The Authoritarian Moment

by Ben Shapiro

  Under the absolute government of one alone, despotism struck the body crudely, so as to reach the soul; and the soul, escaping from those blows, rose gloriously above it; but in democratic republics, tyranny does not proceed in this way; it leaves the body and goes straight for the soul. The master no longer says to it: You shall think as I do or you shall die; he says: You are free not to think as I do; your life, your goods, everything remains to you; but from this day on, you are a stranger among us. You shall keep your privileges in the city, but they will become useless to you; for if you crave the vote of your fellow citizens, they will not grant it to you, and if you demand only their esteem, they will still pretend to refuse it to you. You shall remain among men, but you shall lose your rights of humanity. When you approach those like you, they shall flee you as being impure; and those who believe in your innocence, even they shall abandon you, for one would flee them in their turn. Go in peace, I leave you your life, but I leave it to you worse than death.37

  This is the America we currently occupy. As Axios reporter Jim VandeHei writes, “Blue America is ascendant in almost every area: It won control of all three branches of government; dominates traditional media; owns, controls and lives on the dominant social platforms; and has the employee-level power at big tech companies to force corporate decisions . . . our nation is rethinking politics, free speech, the definition of truth and the price of lies. This moment—and our decisions—will be studied by our kid’s grandkids.”38

  There is no respite: your employer requires your fealty to woke principles; corporations require that you mirror their political priorities; the media treat you as a crude barbarian. There are no distractions: Hollywood mocks your morals and damns you for adherence to them; the sports world requires that you mimic the popular perversities of the moment before being allowed to escape; social media controls the flow of information you can see, while preventing you from speaking your mind. And each day you wonder if today will be the day the mob comes for you.

  This book is about how our authoritarian moment came to be. It is about the takeover of our most powerful institutions by a core of radicals, and about the miasmatic hatred and dire consequences Americans face for standing up for heretofore uncontroversial principles.

  But it is also about something more.

  It is about how to fight back in the right way.

  Because buried in authoritarianism is always one deep flaw: its insecurity. If authoritarians had broad and deep support, they wouldn’t require compulsion. The dirty secret of our woke authoritarians is that they are the minority.

  You are the majority.

  It’s not that everybody hates you. It’s that millions of Americans are afraid to say that they agree with you.

  We have been silenced.

  And now is the time for the silence to be broken by one simple, powerful word, a word that has meant freedom since the beginning of time:

  No.

  Chapter 1

  How to Silence a Majority

  On November 8, 2016, a bombastic reality television star became president of the United States. Donald Trump became president despite months of media hysteria and extraordinary attacks on his campaign and his character; he became president despite the confident predictions of the pollsters and pundits that he had virtually no chance.

  Most of all, the pollsters and pundits got Trump’s level of support wrong because they got Trump supporters wrong. Trump’s supporters, they believed, were a diamond-hard core of bigots, annoying but generally unthreatening—a set of “deplorables,” in Hillary Clinton’s phraseology.

  Then Trump won.

  This presented the political elitists with two possible choices: they could engage in some well-earned introspection, considering the possibility that they had missed something vital in American political life and reexamining their premises about the nature of the American public; or they could castigate tens of millions of Americans as moral and intellectual deficients.

  They chose the latter.

  After some initial media coverage, in which Brooklyn-based, Gucci-loafer-wearing would-be-journalistic–Jane Goodalls covered Trump supporters as mysterious, grunting gorillas-in-the-mist; in which graduates of the New York University School of Journalism, fresh-faced and bright-eyed after classes with Lauren Duca on how to bitch about Tucker Carlson in Teen Vogue, traveled to fabled primitive red state America—a chaotic and brutal place filled with chain restaurants and Walmarts and churches, and characterized by a serious lack of culturally sensitive vegan restaurants and artisanal coffee shops and Planned Parenthood facilities; in which said ace reporters talked to Poor Old Billy, a down-on-his-luck former factory worker merely aching for some Democratic subsidy programs . . . the journalistic establishment came to a conclusion: Trump voters were, as they had originally thought, and as Hillary Clinton had once said, deplorable. They were, as Barack Obama had once characterized them, bitter clingers, desperately clutching to God and guns and racism, wearing their hard hats to decaying factories, then turning them in for white hoods at night to terrorize the neighborhood minorities. Trump voters were poor white Americans in dying Rust Belt towns, hoping to stop demographic shifts by voting Trump. (It somehow escaped attention that some 2.8 million New Yorkers voted for Trump, or 4.5 million Californians. There are lots of Republicans who don’t sit around in diners wearing trucker hats.)

  This was a convenient narrative. It certainly relieved journalists of the obligation to leave their comfort zones, both literally and figuratively—no need to spend a night in rural Ohio rather than the comforts of the Upper West Side, or to bother discussing uncomfortable issues with the rubes. It also allowed journalists to abandon the practice of journalism more broadly. Now, instead of focusing on Trump’s policies, they could simply focus on his tweets, the id-driven manifestations of their original thesis: every tweet could be read as a confirmation of their hypothesis about red-state Americans. Now, instead of examining all sides of various political controversies, they could simply assume the sinfulness of their opponents, and demand surrender. Journalism became a search-and-destroy mission, directed not merely at Trump but at Trump’s supporters.

