedly. At the same time, we must accept that doubt can never be fully overcome: all may be vanity, and death may render everything we do meaningless in the end. But to live with faith despite this doubt — to live as if what we do matters in some higher sense, even though we don’t know whether it really does – is one of the greatest and most difficult tasks of being human. It is also necessary to avoid the neurotic suffering that plagues people who feel their life is meaningless. Or as Becker writes:

“Men avoid clinical neurosis when they can trustingly live their heroism in some kind of self-transcending and meaningful drama…To lose the security of heroism is to die — that is what [stripping a primitive tribe of their meaning-system] means and does. It kills them or reduces them to the animal level of chronic fighting and fornication. Life then becomes possible only in a continual alcoholic stupor.” ~ Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death

from academyofideas.com on June 22, 3026