Governmental suppression of competing ideologies has a long history, going back, at least, 4,000 years to the time of the pharaohs in ancient Egypt.  As Toby Wilkinson writes, in the Twelfth Dynasty (1938–1755 B.C.), the pharaohs "displayed a ruthless streak ... deploying sophisticated propaganda alongside brute force, subtle persuasion backed up by terror tactics" (The Rise and Fall of Ancient Egypt, 141).

This use of propaganda and concomitant resort to terror was not very different from what would follow in Persia, Greece, and Carthage, and in ancient Rome.  Nor was it different from the horrific violence of the modern era, from Nazi Germany to Stalinist Russia or Maoist China — and from what continues today in many authoritarian countries and in those, like the United States, that are rapidly becoming more authoritarian.

Our most important task today is to understand, as President Bush put it after 9/11, that "evil is real" and that the task we face is monumental because of the massive power of federal and state/local governments.  Government now controls 40% of our economy and aspires to take everything.  If we fail to rein in the explosive growth of government and the authoritarian power that goes with it, we will lose our precious inheritance of democratic capitalism — the most compassionate and productive system of government ever to exist.  And it will be our fault that we have lost our freedom.  We will live in a society not at all different from that of the pharaohs, or that of modern-day communist China.

For too long we have assumed that we can live with the "public/private partnership," as it is called.  That pairing of public and private is never a partnership — it is only dictatorship.  Once government has wormed its way into our affairs — as it has done in education, business, and now energy production — it becomes the dominant player.

Few can now recall the heated struggle of the early 1960s to keep the federal government out of public education.  At that time, it was still understood that government aid to education came with menacing strings — the right to determine what is taught and how, and by whom.  Most now assume that the federal government has a rightful or "natural" role in determining curricula, setting standards, testing, and other matters, when in fact it was only 60 years ago when D.C. had no role at all and the Department of Education did not exist.  (It was created in 1979 under President Carter.)

What, after all, is the proper role of a federal "department" of education?  Of all federal departments, it is the one most needful of being abolished.  Its modus operandi is to entice educational institutions to accept funding, taken from revenue collected from residents of the states, in return for federal control of institutions that under the Constitution should be controlled by the states.  In other words, after seizing money from residents of states — residents who by right should control local schools — the Department of Education uses this money to persuade schools and colleges to accept federal control, and it doesn't take much persuading.

Administrators, who now control educational institutions rather than teachers and professors, are eager to accept federal funds to increase their own salaries, staff, and power.  This corrupt system is not driven by the proper purpose of education: to educate students in actual content areas such as literature, history, math, and science.  Those subjects themselves have now been eviscerated as a result of federal influence intent on woke thinking.  Literature courses no longer teach Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, and Milton; it is all ethnic, LGBT, and Marxist ideology disguised as literature.  And teachers and students are willing to go along with it for their own mercenary reasons: reading Shakespeare and Milton is intellectually demanding; repeating the mantra that "white is bad, black is good" is not.

Unfortunately, identity politics and woke thinking are a dead end, no matter what the totalitarian state would like us to believe.  As long as Americans believe that race, sex, and class determine one's status, Americans will remain divided and unable to challenge the obvious fact that a political elite now rule in place of the people.  Elections can be rigged, as I believe they were in 2020, and public opinion can be manipulated.  When politicians wish to distract attention from their own corrupt or inept behavior, they can travel to the site of a legislative assembly insurrection and celebrate participants in the insurrection.  Or they can just hide out and refuse to take questions, as Biden has done now for two and a half years.

Those who believe that what we have is just "democratic socialism" — the grandfatherly mantra of Bernie Sanders — are blind to what is happening.  Agency raids have become commonplace, from the outrageous FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago to the more than 625,000 IRS audits conducted in 2022, soon to be greater because of the recent doubling of IRS numbers.  Liberal bias is not just hypothetical; it is real, and it is designed to intimidate conservatives who challenge the political elite.

The power of the State is now vastly greater than it was in the day of the pharaohs, when a small army was sent to impose rule on a few surrounding districts.  We now have a totalitarian state that, through its own size and power, and through that of public employee and teacher unions, compliant media, and welfare clientele, is approaching permanent control.  The election of conservatives in 2024 will help to slow the process, but the task of draining the swamp of left-wing ideologues will take generations.  It took 4,000 years in ancient Egypt, and then at the cost of foreign rule imposed by Roman armies — and in that case, the cure was worse than the disease.

There is still a chance our democracy can be saved, but only with the help of conservatives like you and me.  Every one of us should participate in the election of 2024 and, of course, vote.  Maybe then we can drive Pharaoh from the banks of the Potomac.

Jeffrey Folks is the author of many books and articles on American culture including Heartland of the Imagination (2011).  

Image via Pxhere.