Thoughtcrime, Or Totalitarianism in American Democracy
Thought has became a crime in American political discourse. Where do we go from here?
The 2024 presidential election will go down as one of the most important elections in U.S. history. Most of us knew it would be contentious but I don’t think anyone could have predicted how that contention would manifest.
The sitting president, Joe Biden, competed for re-election against the Republican Party’s presumptive nominee, former president Donald Trump. Most people assumed it would be a close race like so many political races are but everything changed after the first debate.
No one could deny what they saw that night. The president’s cognitive decline was on full display for the world to see. Without a single vote, President Biden was removed from the ballot and his vice president, Kamala Harris was appointed in his stead.
President Biden’s poor debate performance wasn’t a gaff or a fluke. At 81 years old, Joe Biden is the oldest president to ever be elected to the Oval Office. A mere mortal, it was only a matter of time before his age would begin to show.
As the election unfolded, the Harris campaign tried to stay in control of the narrative. They reiterated Trump’s criminality. They denounced him as a fascist. And they spread fear that if elected, he intended to install himself as an American caesar.
Since 2016, the raison d’etre of the Democratic party has been to oppose Trump. Now the ruling party, it was incumbent on the Democrats to defeat Trump this election cycle, even if that meant subverting truth in the process.
In doing so, the Democrats didn’t just violate the rights and guarantees enshrined in the First Amendment, they laid the groundwork to turn thought into a criminal act.
This essay will dive into the emergence of thoughtcrime in American political discourse. It will argue that by creating a culture where dissent is punishable by social excommunication, the Democratic Party has successfully incubated a nascent totalitarian state. If left unacknowledged, it could lead to the further degradation of American democracy in years to come.
A thoughtcrime is when you think something different from what is approved by the ruling party
Written by George Orwell after World War II, 1984 is a dystopian novel that depicts the perils of totalitarianism. It is arguably one of the most important works of fiction to be written in the 20th century yet very few Americans have read it.
According to a 2014 survey by YouGov, only 37% of the population has ever read 1984. That’s likely gone down thanks to the distractions of social media. And with only 50% of Americans reading at an eighth grade level it’s unlikely many Americans could grasp the important concepts in the book even if they tried to read it.
One of the central themes of the book is the idea that totalitarianism emerges when information and truth are manipulated for political gain. Censorship and repression aren’t the outcomes of a totalitarian government – they’re prerequisites for totalitarianism to emerge. The only way to maintain power is to eliminate all political opposition, not just political leaders, but thoughts that cast doubt on the ruling party’s narrative.
In the book, Big Brother represents the omnipresent nature of totalitarian rule. It constantly surveils the population, working meticulously to eliminate dissent. Meanwhile the Ministry of Truth represents the necessity of propaganda to replace the truth. It doctors information in order to establish new truths that ensure complete allegiance to the party and the unquestionable authority of totalitarian rule.
A work of fiction, Orwell invented new terms to describe how thoughts within a population can be controlled and formed around political objectives. Newspeak, for example, is controlled language approved by the party while doublethink accepts two contradictory ideas to both be accepted as true at the same time.
Today, Orwell reads like nonfiction. The ruling party is the Democratic Party. It controls the narratives that shape the media, culture, financial capital, and the administrative state. Under the Biden Administration, the party attempted to institutionalize its hold on power, a necessary requirement to establish a totalitarian state.
To eliminate dissent, the party delegitimized information that invalidated the narrative. Under the guise of national security, the Biden Administration created an organization within the Department of Homeland Security to evaluate disinformation campaigns.1 In doing so, they empowered a cadre of unelected bureaucrats – many of whom are party loyalists – to discern truth from fiction.
The use of preferred pronouns – and subsequent changes to the English language that are required in order to accommodate those pronouns – have become the American equivalent of Newspeak. Adherents to the new lingua franca freely police their fellow citizens at their own personal discretion.
More importantly, the coverup of Biden’s cognitive decline – and the gaslighting that ensued – embodies the idea of doublethink. Despite his disastrous debate performance in June, Joe Biden is still the sitting president of the United States. At this very moment he is capable enough to run the country but according to the party, he was not fit enough – or electable enough – to seek re-election. Without a single vote he was replaced and a new candidate was appointed to run in his stead.
What used to be confined to the pages of a fictional novel are now reality. The thing voters feared the most – totalitarian rule – has come to fruition. But it isn’t the dreaded orange man from Mar-a-Lago that turned America into a totalitarian state – it’s the Democrat party.
Thoughtcrime is necessary for the ruling party to establish totalitarian control over the electorate
For totalitarian rule to take hold, political dissent must first be eliminated. While some members of the political right here in the United States have been imprisoned,2 the average American, thankfully, isn’t going to jail for posting their thoughts on Facebook.3
America may be guilty of detaining terrorists at Guantanamo, but it isn’t guilty of detaining its own citizens in gulags just yet.
The suppression of speech undermines liberal values and democratic institutions.
This essay gives you examples of thoughtcrimes that exist in American political discourse and how thoughtcrimes sow the seeds for a future totalitarian government to emerge. Thanks for your support.