Totalitarianism is a political system in which a single ruling power seeks to control every aspect of public and private life.
It is different from authoritarianism, which demands political obedience but leaves society’s private and cultural spheres intact.
So, in a totalitarian society, individual freedom is erased in both its private culture and politics. In authoritarianism it is just politics. You have to be loyal to the ruler, or at least pretend to be, but your private life and even some parts of the economy can enjoy some freedom as long as they don’t undermine the regime’s rule.
Examples of authoritarian regimes are Franco’s Spain or Chile under Pinochet.
Totalitarian regimes are Nazi Germany and Stalin’s USSR.
I see totalitarian tendencies on mostly the left and authoritarian ones on the right. I don’t welcome either, but, to lay my cards on the table, I would much rather be governed by a rightwing authoritarian regime than a left wing totalitarian regime.
On the left you have a form of soft totalitarianism that, in Rod Dreher’s own words looks like this….
When people think of totalitarianism, what comes to mind is gulags, secret police, torture — basically, Stalinism, or Orwell’s “Nineteen Eighty-Four. This is understandable, because that was the twentieth century experience. But if we are looking out for the KGB agents to come roaring down the street to haul us off to prison, we’re not going to see it, and we’re going to miss the softer ways totalitarianism is emerging in our society.
Totalitarianism is a political system in which only one political ideology is allowed, and everything in society becomes politicized. An authoritarian government only wants you to obey politically. A totalitarian system wants your soul. When you see something as absurd as Oreo cookies celebrating LGBT Pride with rainbow-colored fillings, you know that you are dealing with a totalitarian mentality. After the Russian Revolution, the Soviet chess society tried to keep politics from infiltrating the game. They put out a statement saying that they wanted to keep “chess for chess’s sake.” The Communist government chastised them, saying that all things, even chess, must be made to serve the revolution. This is the same mentality that makes Oreos woke.
Hard totalitarianism depended on inflicting terror and fear of pain on people to force them to conform. Soft totalitarianism, by contrast, depends on people being afraid of losing comfort, status, and at worst, employment, to force conformity. Nevertheless, because so few people today will be willing to suffer for the truth, it will achieve by softer means what the earlier version achieved through harsh means. What’s more, I think that the enforcers won’t need to resort to hard tactics to enforce their ideology. They will use sophisticated surveillance technology, like the Chinese social credit system, to regulate consumer privileges and access to jobs. Nobody will be sent to prison for their faith. They will simply not be able to buy or sell if they are judged by the algorithms to be bad citizens. China is well on its way to implementing this kind of control.
Finally, the softness of soft totalitarianism is also a reference to the fact that we are building a total control society for the sake of compassion, in order to create a “safe space” for favored minorities. The other day I was dressed down on my blog for “cruelly misgendering” a transgender man — this, because I called her a “she,” which, biologically, she is. This totalitarianism is therapeutic, you see.
You don’t quite have these tendencies on the right. What you do have is Trump and his assault on our institutions and democratic norms, especially elections themselves.
But there is some right wing assault on intellectual liberty like the anti-Semitism and Free Palestine stuff, eradicating DEI considerations in college, and maybe some of the trans stuff. I tend to be sympathetic to the right on these points, but from the perspective of someone on the left, I can understand how they are alarming.
But, the point is that it seems like both the left and right are heading in some sort of non democratic direction.
So I looked into why this is and found the work of Hannah Arendt who literally wrote a book titled The Origins of Totalitarianism that goes over this very thing. I read some of it but also consulted chatgpt and according to her work there are broadly four conditions for totalitarianism which are the following.
1. Mass loneliness and alienation: people feel isolated from one another, disconnected from community and meaningful belonging. Arendt, especially in The Origins of Totalitarianism, argued that atomized, isolated individuals which are cut off from durable institutions and communities are especially vulnerable to mass movements and totalitarian control. “Loneliness” is not just social isolation but a political condition which means being deprived of a common world of shared meaning.
2. Loss of faith in institutions and hierarchies: people no longer trust traditional structures like government, religion, law, or authority in general. The breakdown of authority structures and traditional institutions are all preconditions for mass movements and when authority no longer commands respect, people become susceptible to demagogues.
3. Love of transgression for its own sake: people celebrate breaking rules or norms, not out of principle, but just because it feels liberating or exciting. This condition describes a cultural mood in which rule-breaking is celebrated not as a means to achieve justice, freedom, or truth, but as an end in itself. In such a climate, the mere act of violating norms carries its own prestige.
In earlier eras, transgression was often tied to principle. Revolutionaries broke laws to secure liberty, reformers violated norms to expose injustice, artists defied convention to pursue beauty or truth. But in a culture saturated with irony and shock value transgression often loses its moral or political anchor. It becomes playful, even nihilistic: “I break the rule not because it’s unjust, but because breaking it proves my independence.”
