The evil doctrines of Marxism have infiltrated many institutions in the United States, leading conservatives to frame cultural and political battles as a contest between individualism and collectivism. On the surface, this makes sense. Marxism, as the ideology of communism, promotes state-enforced equality where individual agency is subordinated to a top-down notion of the collective good.
Many past conservative thinkers recognized this as a false binary, however. They understood that individualism, if left unchecked, can foster conditions that pave the way for tyranny. Lower-order organic identities — such as family, faith, and community — have repeatedly proven to be the only effective forces against the imposition of top-down despotism. The true battle is not between individualism and collectivism but between ordered liberty and disordered tyranny.
Framing our current opposition to Marxist dogma as a conflict between individualism and collectivism is a mistake.
In his classic work “Democracy in America,” Alexis de Tocqueville explored the rise of individualism during the democratic age following the American and French revolutions. De Tocqueville believed a democratic trajectory was inevitable for France and sought to understand how Americans had managed to curb its worst impulses.
He observed that individualism often led people to focus solely on their own lives and interests, leaving them indifferent to the well-being of their neighbors and their communities. This lack of civic engagement, he argued, made it easier for despots to establish tyrannical rule. A despot thrives on individual apathy and the absence of civic virtue. He wrote:
Despotism, suspicious by its very nature, views the separation of men as the best guarantee of its own permanent rule and usually does all it can to keep them in isolation. No defect of the human heart suits it better than egoism; a tyranny is relaxed enough to forgive his subjects for failing to love him, provided that they do not love one another. He does not ask them to help him to govern the state; it is enough that they have no intention of managing it themselves. […]
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