“Even the tyrant never rules by force alone, but mostly by fairy tales.” – G.K. Chesterton
Napoleon once told his foreign minister, Talleyrand, that one could do anything with bayonets. Talleyrand’s response was, “Yes, sire, except sit on them.” Napoleon imagined he could do anything by force of arms, while Talleyrand reminded him one must sit very carefully on a throne made of bayonets. As Chesterton observes, that throne must be cushioned with fairy tales.
By this Chesterton did not mean children’s stories. Before they became accepted as children’s literature, fairy tales served as cautionary stories for adults. Similarly, tyrants throughout history have offered simplistic stories to justify their tyrannies and assure their populations that better times were ahead – in Chesterton’s meaning, fairy tales.
Some of the most successful and pernicious examples of these in the twentieth century were Hitler’s assertion that “the Jews are our misery” and the Soviet Union’s claim to be building a paradise for the proletariat. While most Germans realized that all of Germany’s problems were not due to a Jewish cabal and most of the Soviet Union’s proletariat knew they were not living in a paradise, and that things had gotten worse, for the most part both groups accepted those fairy tales. They offered a simple solution and a justification for sacrifice.
We are smarter than that, right? Or are we? It seems we are hearing a lot of this class of fairy tales from the current administration. You have heard them. “January 6th was an insurrection.” “Anyone who questions whether there was any election fraud in 2020 is an Election Denier!” “The greatest threat to the country comes from White supremacists.” “Covid-19 is the biggest public health threat since the Black Death.” The childlike among us accept those absurdities absolutely.
Which is their purpose. They give cover to government behavior that is otherwise unacceptable. They let the government intrude into our lives, target their political opponents, and seduce our children.
But they only have power if we accept them. Like the little boy in “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” once enough people reject these absurdities, call them out as the frauds they are, they lose power. That is why the government, with the collusion of Big Tech and the mainstream media is so desperate to control the narrative. Why Katie Hobbs is so insistent on refusing to debate Kari Lake. Why Fetterman wants his health – and his actual record of performance in public office – taken off the table as a subject for discussion. Because they lose power over us once their fairy tales are disbelieved.
Then all they are left with is force. That, by itself, is insufficient to maintain power. Ask the Soviets who deposed Gorbachev. Or Nicolae Ceaușescu. Or the successors of Erich Honecker. And just maybe, if we spread the word enough, the Democrats after November 9.
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