4. Relativized “truth”: truth becomes subjective, defined not by objective reality but by what suits one’s wishes, emotions, or interests. It is a form of emotivism.
Arendt repeatedly warned about the collapse of factual truth. In essays like “Truth and Politics” and in Origins, she showed how totalitarian regimes destabilized the distinction between fact and fiction, turning truth into whatever served power or ideology. She described this as a deliberate strategy: flooding the public sphere with lies until people no longer believed in any truth.
How do these connect to totalitarianism? People crave a sense of belonging but everythign seems as if it is falling apart. People are lonely and atomized and our institutions don’t give structure to how they navigate life. And no one knows what to believe. They want order and are willing to let someone impose that from the top down if needed.
It shoudln’t be too difficult to see how all four can easily be mapped back to American politics. And I went out to find some articles that support each condition, which you can find below.
1. Mass Loneliness and Alienation
Recommended article: “The Anti-Social Century.”
We are becoming atomized and lonely. Some of this is because of technology (phones, ubiquity of streaming services, work from home, etc.) some of it is cultural (secular monks and optimization of the self). This is having consequences on our health and politics. Here is the best part of this article.
Practicing politics alone, on the internet, rather than in community isn’t only making us more likely to demonize and alienate our opponents, though that would be bad enough. It may also be encouraging deep nihilism. In 2018, a group of researchers led by Michael Bang Petersen, a Danish political scientist, began asking Americans to evaluate false rumors about Democratic and Republican politicians, including Trump and Hillary Clinton. “We were expecting a clear pattern of polarization,” Petersen told me, with people on the left sharing conspiracies about the right and vice versa. But some participants seemed drawn to any conspiracy theory so long as it was intended to destroy the established order. Members of this cohort commonly harbored racial or economic grievances. Perhaps more important, Petersen said, they tended to feel socially isolated. These aggravated loners agreed with many dark pronouncements, such as “I need chaos around me” and “When I think about our political and social institutions, I cannot help thinking ‘just let them all burn.’ ” Petersen and his colleagues coined a term to describe this cohort’s motivation: the need for chaos.
There is also this. The Political Consequences of Loneliness and Isolation During the Pandemic from the NYorker.
Here is the chatgpt summary: Gessen—via Arendt—distinguishes isolation (can’t act with others) from loneliness (can’t act at all). Pandemic-era habits accelerated a broader trend: fewer shared public spaces, more virtual “audiences,” and the thinning of a common world. When citizens can’t reliably meet, deliberate, or build organizations, politics shrinks into performance and suspicion, making people receptive to groups that offer totalizing narratives. This doesn’t code left or right; it primes both: on the left, ideological conformity can ride through professional and cultural institutions; on the right, procedural hardball and leader-centric movements can flourish. The mechanism is the same: atomized people seek belonging, trade truth for identity, and tolerate illiberal tactics that promise meaning and safety.
2. Loss of Faith in Institutions and Hierarchies
This is clearly something wrong unfolding in America on this front. Here is some data.
Below is a great article on this, although it is just one theory.
The basic argument is that our institutions are undergoing a shift from molding character to performing for audiences. Institutions are seen to not to shape the individual into something better but to serve as a platform to advance their status.
“How Did Americans Lose Faith in Everything?” (New York Times, Jan. 18, 2020). This is by Yuval Levin.
What stands out about our era in particular is a distinct kind of institutional dereliction — a failure even to attempt to form trustworthy people, and a tendency to think of institutions not as molds of character and behavior but as platforms for performance and prominence.
In one arena after another, we find people who should be insiders formed by institutions acting like outsiders performing on institutions. Many members of Congress now use their positions not to advance legislation but to express and act out the frustrations of their core constituencies. Rather than work through the institution, they use it as a stage to elevate themselves, raise their profiles and perform for the cameras in the reality show of our unceasing culture war.
3. Love of Transgression for Its Own Sake
For this topic read this here: “Holiness Is Transgressive” (The Gospel Coalition article, February 2023).
Here are to slices from the essay.
Because “transgression” in contemporary pop culture has become ubiquitous to the point of banality. Transgressing gender binaries in fashion, pushing the envelope of sex and nudity on TV, ratcheting up gore in horror movies, celebrating “completely filthy” chart-topping singles—it’s all so pervasive by now that it’s tiresome, as “transgressive” as the khaki section of Old Navy.
Moral boundaries and norms have been transgressed for so long, and in so many ways, that today the truly transgressive act is to choose life within moral constraints rather than libertine freedom. Holiness is the new transgression.
