The ruling elite are not going to surrender power without a fight.

Over the last two years, many of us have been surprised and troubled at how eagerly millions of citizens have surrendered their freedoms to the shifting, contradictory, nakedly politicized diktats of various "Experts" and government agencies.

The technocratic Left currently ruling the country has wrung every ounce of unconstitutional power from the sovereign people, a large cohort of whom, especially the cognitive elites, have willingly gone along with every new crisis and command.

Will such resistance reach the critical mass of voters necessary for liberating us from such "Soft despotism" and its wardens? We shouldn't be surprised that progressives have seized the opportunity to aggrandize themselves through serial changes on the pretext of an exaggerated crisis.

Crises such as the Great Depression, Two World Wars, and other conflicts and recessions provided the pretexts for expanding and concentrating the powers of federal agencies and their "Network of small complicated rules." And like children, too many citizens have accepted these encroachments, willingly ceding their autonomy and freedom to overseers who bribe them with the redistribution of other people's money, and with promises "Alone to secure their gratifications and to watch over their fate" from the cradle to the grave -what we call "Entitlements" but think are unalienable rights.

These outcomes will surprise no one who understood from the start that after a few months of uncertainty in early 2020, the issue was not the pandemic, but how the pandemic could provide the pretext for expanding government power, and damaging a president whose policies pushed back against the progressives program to "Fundamentally transform" the United States.

Finally, growing numbers of voters have soured on progressives' "Cancel culture" and strong-arm tactics-their "Relentless moral condescension, the messianism of mass protests, physical intimidation, social ostracism and demands that you simply shut up"-as the Wall Street Journal's Daniel Henninger describes the treatment of renegade Democrat Senator Joe Manchin, who stopped their Build Back Better binge of green pork and welfare lucre.

The Dems still possess the commanding heights of media, entertainment, popular culture, sports, government agencies, and universities.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/12/pushback-against-soft-despotism-coming-2022-bruce-thornton/