If You Think Trump Equals Totalitarianism You Understand Neither

Pretty regularly these days one sees stories setting forth fears of the totalitarian state under Trump.  Recommendations and sales of the book 1984 continue to excel as if that book is a statement of how the Trump administration is a totalitarian one.

Let us define totalitarianism:  a system of government that is centralized and dictatorial and requires complete subservience to the state; absolute control by the state or a governing branch of a highly-centralized institution; of or relating to a centralized government that does not tolerate parties of differing opinion and that exercises dictatorial control over many aspects of life; the political concept that the citizen should be totally subject to an absolute state authority.

Now, in my humble opinion, the above definitions (from sources such as Miriam Webster and dictionary.com) far better describe where we were headed under the previous Democrat administration than it does the Trump administration.  Totalitarianism is the epitome of big government, of a government that believes it knows better than the people themselves how they should run their lives, what they should do, what they should say, what they should think.  Speech codes, prohibitions on what one can say or think, dietary guidelines, required acceptance of a specific set of values – these are all ideas from the Obama administration, not from Trump who wants to return that government overreach to the people themselves.

A strong leader is not necessarily a totalitarian leader.  President Trump may be a strong leader in the sense that he is assertive and does not back down.  But the positions from which he does not retreat are the positions for which the people elected him.  They include such things as returning to the people the power that the previous administration usurped from them – things like the power to hold a variety of beliefs and value systems, the power to make their own decisions about big things like health care and about smaller things like what to put in their child’s lunch box.  He wants to return to the states the powers that are rightfully theirs under the Constitution.  President Trump believes in smaller, not bigger government and in holding such a belief he stands for the opposite of totalitarianism. 

Obama may have been more likable than Trump, but that like or dislike does not equate with totalitarianism or lack thereof.  Indeed, it may have been Obama's likability that allowed him to move this country toward a more totalitarian state without anyone noticing or objecting.  And now, having found ourselves on the way there and with a less likable president, it seems that Democrats are using the negative label  "totalitarian" to attack Trump, even though that label better suits the previous president and his administration and the policies that they put in place.

In the book Nineteen Eighty-Four, currently being touted as supportive of an anti-Trump mentality, the controlling party creates a language called Newspeak which attempts to prevent political rebellion by eliminating all words related to it.  To me this is far more reminiscent of the previous administration and certain speech codes and prohibited words: things like the threat of being a micro-aggressor by using certain words or the refusal to equate acts of terrorism with Islam.  In Nineteen Eighty-Four we learn of the Ministry of Truth where historical records are altered to fit the needs of the party.  Let us consider who it is who has demanded statues be removed, pictures torn down, names changed in order to remove the history of our racist or other negative past of this country.  Nineteen Eighty-Four ultimately shows us how the Party’s goal is to break one’s spirit completely as it demands total loyalty to the State.  Again, I find that there was far more intolerance from the previous administration for views outside the Democrat narrative than there is from the current administration.    

It is the Democrats who believe that they have the answer for how everyone should think, behave, act, and react; there is little room in the Democrat’s agenda for diverse views.  In contrast, while President Trump and his administration are strong in their own beliefs, values, and policy positions, they seem to have far more acceptance of and tolerance for the fact that theirs may not be the only view out there.  Their primary goal is to return power to the states and to the people to make their own decisions and to hold their own views and values.  This is not totalitarianism.  Those who think that it is have perhaps succumbed to the brainwashing of the real purveyors of a totalitarian state – the Democrats.