“What sort of government is it, that finds its strength and its justification before its own people in falsehoods? What is the destiny of a society that maintains and restores itself with injustice?”
-Milovan Djilas, “The Unperfect Society”
Lest readers start waving their arms and crying “Me! I can answer that! Over here!”, one should understand that this passage from one of the brightest intellects in Communism’s constellation in the 1930’s and 1940’s, is a rhetorical indictment of Eastern Europe’s sclerotic, authoritarian communist states of the 1950s and 1960s. Yes, even after they had become “workers’ paradises” in the model of their overlords in the USSR. It may also be appropriate for us here, today.
Djilas’ ruminations began in the early 1950s, as he noticed disparities between what top Communist leaders (he was one) were saying about the state of things and their reality. Based on his findings he published “The New Class,” which analyzed then-current communist regimes using Marxism’s intellectual tools. He discovered, much as George Orwell had earlier predicted, that there was not one whit of difference between the actions of “Capitalist Exploiters” and their socialist bureaucrat heirs: both used the system – which they designed to advantage themselves – to seize assets and exploit them for selfish gain. The book got him a total of 9 years in Yugoslavia’s version of the Gulag. Evidently Yugoslav bureaucrats don’t have a sense of humor, either.
On emerging, he published “The Unperfect Society” which continued his analysis, this time on the possibility of “reform” (none) and the likelihood of the evolution of communism toward a more open system (essential, but only likely in a few spots). It was published on his arrival in the United States.
Both of Djilas’ mentioned works echo what we see in the slow collapse of our government and our nation. From the shadowy figures with their hand up our president’s butt making his mouth move to smirking, unaccountable bureaucrats enforcing a party agenda on our borders to popular demagogues who deliberately undermine our nation’s foreign interests and domestic security in return for accolades and cash, we are witnesses to the triumph of an unelected and unaccountable phalanx of anonymous government hacks. Each is pursuing self-interest and an unfettered climb up the goodie ladder. Like simple organisms they will act instinctively to defeat any threat to their well-being, even when it comes from a president whose regulations they are ethically compelled to serve. Because in a bureaucracy, survival of the bureaucracy trumps everything: ethics, oath of office, law, national interest, common sense, the Ten Commandments – everything.
This is why we see people who strolled unmolested into the Capitol building on January 6, and who left of their own accord without so much as putting a painting askew sought as “Insurrectionists” who deserve a ten-year sentence for “Obstructing an Official Proceeding,” while a member of the Democrat Caucus in the House who actually obstructed an official proceeding – passing a budget – gets off with an apology in which he admits to being too stupid to tell a fire alarm from a doorknob. The first group are supporters of a presidential candidate Washington’s bureaucrat class fears like the plague because he is a direct threat to their parasitic existence at public expense; the second is a member of the group living in closest symbioses with them.
The court cases against candidate Donald Trump? Nothing we have seen in the country’s history with the possible exception of the 1798 “Alien and Sedition Acts” comes close to the political bureaucracy’s legal focus on a single citizen. There’s a prosecution for a victimless crime on grounds without legal precedent. Prosecution for public, political speech. Prosecution for crimes that are crimes “because I say so.” None of this speaks to justice. Quite the contrary, it speaks to an obsessive hatred that is willing to tear down every protection, every law, every reticence and ethical boundary to get at one man.
This is why we have the Fourth through the Eighth Amendments – half of the Bill of Rights’ total – limiting the government’s ability to use the judiciary against its political rivals. But in Trump’s case, as Djilas described in other circumstances, those behind the trials couldn’t care less about the law or anything resembling “justice”. If they did, Joe Biden would be in the Big House, not the White House for stashing classified documents behind his Corvette. He’d wave to Hillary on his way in, too. But he’s not and didn’t, because yes, Mr. Garland, there are two systems of justice in this country now. No different from Mr. Djilas’ communist Yugoslavia or any other thugocracy of his time or thereafter.
Which was the real import of his question: “What sort of government is it,” indeed? And what do you intend to do about it?