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The Death of Tolerance and Rise of Fascism in America

It is ironic that the price of diversity is actually that which it purports to embrace. Diversity of opinion is dead. It’s epitaph, written in garish rainbow letters on an uncarved hunk of stone for fear that a particular visage or symbol might offend some group- Tolerance.

America has a problem with fascism. Don’t agree that a group of whining, vindictive children privileged enough to have the chance at higher education are as oppressed as they say they are? Then you’re part of the problem. Dare to dissent on the principle of self-interested caution with the president’s program for importing Syrian refugees? Then you’re not only an immoral coward, you’re un-American.

The message: fall in line or be destroyed. But in the name of tolerance. Be assuaged by that when you’re freezing and starving after the ghoulish captains of the politically correct police have drummed you out of society.

Words cannot describe how chilling the new political reality is. Justice is supposed to mean equal treatment for everyone, to lift up all people by guaranteeing them that their rights are at true parity with their richer, more connected neighbor.  That is a truly noble concept, so simple and yet completely out of  the reach of the vast majority of the entire human race. Now unvalued by pontificating activists who do not look for an equal playing field. They do not even pretend to want equality. They want suffering, for the so-called powerful to be dragged down into the muck, to be ostracized and disenfranchised as they claim to be.

Never mind the repudiated adage “might makes right,” or the more just mantra of meritocracy, “right makes might,” the rallying cry for the modern moralists is “noise makes right.” It’s the loudest voices that have the moral imperative. Inherent human worth no longer speaks to a sense of worth that exists from the inherent ability to think, grow and accomplish; it is now a sense of entitlement- existence means everyone else must explicitly acknowledge the personal glory in every person other than himself.

This extremely warped view of hierarchy is simply sad; sad because it is so wrapped up in itself that it does not recognize how it embodies that which it claims to hate; sad because it is the crippled, indulged child of desperation and self-doubt. H

The fascist overtones are downright chilling. Dissent has become treason, even when individual sympathies lie with the aggrieved party in most instances. For coddled children who have been told that they possess inherent talent and not raw potential that must be cultivated through hard work, this attitude is reprehensible and maddening, but understandable. For government officials who feel justified in maligning their opponents on a personal level, who advance the idea that differing judgments invalidates the very right of the minority to even have an opinion, this attitude is nightmarish. Left unchecked, it threatens to become a superiority complex that justifies not only the rhetorical invalidation of rights but the political negation of rights.

Put all these elements together and it is not hyperbolic to say that fascism has come to America; it is a fact. It is the result of ideology becoming more than a belief in a set of principles, arrived at by analytic thought and adhered to through the careful process of rationalism.

Thomas Jefferson wrote of the evils of ideology, writing “I never submitted the whole system of my opinions to the creed of any party of men whatever in religion, in philosophy, in politics, or in anything else where I was capable of thinking for myself. Such an addiction is the last degradation of a free and moral agent.” Unfortunately, this is no longer a statement of personal conduct but a prophesy.

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Katherine Revello

A recent graduate of the University of Maine, where she majored in journalism and political science, Katherine Revello is an aspiring political commentator. Her focuses include theory, the philosophy of money and populism. Currently, she is a graduate student at Villanova University. She is the founder of The Politics of Discretion, a blog dedicated to advancing her philosophy of discretionism. Follow her on Twitter: @MrsWynandPapers

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