  This wasn’t much of a change, as it turned out. Republicans of all stripes had always been the problem, not just Trump. Before Trump was a glint in the media’s eye, the media had targeted a small-town plumber who had the temerity to ask Barack Obama a question about his tax policy; they dug up his tax record, his home address, his plumbing license. Mitt Romney, the most milquetoast human being of the modern era, had been castigated by the media as a racist and a bigot. John McCain, who would later be hailed as an anti-Trump hero, was hit with similar slander.

  The media itself had shifted on Trump personally over the years. For years, he’d been treated as easy clickbait, a genial figure of comedy and an outsized figure of wealth and pomposity, an icon of garish frivolity and entertaining charlatanry . . . up until the point he declared himself a Republican candidate for the presidency. Even then, Trump received late night phone calls from Jeff Zucker and advice from Joe Scarborough. Then he won the Republican nomination. Overnight he became the fonthead of evil—because overnight he became the symbol of his supporters, not the other way around. After all, it wasn’t as though the media would have treated Ted Cruz or Marco Rubio as anything but pariahs had either won the nomination. As Trump would later argue, they hated him mostly because they hated his supporters.

  This created an extraordinary amount of loyalty to Trump among Republicans—Republicans felt that Trump had merely taken bullets otherwise aimed at them. And they weren’t totally wrong. The political slings and arrows were aimed at them. Trump just made an easier, more convenient, and more justifiable target. The media wasn’t the only institution committed to the narrative that all conservatives—or at least the ones who hadn’t flipped and joined the Lincoln Project, earning Strange New RespectTM—were vicious racists, know-nothing xenophobes, bigoted idiots. Nearly every major American inst
itution was committed to the same idea.

  Conservatives felt the left-wing authoritarianism. They understood it on a gut level. And they hated it.

  They felt the top-down censorship from social media, which deemed their speech “hate speech” and their worldview “harassment.” They felt the anti-conventionalism from Hollywood, which painted conservatives as the great threat to a more beautiful, tolerant, and diverse country, and from their bosses, who declared their fealty to tolerant, liberal ideals while not-so-subtly threatening to fire dissenters, and from their friends and family, who told them in no uncertain terms that they were not welcome at the table. They saw the revolutionary aggression of a radical Left directed against fundamental American ideas—and patted on the back by all of America’s most powerful institutions.

  Conservatives were to be treated as outsiders. Anyone who voted for Trump was to be banned from polite society, to be treated as a gangrenous limb. Better to lop them off from the body politic than allow their poison to fester. In fact, it wasn’t enough merely to silence conservatives who didn’t actively oppose Trump. Silence, as the nonsensical woke slogan went, was violence. Conservatives had to be outed. Even those who might not feel themselves sympathetic to Trump had to be outed if they so much as engaged in conversation with Trump voters, or even those open to engaging in conversation with Trump voters. Such discussions, the logic went, would serve to humanize the inhuman, to tolerate the intolerable. Excision of the occasional Trump supporter was utterly insufficient—exorcism of the very concepts that could lead to the presence of Trump support had to be undertaken. Confessions had to be forced. Purity tests had to be administered. Struggle sessions had to be initiated.

  Symbols of loyalty would be demanded: properly self-righteous hashtags on Twitter; anti-Trump bumper stickers on cars; semantically overloaded, tautology-laden lawn signs plunked into well-manicured grass. Statements of dissociation would have to be undertaken: dissociation from newly identified code terms like “meritocracy” and “Western civilization” and “color-blindness.” Dissenters would be lumped in with Trump supporters. The Overton Window—the window of acceptable discourse—would be smashed shut, then boarded over.

  And, our cultural leftist authoritarians thought, it had worked.

  In 2018, Democrats won an overwhelming electoral victory, swamping Republicans across the country and seizing control of the House of Representatives, flipping 41 seats blue. Support for Democrats washed through the suburban areas of the United States, flipping 308 state legislative races in favor of Democrats. That was without Trump on the ballot.

  With Trump on the ballot—the symbol of evil himself, bigotry and racism and vulgarity and brutality made Orange Flesh—surely Democrats would usher in a never-ending Golden Era of dominance, and cement Republicans into minority status for a generation.

  And sure enough, one week before the election of 2020, Joe Biden was apparently ahead in the polls by nearly double digits. Democrats had a generic ballot advantage in Congress of nearly seven points.

  Triumph was at hand.

  Except it wasn’t.

  It turns out that if the major cultural institutions in a society declare all-out war on a large percentage of the population, those people don’t convert—they go underground. And that’s precisely what they did. They fibbed to pollsters, or didn’t pick up the phone at all. They didn’t tell their friends and family how they were voting. They didn’t post on Facebook or Twitter. They didn’t tell their bosses their real thoughts about Joe Biden or Kamala Harris or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

  Then they entered the polling places, and they voted.

  And they voted against those who had declared them the cultural enemy.

