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Totalitarianism has been around a long time. Something being around a long time doesn't make it not totalitarian.
The user said quarantine camps and vaccine mandates. Not either or, but you're picking out one to attack. Even if not, this sort of compartmentalization where you take individual pieces which fit into a totalitarian system, instead of the whole it typically fits into and fundamentally represents, is just playing definition games with your preferred definition (which likely requires more than one facet of life to be controlled). By this definition, pretty much any individual facet of a larger totalitarian system could be looked at individually and claimed to not be totalitarian.
You could argue a system with vaccine mandates is, ceterus paribus, the same level of "totalitarian" as one without them, but that's nonsense.
A system which claims ownership over the bodies of individuals to the point where they claim the right to use violence to inject whatever products into that person's body by the mere fact of existence is a totalitarian system. It fundamentally represents an all encompassing ideology; it requires the subservience of the individual's very being, their bodily integrity, to be subservient to the state.
Even if this were true, this is fundamentally the definition of indoctrination as children grow up in water without critically thinking the water even exists let alone careful examination of any of its tenets.
Secondly, this is nonsense; the majority of people would likely not agree to many aspects of "wokeness." The reason it's causing such conflict is because a small number of people with institutional control are pushing it onto the population who doesn't want it.
I just wanted to keep my response short. (I don't recall the US having those?)
... what totalitarian system? Is American life "totalitarian"?
Is it totalitarian that the FDA claims ownership over the food we eat, and claims the right to use violence against distributors of food they deem impure? Is it totalitarian that DoT claims ownership over the cars we drive, and will use violence against any individual who dares make unauthorized forms of transportation? Is it totalitarian the system claims ownership over the very products of our labor, and will use force against any individual found to do productive work without granting 30% of the product of said work to the government?
(US vaccine mandates were of the form 'you need vaccine to go to school' or 'employer requires you to get vaccine', and FDA / tax / car production regulations are of the same kind - if you want to work, you must do X).
Almost nobody considers these totalitarian. If you do, your argument is very different from "the US is totalitarian", and covid is a single very minor facet of the evil system oppressing us.
Yes, and it is literally impossible to not indoctrinate children under this definition. If I raise my children as christian? Indoctrination. Atheist?
How precisely is wokeness so universally socially enforced if it's only pushed by a small number of people? Sure, to an extent there are a minority of strong believers and a majority of mild believers who go along with the cancelling, but that still means the beliefs are widely held.
picking out individual aspects of totalitarianism to claim are individually, alone, not totalitarian is disingenuous because by your definition totalitarianism would need to be total, complete, everything
all parts representing the larger totalitarian whole where the step claims violent ownership over all aspects of life
How much longer would your list of examples be where the state claims violent control over each aspect of life would you stop and consider, "well damn, this does feel totalitarian"?
absolute nonsense
arguments by, at the very least, sizeable minorities claiming it's totalitarian at every single step where the government claimed the power to do each of the list above and then used that fiat accompli to push into even more power and control over that aspect of life
then later in history we get people who argue "almost no one" argued against it or claimed it's totalitarian despite each of that list being imposed based on ~55% approval and enforced on the 45% minority
I could and that not be my argument. I do think those things, but that doesn't morph the argument I did make about your characterization of totalitarianism and arguments for why your examples are not totalitarian.
Covid was not a minor facet, but the trigger event to show just how totalitarian the system is right now. Using licensure requirements, insurance requirements, professional boards, city government, local government, state government, federal government, travel, etc., etc., etc., to punish any person who speaks against any of it or refuses to go along with it is an example for why the American system is totalitarian right now
Do you think being forced to inject whatever the state demands into your body in order to work is totalitarian? To leave your house? To get groceries? To participate in life? To exist at all? If your answer to all of those is "no," which I suspect it is, then arguing over the exact type and manner of American "vaccine" mandates is irrelevant.
Yes, children are indoctrinated because they fundamentally do not have the minds to carefully examine the soil they're planted and grow in. If you think another definition better fits, then propose it. IMO any definition with a condition which examines the substance of what the target is indoctrinated with is essentially just "indoctrination I don't agree with."
