Marco Rubio's Warped Worldview

http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/03/marco-rubios-warped-worldview/284319/

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Rubio’s CPAC speech began typically enough: with a list of the various regimes that Americans should worry about: Russia’s, China’s, North Korea’s, Venezuela’s, Iran’s. Then came this stunner: “All the problems of the world, all the conflicts of the world, are being created by totalitarian regimes.”

All? Can the 2008 financial crisis be laid entirely at the feet of “totalitarian” regimes? Can climate change? Rubio’s statement betrays a deep, Cheneyesque, indifference to the economic and environmental forces that fuel international violence—perhaps because acknowledging them might require acknowledging that non-totalitarian regimes like ours can also help spur conflict in far-off lands.

But beyond that, Rubio simply has no idea what “totalitarian” means. “Totalitarian” is not a synonym for “dictatorship.” Dictatorial regimes seek to stamp out behavior that actively challenges the state. Totalitarian regimes seek to stamp out behavior that does not actively support the state. A totalitarian regime, explained Irving Howe, “tries to give the state total power over all areas of human life, to destroy civil society entirely, and to extend state ownership over all things and all people.” As Hannah Arendt put it, “If totalitarianism takes its own claim seriously, it must come to the point where it has ‘to finish once and for all with the neutrality of chess,’ that is, with the autonomous existence of any activity whatsoever.”

At their worst, Hitler’s Germany, Stalin’s USSR, and Mao’s China approached this nightmarish vision. Even the Soviet Union, Arendt argued, ceased being totalitarian in the mid-1950s when Nikita Khrushchev relaxed government control over artistic expression. A good test for whether a regime is totalitarian today is the music it permits. To be truly totalitarian, a regime must not only ban music that challenges its ideology. It must also ban music that ignores its ideology. On Rubio’s list, only North Korea comes close.