Our 'Man in the High Castle'
Hawthorne Abendsen is a subversive filmmaker and title character in the critically acclaimed television series The Man in the High Castle, the dark vision of an America occupied by Nazi Germany and the Empire of Japan following the victory of the Axis powers in World War II, based on a novel by Phillip K. Dick.
Finding Abendsen and every copy of his work is the obsession of the American Reich because his films document a dangerous alternate reality: a parallel universe in which the Allies win the war and domestic life unfolds as we’ve known it, with all the competing passions of representative democracy and pleasures of individual liberty -- ideals that fascist governments suppress and supplant with forced conformity of thought and a profane moral order.
The series has been wildly successful. One reason, no doubt, is morbid curiosity. The chilling specter of living under the yoke of a totalitarian regime that strips away all personal, political and religious freedoms for the sake of “the common good” -- as defined by an oligarchy of Orwellian overlords -- is instinctively abhorrent to Americans.
At least it used to be.
Today, you’d have your doubts listening to the leaders of the progressive wing of the Democratic party. They speak unflinchingly about a utopian America where the playing field has been permanently leveled so that everyone is guaranteed more than just an equal opportunity -- a word they consider alt-right code for discrimination against non-white, non-male, non-hetero, undocumented, less educated and lower-skilled people.
Their dream is for everyone to be guaranteed an equal outcome in securing “the blessings of liberty for themselves and their posterity.”
Except, that is, for the blessing of liberty itself.
As every leftist knows, individual liberties -- and the Bill of Rights that perpetuates them -- are the single greatest obstacles to achieving true social equality. That’s why, while students in Hong Kong fight for freedom of speech, progressive students here fight against it.
They imagine themselves soldiers in a new cultural revolution that will make sure that creating a “harmonious society,” as Hu Jintao called it, is the only consideration in any political decision.
That requires, of course, rewriting the US Constitution, which they see as a shameful anachronism, beginning with the very idea of a “United States.”
The revolution’s first orders of business will be to abolish those states, subsume their governments, dismantle the Electoral College and reapportion the Senate: eliminating all vestiges of a homesteading mentality that has allowed sparsely populated and reactionary territories to subvert the will of the majority of the American people in national elections.
The next order of business will be to transform business itself, beginning with the conviction and imprisonment of the entire cabal of C-Suite capitalists who’ve enriched themselves by raping the Earth and exploiting American workers -- workers who, through their wise and compassionate leaders, will be the rightful shareholders of every corporate entity.
The final task will be to address the lingering opiate epidemic. Not pharmaceutical drug use, but the “opiate of the people:” religion. Its intolerant beliefs and archaic moral codes will have no place in a progressive America in which behaviors are judged good or evil depending on their cultural utility.
When complete, this new USA -- United Socialists of America -- will submit itself to the oversight of the United Nations, and that beacon of hope, the Statue of Liberty, renamed the Statue of Progress, will then welcome to a borderless land all progressive peoples of the world yearning to be useful to the government in achieving its noble goals.
If you think these storylines are relegated to dystopian dramas, think again. They will be the storylines of American life, should the far left of the Democratic party ever ascend to permanent power.
Enter our Man in the High Castle.
Like the mercurial Hawthorne Abendsen, who bolsters the Nazi Resistance with captivating images of a free and open society, our Man in the High Castle is a radical resistance unto himself, using his bully pulpit on Pennsylvania Avenue to preach unashamedly about the traditional American values and common sense correctives we need to defend Jeffersonian democracy against the onslaught of collectivism.
He’s the first existential threat to socialist ideology since Ronald Reagan and will continue to be public enemy number one to every Marxist, globalist, secularist and identity politician in America, especially in the election year ahead.
As such, progressives and their media allies will put a target on his back every minute of every day -- a target he’ll move to the front of his Brioni suit, place over his heart, and wear as a badge of honor.
Timothy Philen is an opinion writer and author of Harper&Row/Lippincott’s “You CAN Run Away From It!,” a satirical indictment of American pop psychology.