Believe it or not, we owe the evil Dr. Fauci a debt of gratitude.  He has demonstrated for all time the costs and folly of allowing ourselves to be ruled by government experts.  In addition, he has even given us the perfect name for rule by government experts: fauciism.

Fauciism is fascism with a difference.  Fascist rulers favored military uniforms and attacked opposition to their rule as treason against the nation; Fauci wears the garb of the government bureaucrat and declares that opposition to his rule is an attack on science.  

Fauci and his minions were wrong on AIDS — Fauci caused an earlier panic when he told the American people and Congress that we could catch AIDS from casual, merely social contact with the infected — and he and his minions have been wrong so many ways on the Wuhan flu that it has been difficult to keep an accurate count.

The Germans and the Italians paid a terrible price for letting the fascists take over.  We can hope that the terrible price they paid inoculated them from trying that form of rule again, at least for a while.  May the terrible price we have paid for allowing Fauci to have his way with America and with the American economy awaken us to what must be done before it is too late.

What's to be done?  Let's begin to find our way to the answer by asking how we got here. 

How we got here is no mystery.  Putting government experts in charge has been the goal of the Progressives all along.  From the beginning, they understood that transforming America into a country ruled by experts would be an enormous undertaking.  Consequently, their plan was to do it step by step, progressively.  For over a century, the Progressives have been replacing rule by the people through their elected representatives with rule by government experts.  They created an ever-expanding administrative state composed of agencies like the CDC, and put credentialed experts in charge.  These experts were Progressives who immediately set to work expanding the reach of the agencies they were put in charge of.  This is known as government overreach.

We owe Fauci.  He has shown us how far America has traveled on the Progressive path. 

Growing up, I frequently heard people say "it's a free country."  Today, I hear those words only in old movies.  When I have tried the phrase out on people recently, I get puzzled looks or sometimes a guffaw.

Perhaps the worst consequence of rule by experts is the bad effect it has on our fellow citizens.  Like fascism, fauciism has an allure for people who want to rule over others.  It can bring out the worst in our neighbors.  Fauci's absurd edicts offer certain of our neighbors the opportunity to become self-appointed enforcers of those edicts.  You know the people I mean.  They can be seen driving their cars alone with the windows up and fully masked, ready when they are out and about to pounce on any deviationist they encounter in a public place.  Fauciism, like fascism, can't be carried out by the ruler alone; the ruler needs plenty of people in the government and in the general public who want the experience of lording over others.

To save the republic — and for the good of our neighbors who are drawn to fauciism — we need to get busy unwinding the Progressive state.  The target is clear.  Nineteen thirteen is to the Progressive State what 1776 is to the United States.  Our task is simple: eliminate the agencies of the federal government the Progressives have imposed on us since 1913. 

One by one, those government agencies have revealed themselves.  If the American republic goes down not by foreign conquest, the role of the FBI in America's demise will be obvious to any observer.  Clearly, the FBI has to go, along with the felonious FISA courts, the astonishingly destructive Department of Education, and all of the other elements of the Progressive Leviathan that have replaced the federal government America once had.

But don't we need to keep some parts of it?  What about the Department of Defense?  I welcome the question.  The proponents of the DOD argued that WWII demonstrated the need for a central agency to co-ordinate the activities of America's armed forces.  How has that worked out?  Well, America won WWII — and hasn't won a war since the DOD was founded.  Maybe, just maybe, the Progressive urge to centralize everything within an ever more gigantic bureaucracy is always counter-productive. 

Naturally, dismantling the Leviathan will need to be done systematically and as intelligently as possible.  For example, to eliminate the IRS, Congress will need the advice of those economists who have argued for decades that there are better and less totalitarian ways to finance the federal government.

It is true that restoring the Republic will be possible only with honest elections.   Cleaning up elections in America remains job one.  With political power restored to voting citizens, we can set to work restoring the system the founders gave us.

We can measure our progress by how close the federal government is to the one America had before the Progressives set to work changing it into the enormous, intrusive government we have today.

Robert Curry serves on the Board of Directors of the Claremont Institute.  He is the author of Reclaiming Common Sense: Finding Truth in a Post-Truth World and Common Sense Nation: Unlocking the Forgotten Power of the American Idea.  Both are published by Encounter Books.

Image via Pxhere.

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