In Communist countries, it was understood that to get certain jobs, especially ones in the government or academia, you had to be a member of The Party. Being in The Party was official, public proof of your ideological bona fides and hiring managers had no qualms about excluding you for not being a member.
This was because everyone knew The Party was in charge and had obtained and maintained its power by force.
Openly criticizing the party line was dangerous, at least to your career but also possibly to your life.
This was how Communist apparatchiks maintained their power and enforced their ideology.
Today, it’s becoming apparent that though we essentially won the Cold War and defeated Communism in the West, we haven’t defeated the underlying ideology or methodology.
Just look at the case of the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau. This benignly named entity was created under the auspices of Dodd-Frank explicitly to be unaccountable to Congress or the public and used its noble-sounding mission to justify internal ideological uniformity.
In other words, to get a job there you had to be an avowed liberal and Democrat and once you were in, your main job was to make the CFPB look good by exacting huge fines from financial companies without giving them recourse to due process.
This situation largely mirrors that of the federal bureaucracy, academia, and journalism, where only people with the “correct” views stand a chance of getting employed or rising up in the ranks.
How is this so different than the Communist dictatorships of yore? I guess one important difference is that everyone understood that right or wrong, the ideological conformity of the ruling regime was most definitely imposed from the top with violence or the explicit threat of it.
Our leftist ideological conformity has been imposed through more indirect means, a bit more organically and gradually and rarely accompanied by the threat of violence.
But the results are starting to converge in scope, degree, and intensity. Not satisfied with controlling the major institutions of American society, the left now seeks to use this hegemony to impose its views on the populace with vicious persistence.
Whether denying employment to conservatives in the federal bureaucracy, or using the IRS to target conservative groups, or assigning highly biased agents to investigate politicians, our government is now actively engaging in a kind of ideological purge of conservatives.
Conservative thoughts and values are almost completely excluded from Hollywood and except for a few right-leaning outposts, journalists present at best a left-leaning view of the world, and at worst one which is openly hostile to people of traditional values.
Fortunately for our country, and not just for conservatives, we have the Constitution to provide significant protections from the outright imposition of leftist tyranny. It is essential that all facets of American professional life be open to and accepting of multiple views and that we don’t choke our country on group-think of any political leaning.
Otherwise, the fascism that the left fears so much will find fertile ground and choke the freedom of all Americans.
Trey Hoffman
Peachtree City, Ga.
