With the triumph of Donald Trump, we are told to beware of authoritarianism, fascism, totalitarianism. Those on the left, especially, ominously shriek their warnings, advising us to read Ninety-Eighty Four. But, like usual, leftists have chosen the wrong book. The science fiction classic relevant here is Frankenstein. The Left, after all, bred its Nemesis. It should learn to sympathize . . . if not with the monster, at least with its creator.

If you think that people who hold ugly ideas need to be hounded out of society, must be socially destroyed, you do not believe in free speech. You are illiberal.

The need for rules and taboos will surely never end in human society. We cannot think through the consequences of every act. We must make short cuts. By holding one or many sets of actions out of bounds, we are relieved of the necessity of evaualting those actions and their effects. This is what Hayek called nomocratic — the government of rules. The rule-following aspects of life allow for the purposeful aspects of life to be managed more effectively. Rules outsource wisdom from individuals to tradition and  folkways.

The world of facts is not all that is the case. Fiction has been a driving force for human adaptation and progress. Facts are for computers. Fictions are where humanity has thrived. Those who think morality compels us to always “stick to the facts” will fail to become fully human.

Determinism is a theoretical map placed upon the world. It is akin to measurement, which also maps reality, but by comparing reality to an idealized construct, a standard. Determinism runs afoul of the truism “the map is not the territory,” and proves off-point with Zeno’s arrow paradox, in which we buy into a premise of measurement — a mapping technique — forgetting the reality in the act of mapping, measuring. The truth is that the arrow hits the target and stops. The truth is that adding sign and significance and concepts to the causal reality, causal reality is transcended — leaving determinism measuring a world no longer relevant to it. For, as Hume showed us, the realm of ideas behave by logic and validity, not causality, and our life of the mind places us on another level beyond any simple causality.

Socialism is the fantasy of most Democrats, libertarianism of many Republicans.

The former has long been the case, but usually was discounted with a breezy admission that socialism be “unworkable” in some way, but still “a good idea at core” and “obviously the more moral way of organization” though, sadly, somehow leading to bad results when pushed too far. So most Democrats compromised, always nudging towards more government, but accepting some need for compromise. Recently, the understanding of socialism’s scalability problems have evaporated, and the Democracy has lurched towards hard-left collectivism and a sort of Cultural Revolution moralistic groupthink.

Republicans’ besetting fantasy has been increasingly libertarian, but they often impute to the recent past more libertarian features than it possessed. Because progressives thoroughly won the ideological wars by 1960, and recast much of American life in terms of heavy state interference, characteristically conservative attitudes tend to bolster existing progressive institutions. The Republicans’ libertarian fantasies have thus served more as a touchstone than a lodestar, or, better yet, more of an anchor to prevent hasty and unsustainable acceptance of further socialist incursions.

Amusingly, the Democratic socialists take the libertarian fantasies of Republicans more seriously than do the Republicans themselves. They see these fantasies as a real threat, and, like many Republicans, often mistakenly impute Republicans’ characteristically milquetoast reforms as “free market” and “ruggedly individualistic“ (“by the bootstraps!” in their demonology of convenient clichés) when the Republicans’ fantasies are in fact barely ever more than nods towards individualistic rigor.

This yields us the peculiarly daft ideological divide of recent history, and makes talking with normies of both sides quite frustrating. They rarely can distinguish between fantasy and reality, especially when contemplated in the other sides’ ideological eructations.

Recently, though, it has gotten more interesting. With the popularization of Bernie and Elizabeth Warren’s “ideas” (mostly, of course, fantasy and rank delusion) the Democrats have abandoned their previous distancing from socialism to an embrace of the very word on the grounds that any government program is socialist, so wanting more programs makes them, unabashedly, “socialists.” This is so stupid one wonders if they have any sense of history at all, or any respect for clear thinking.

But they look like Einsteins compared to the brain-deadening drain on principle that is the Trump phenomenon. Almost any love for individual freedom has been thrown out the window for the silly nationalism of Trump’s unlearned approach to policy. The only palliative, here, is the obvious build-up of failures in the new administration. Which may lead to an implosion. Soon.

We are reaching for an apogee of silliness, it seems, upon which we can expect the decay to be quick and catastrophic.

But I hope I am wrong. If the modern world can keep running through its witless iterations of fantasy and compromise, we may witness the unfolding of some new alignment of politics, perhaps of a Seussian nature: will your fronts be plain, while your opponents sport stars upon thars? Or the reverse?

Better that than a choice of hammer-and-sickle vs. swastika, leading to the conquest by people preferring to adorn themselves with the crescent.

twv