From a reader:
Dear Jonah,
I haven’t finished your book, but I’ve read enough to note how it
resonates with the work of great cultural historian Christopher
Dawson. I’m reading Bradley Birzer’s book on him now: “Sanctifying
the World”.
On p.124, Birzer discusses Dawson’s book, “Religion and the Modern
State” (1936):
Dawson “described the rise of fascism while labeling the rise of the
New Deal in America as a benign form of dictatorship. ‘It is in fact
a constitutional dictatorship,’ Dawson wrote bluntly. Further, he
noted, to abandon the free market, as the Americans had done, would
lead to the abandonment of other American liberties. ‘We shall also
have to abandon political individualism and the right to criticize and
oppose the Government,’ Dawson wrote. Rooted in the Burkean
tradition of organic common law and constitutional medievalism, Dawson
believed that all liberties were wrapped together, inseparable from
one another….mass democracies more often than not allow bureaucracies and selfish
interests to assume control, forcing all things to become political
and politicized…”
Check out this quote especially, which might have come from your own
pen:
“It may be harder to resist a Totalitarian state which relies on free
milk and birth control clinics than one which relies on castor oil and
concentration camps.”