Totalism's new guise

I wrote in 2012 in The American Totalist party,

It  is time for plain speaking: true to its Leftist, "progressive" nature, the Democrat party is the American proto-fascist party, pure and simple, on this as on most every other public matter. An apt description of fascism is that is it one variant of what psychiatrist and historian Robert Lifton called “totalism.” Professor Anna Geifman explains the Totalist political world view:

... Its devotees — anarchists, Marxists, or Islamists — want to impose a new order based on an “all-or-nothing claim to truth.” They operate within distinctive parameters of a “theology of Armageddon — a final battle between good and evil” –  in which the stakes are nothing less than universal salvation. As outlined in Eric Hoffer’s classic, The True Believer, such movements have mastered the art of “religiofication,” that is, converting political grievances into messianic aspirations and “practical purposes into holy causes.” [HT: American Digest]

No one gravitates to the Left in order to let others live their lives as they see fit. The beating heart of Totalism in all its forms is power and control over others. This has become the raison d'etre of the Democrat party.

And so we understand the actual objective of "gender" mandates and universities complying with federal mandates of rape persecution under Title IX and transgendered bathrooms: 

The goal, as is always the case with such movements, is to remake humanity. What the people behind this latest version won’t tell you is that their project requires each and every one of us to deny our own humanity.

The gender mandates are not about fairness or compassion or anything like that. They are about control, pure and simple. It is to place the Totalist American government in the middle of Americans' most intimate and private relationships. But that's what Totalists do, they use mandates and law to create a maze of requirements for which transgressions can be persecuted at the whim of a mid-level government factotum. Totalism is the end of American liberty.

What they do is create new categories of crime or regulatory violations that do not involve actually harming anyone or committing an act that had ever been imagined criminal before. It is the creation of a new mala in prohibitum, crimes that are crimes simply because the government says so, as distinguished from mala in se, crimes that are crimes in their own nature, such as robbery or murder.

And so with mandates about gender and gender identity:

In such a scenario, the state controls all personal relationships right at their source: the biological family. The abolition of family autonomy would be complete, because the biological family would cease to be a default arrangement. The “family” would be whatever the state allows it to be. Again, in the de-sexed world of gender politics, all personal relationships end up controlled and regulated by the state.

Martha Fineman, a gender legal theorist, touched on this in her 2004 book The Autonomy Myth. In it, she argues for the abolition of state-recognized marriage because it allows for family privacy, writing that “Once the institutional protection [is] removed, behavior would be judged by standards established to regulate interactions among all members of society” (emphasis added).

Gender ideology is an effective statist tool. Cultural Marxists use it to corrupt language and sow confusion, especially among children. It paves the way for the removal of the institutional protections for freedom of association and family privacy that stand in the way of “regulating interactions among all members of society.”

Nothing outside the State!

In 1932, Mussolini defined Fascism for the Italian Encyclopedia. It included this nugget:
The foundation of Fascism is the conception of the State, its character, its duty, and its aim. Fascism conceives of the State as an absolute, in comparison with which all individuals or groups are relative, only to be conceived of in their relation to the State. The conception of the Liberal State is not that of a directing force, guiding the play and development, both material and spiritual, of a collective body, but merely a force limited to the function of recording results: on the other hand, the Fascist State is itself conscious and has itself a will and a personality -- thus it may be called the "ethic" State....

...The Fascist State organizes the nation, but leaves a sufficient margin of liberty to the individual; the latter is deprived of all useless and possibly harmful freedom, but retains what is essential; the deciding power in this question cannot be the individual, but the State alone.... 

Mussolini also summed the Fascist principle another way, explained in March of last year by the "Classic Liberal" blog: 

A popular slogan of the Italian Fascists under Mussolini was, “Tutto nello Stato, niente al di fuori dello Stato, nulla contro lo Stato” (everything for the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state). I recall this expression frequently as I observe the state’s far-reaching penetration of my own society.

What of any consequence remains beyond the state’s reach in the United States today? Not wages, working conditions, or labor-management relations; not health care; not money, banking, or financial services; not personal privacy; not transportation or communication; not education or scientific research; not farming or food supply; not nutrition or food quality; not marriage or divorce; not child care; not provision for retirement; not recreation; not insurance of any kind; not smoking or drinking; not gambling; not political campaign funding or publicity; not real estate development, house construction, or housing finance; not international travel, trade, or finance; not a thousand other areas and aspects of social life. ...

The American experiment was great while it lasted, but really, we should have known that it could not last and perhaps we should be surprised that it lasted as long as it did.