Another is to coin the accompanying phrase, “state supremacist” to answer Lenin’s famous “Who whom?” question: Who has the power to do what to whom? For a statist/state supremacist, it is the state that has the power to do what it wants to the individual, not the other way around.

I think the best thing to call them is “progressives,” always with the quotation marks, because that’s what they call themselves. “Statist” may be accurate, but it’s very hard to get a whole new vocabulary broadly adopted.

It really is about capturing a fixed “pie” and, unfortunately, we’re out of time to enforce basic economics education in the classroom that could have changed that pre-medieval mindset. So, unfortunately, vast segments of the lumpen proletariat will not ever get it. However, thanks to their ignorance, they may yet get to experience it – a shrinking “pie” society, that is.

Book ran a great post a few months back in which she chose the word “Statist” as well. Any chance of bumping that post up to the top again, Book?

Instead, people are trained to believe that America has had all the worst actions in our history. Thus conservatives, people who wish to conserve our history, are evil for they wish to keep all the bad things and prevent all the good New Things coming down the pipe.

“Statist” is a true description of those people.

Re Ronald Haydon’s point that
“Both concepts [ie sharia govt and govt control of salaries] scare me to the core and radicalize me. And I’m usually not that kind of person at all.”

I agree; I feel the same way.

For the first time in my life, I am thinking of joining a demonstration — the “tea party” — and as a personal aside, I can’t tell you how utterly distasteful and foreign the idea of joining a movement feels to me as a rational individual. Congregations are for church and temple; I don’t like mass political rallies.

However.

The situation is alarming. As one of the usually lion-hearted guys at Powerline wrote, “I am depressed because the president of the United States is a fool who will immiserate us, render us wards of the state and lose us our life and liberty to those who understand what they are about. ”

Quite. Let’s acknowledge the reality of the situation and our fears; but let’s not confuse trends with inevitability.

The question is how best to organize principled resistance. I can’t believe that most Americans are so un-American as to take this lying down. Maybe it’s only a matter of faith on my part, but to counteract this tendency towards acedia and despair, I will quote the modern patron saint of courage and liberty:

“Still, if you will not fight for the right when you can easily win without bloodshed; if you will not fight when your victory will be sure and not too costly; you may come to the moment when you will have to fight with all the odds against you and only a precarious chance of survival. There may even be a worse case. You may have to fight when there is no hope of victory, because it is better to perish than live as slaves.

I reckon we are at stage 2 1/2. Victory is unsure and will be costly; I’m not sure about the odds. But we can always do what is right!

Clearly, Communists, Nazis and Facists had one common attribute. They were all Statists.