  Donald Trump may have lost the election, but Republicans across the land didn’t. Republicans outperformed the polls across the board. Many pollsters had projected that Trump would lose by double digits nationwide; instead, Trump personally won more votes than any other Republican in American history, and more votes than any candidate in American history outside of his opponent, Joe Biden. Some pollsters had suggested that Republicans would easily lose the Senate and drop a dozen seats in the House. Instead, Republicans nearly maintained the Senate (losing control only because of Trump’s asinine intervention in two winnable Georgia Senate races), gained seats in the House, maintained their stranglehold on state legislatures in a redistricting year, and nearly retained the White House, too.

  The elevation of a geriatric nonentity like Joe Biden was no endorsement of the Democratic agenda. It was far more likely a rejection of Trump’s personality—which came as little surprise after years of erratic tweeting, bizarre personal behavior, and extraordinarily savage media coverage. Trump underperformed Republicans in nearly every state with a competitive Senate race; Republicans swept into power in New Hampshire, where Trump lost by nearly eight points. Trump bled in the suburbs; had he lost the suburbs by the same margins he did in 2016, he would have been reelected. So Americans may have rejected Donald Trump personally. But the silent majority—a majority the media, the pollsters, and the experts completely missed—broadly rejected the Democratic agenda, in truly shocking fashion.

  Americans didn’t vote in defiance of the polls because they were racists. They didn’t vote in favor of Trump because they were bigots. They didn’t vote for Susan Collins in Maine and Thom Tillis in North Carolina and Steve Daines in Montana because they were benighted rednecks committed to a vanishing demographic majority. Latinos didn’t vote in outsized numbers for Trump because they were suddenly “white,” even though Pulitzer Prize–winning prevaricator and much-ballyhooed mountebank Nikole Hannah-Jones of The New York Times declared them so. Black males didn’t vote in surprising numbers for Trump because they had abandoned their race, as Joe Biden himself implied. Suburban white women didn’t vote Republican because they had decided they were in love with Donald Trump’s casual grossness with women.

  These Americans voted the way they did because they are Americans, and because they demand to be heard. Because they refuse to surrender to the alliance of the authoritarian Left and their liberal enablers. Because they never agreed with the media or their bosses or their idiot nephews in college carrying around copies of unread Ta-Nehisi Coates books to get laid. Because they won’t be bullied into putting up meaningless symbols on their social media pages, or into declaring that all police are racists, or into cheering on the idea that America ought to be denigrated.

  They went quiet. They didn’t go away.

  And then they weren’t quiet anymore.

  That’s why the pollsters got it wrong. It wasn’t because pollsters are purely incompetent. It’s because pollsters can’t pry answers out of those who have been intimidated into silence. As Eric Kaufman, professor of politics at the University of London, observed, pollsters didn’t actually get it wrong with white non-college-educated voters—those who are likely to feel the least peer pressure from the self-empowered newfangled cultural fascisti. They got it wrong with precisely the people most likely to feel pressured: white college graduates. As Kaufman concludes, “If America cannot reform its regime of speech discipline, it has no hope of overcoming its yawning cultural divide.”1

  In order to overcome that yawning cultural divide, however, we must first acknowledge the obvious: our divide is cultural. It is not economic. It is not racial. It is cultural.

  THE CULTURE WAR

  Our philosophical betters—the elitist opinion makers who claim to understand the deeper meaning in our politics—generally present two explanations for division in America: race and class. Both are utterly insufficient.

  The Marxist theory of class-driven division has long provided a shoddy explanation for real-world phenomena. During World War I, Marxist theorists were firmly convinced that international warfare would certainly result in a revolution by the working class, only to find that workers of the world were actually Brits, Frenchmen, Germans, and Russians. Today, Thomas Piketty explains Trump by app
ealing to rising income inequality2—but can’t understand just why Trump voters continue to reject the overt redistributionism of the Democratic Party. By Marxist theory, Trump voters should have become Bernie voters over time. They aren’t.

  The racial theory of American politics is similarly non-explanatory. That theory supposed that Trump’s outsized white support in 2016 was evidence of a white majoritarian backlash to an ascendant minority coalition. But that theory was firmly debunked in 2018, when white suburban voters handed a majority to Democrats in Congress, and in 2020, when Trump increased his vote share among minorities but lost vote share among white voters, and white men particularly. If racial animus were the driving force behind Trumpism, or Republicanism more broadly, that wouldn’t have manifest itself in a 55 percent Cuban vote for Trump in Florida, or in Trump closing the gap in majority-Latino Rio Grande Valley districts like Starr and Hidalgo counties from 60 and 40 points in 2016 to 5 and 17 in 2020.

  Trump didn’t overperform estimates among Latino and black voters because he was a racist. He overperformed because the elitists in our institutions declare things racist even when they aren’t. Joe Biden suggested that Trump engaged in full-time dog whistling, despite Trump’s repeated denunciations of white supremacy and his unprecedented outreach to minority communities, including a criminal justice reform program largely opposed by many in the grassroots conservative community. But as it turns out, elitist white Americans and woke “anti-racism” advocates who largely overpopulate the media, corporate America, social media halls of power, and Hollywood don’t have a read on broader minority viewpoints. When these elitists declare that standing with the police is a “dog whistle,” voters of all stripes tune out.3