How, exactly, did gay marriage get enforced even those large majorities of the population wanted it banned? People who have institutional control, e.g., in school systems, are able to establish cultures which push minority supported beliefs onto vulnerable children even though the vast majority of their parents disagree with it.
opinions can be minority ones and still be "widely held"
I agree "wokeness" is widely held among the professional managerial class and the institutions they infect, but even then only certain aspects of "wokeness." The majority of people do not agree with most aspects of "wokeness" which is the reason for the conflict around wokeness we've been seeing for years. The more centralized life is, the smaller number of people are able to enforce themselves on people at large.
Alternatively, various parts of the state regulate certain aspects of human life to the general benefit of the population. The examples are intended to seem 'beneficial', 'narrow-in-scope', and 'widely accepted by the population', while being about as totalitarian as mask mandates by your arguments
I don't think there's a sizeable minority in the US right now that considers the FDA's oversight over edible food, the DoT's oversight over cars, or or taxes totalitarian. Even those who think taxes are too high do not think 'taxes' themselves are bad. If you meant 'sizeable minorities in the past', sources / elaborate?
If you read 1984 or any authoritarian dystopia story, you'll notice stuff like 'children are trained in school to inform on their parents' dissent, and parents are jailed if they dissent', 'any public speech mildly criticizing the state is banned', 'eating government-provided gruel', 'your job is assigned to you by the state and if you don't do it, labor camp'. One might call that 'totalitarian'. Even in ... China, the hukou system, political censorship, a lot of the economy being state owned, the party's level of general power, and maybe their covid response are - while I wouldn't say totalitarian - clearly are much more 'central power' and 'state being mean to the population' than exists in the US. And calling the US 'totalitarian' in the same way you would call China totalitarian or Oceania totalitarian ... does the word even mean anything?
Again, 'maybe you get banned from twitter, but you can still make $500k/year on substack' and 'the stasi tortures you' are not comparable. The former is bad! But it isn't 'punishing any person who speaks against any of it'. And nobody's being banned off social media for criticizing excess regulation, republicans have been doing that for half a century.
For 'leaving house, groceries, participate in life', as far as I'm aware in the US, only masks were ever required. For work - you can argue that's a bad thing on the state's part, but it's a trillion times less authoritarian than a national draft, which we had in 1973.
From wikipedia:
Sure, but then it is physically impossible to not indoctrinate children. Which casts doubt on the claim!
Gay marriage isn't "enforced", it lets, like, gay couples get tax benefits. Gay couples could, and did, still say they were "married", and that was generally accepted. A totalitarian state might decree that particularly attractive twinks are forcibly married to gay inner party members. That might be totalitarian! Gay marriage is as mild as it gets.
Was life ever less centralized than it is today? When?
the main point of my comment was to discuss how one can pull nearly any particular facet out of a totalitarian system, discuss only that one facet, and then argue it's not totalitarian because by your definition totalitarian would need to be all-encompassing, and that this argument is therefore disingenuous
you seem uninterested in that discussion and instead want to claim?/imply I'm equating any individual facet I describe as totalitarian with any other facet; claiming there cannot be any degrees within totalitarianism (after all, 1984 is totalitarian therefore the US cannot be); and that China, including their citywide lockdowns, are not totalitarian to you, but "more central power" than the US therefore the US cannot be totalitarian
it's clear we have such a wide chasm between what I would consider totalitarianism and what you consider totalitarianism there isn't much point in discussing that aspect
Do you think prison is totalitarianism for the inmates? Supermax? Max? Solitary confinement?
the claim was "Children are being, from our point of view, indoctrinated in Federally funded State schools with State-approved ethnic and sexual dogma: straight bad, white bad."
it seems to me the word "indoctrination" is defined there to mean "indoctrination with substance I dislike," so I think you're right here
I agree children will be indoctrinated with something no matter what and the argument is over what to indoctrinate them with. The "woke" use positions in institutional power to indoctrinate them into believing opinions which are not held by the majority in society.
pretty much any point post ww2 to now and then post ww1 to ww2 and then post civil war to ww1 and then before that with each spike of centralized control (the wars) still being less centralized than today
I am honestly perplexed how one could even argue otherwise with perhaps some quibbling over specific points in ww1 and ww2 compared to now.
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