And this here.
The innovation of culture making used to be constructive: creating new ways to build and beautify. But now, cultural innovation is mostly destructive: dreaming up new ways to trash, demolish, destabilize, pervert, and provoke, especially as it pertains to established orthodoxies or anything “sacred.” This is the type of culture Philip Rieff calls “third world”: a culture that “persists independent of all sacred orders,” where “there is no truth, only rhetorics of self-interest.”
4.Relativism of truth.
Unless you live under a rock, it is obvious that both sides have a readiness to treat truth as what satisfies one’s desires.
Here is one academic article I found on this topic.
Misconceptions, Misinformation, and the Logic of Identity-Protective Cognition
TLDR is the this: According to Kahan, misinformation and misconceptions matter less than the fact that many citizens treat facts as tools for group signaling. In practice, “truth” becomes what satisfies identity needs, not what corresponds to reality.
This is a long article and it is not necessary to read the entire thing. Here is the abstract followed by chatpgpt summary.
This paper supplies a compact synthesis of the empirical literature on misconceptions of and misinformation about decision-relevant science. The incidence and impact of misconceptions and misperceptions, the article argues, are highly conditional on identity protective cognition. Identity protective cognition refers to the tendency of culturally diverse individuals to selectively credit and dismiss evidence in patterns that reflect the beliefs that predominate in their group. On issues that provoke identity-protective cognition, the members of the public most adept at avoiding misconceptions of science are nevertheless the most culturally polarized. Individuals are also more likely to accept misinformation and resist the correction of it when that misinformation is identity-affirming rather than identity-threatening. Effectively counteracting these dynamics, the paper argues, requires more than simply supplying citizens with correct information. It demands in addition the protection of the science communication environment from toxic social meanings that fuse competing understandings of fact with diverse citizens’ cultural identities.
Key points of the article:
Identity-Protective Cognition: People selectively accept or dismiss evidence depending on whether it aligns with their cultural or political group. Truth is filtered through group loyalty, not objective reality.
Science Literacy and Polarization: More scientifically literate individuals are not less biased; in fact, they often use their reasoning skills to reinforce group-consistent views. For example, highly numerate subjects interpret data correctly only when the result matches their political predispositions.
Misinformation as Desire-Fulfillment: People don’t passively absorb misinformation. Instead, they actively seek and believe misinformation that affirms their identity, while rejecting corrective evidence. Even when presented with corrections (e.g., about vaccines or WMDs), individuals frequently dig in deeper when those corrections threaten their group commitments.
Fake News Consumption: Studies show that people’s self-reported “exposure” to fake news is strongly predicted by whether the story aligns with their prior beliefs, not whether they actually saw it. In other words, misinformation is consumed to confirm identity, not to discover facts.
Tragedy of the Science Communication Commons: Individually, it’s rational to adopt beliefs that secure group belonging, but collectively this produces a polluted communication environment where convergence on truth becomes impossible.
There is also this here from Time magazine titled The Era of ‘Self-Evident’ Truth Is Over.
So, as I point out, I think the left is leaning towards totalitarianism and the right seems to be heading towards authoritarianism. The left has set out to pursue an all-encompassing politicization of everything while the right is more focused on institutional hostility. These are similar but identical trends on both the left and right and I think Arendt’s work sheds light on why we see them in development.
But why are the two groups moving in different but similar directions if the conditions for totalitarianism exist en mass?
I am speculating, but I think it has to do with the people who constitutes these movements.
I assume that the left is broadly female and minority and the right is white and male. When I say male and female I mean gender, not sex.
To understand why this matters see the article “Why Gender May Be the Defining Issue of the Election.”
Men are more comfortable with risk, hierarchy, individualism, etc. While females are more community oriented, focus on care and protection, and social equality.
Women protect and are above all interested in reducing harm and this calls for a need to control how you think. Survey data show women are more supportive of speech restrictions, censorship of “harmful” ideas, and regulation of offensive language compared to men. Men tend to care more about loyalty and obedience rather than policing inner thoughts, which sounds like MAGA to me.
Keep in mind that women as a group show stronger inclinations toward regulating thoughts, speech, and norms, not out of power-lust in the crude sense, but because their psychology is oriented around safety and conformity for the group’s well-being. I see this all the time in the trans debate and it is why the left is so adamant you use the correct pronoun.
Why are minorities on the left? That is a bit more tricky. I think the economic programs the left offers is the principal reason, and the soft totalitarian stuff is of secondary concern. Don’t get me wrong, they don’t mind reducing the hierarchy that has been in place in America for 200 plus years but it is not their main concern. I will have to think about this a bit more. If anyone actually reads this and has an idea or a paper they want to offer, feel free in the comments.