Michael Rainsborough
Michael Rainsborough is a writer and academic based in Australia.
“Do we not stand as a kind of warning to the West, revealing to it its own latent tendencies?” So asked Czech playwright Václav Havel in 1978 in The Power of the Powerless, his epic essay on the nature of dissent in Communist Eastern Europe. Havel argued that the fate of East European countries under Communist tyranny stood as a monument to the debilitating effects of late-stage techno-bureaucratic rationalism – a system focused solely on material existence. This system, he argued, ceased to serve humanity, eroded individual dignity and coldly tore people away from their natural affiliations: their habitat, their family, their community, their nation.
For Havel, there was no evidence that the charms of Western-style democracy offered a better solution to the dehumanising effects of technocratic rule. In fact, he contended, the West’s greater political freedoms and economic success merely obscured the underlying crisis more effectively. In parliamentary democracies, he believed, people were manipulated in subtler ways than under the callous authoritarianism of Communist rule – through consumption, production, advertising and consumerism.
In these views, Havel echoed and expanded upon earlier dissident writers like Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Czesław Miłosz, who also identified in Communism the totalising impulses of materialist ideologies. These ideologies, they claimed, gave rise to new religions based on the remoulding of human existence in line with a utopian vision of historical destiny. Eastern Europe under Communism therefore stood as a ‘Warning to the West’ – as Solzhenitsyn put it – about the natural endpoint of sustained bureaucratic rationalism.
The Art of Living with Lies
History never repeats itself, but it often resonates. It is surprising, perhaps, that dissident writings like those of Havel are not more closely studied in Western societies for the profound insights and admonitions they offer. The contemporary West, to varying degrees, may be experiencing a similar condition of moral, spiritual and political decay that Havel observed in late-stage Communist states toward the end of the 20th century.
During this period, writers like Havel examined the evolving nature of authoritarian rule following the end of uncompromising Stalinist repression. This era saw limited political openings after Nikita Khrushchev’s ascent to the Soviet premiership after Stalin’s death in 1953 and the discrediting of hardline Communist rule following the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956.
In Czechoslovakia, these changes led to a period of political liberalisation culminating in the ‘Prague Spring’ of 1968. Reformist leader Alexander Dubček sought to loosen media, speech and travel restrictions, decentralise the economy and reduce Party authority. Fearing these reforms could unravel the Communist imperium in Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union invaded in August 1968, sending half a million troops to crush the nascent political awakening. A compliant regime under Gustáv Husák was installed, returning the nation to heel.
What followed was notable. The Communist system after the Soviet invasion reconstituted itself not through Stalinist-style terror but through what Havel termed ‘post-totalitarianism’. This concept absorbed much of his attention in his political essays. In “Letter to Dr. Gustáv Husák” (1975), Havel asked why his country was plunging into an ever deeper moral crisis. Why did people behave as they did? The simple answer, he perceived, was fear. Not physical fear, but psychological fear. People were not afraid of being tortured, tried, or executed. Instead, they feared social exclusion and losing privileges: a job, a promotion, access to university, the ability to work in one’s chosen field, or a holiday in Bulgaria.
The Cost of Conformity: Personal Loss and Public Decay
Post-totalitarianism did not intrinsically require trials and prisons to enforce its rule because, by design, the whole population was ensnared in a web of existential anxiety – everyone nervously trying to preserve what they had or gain what they did not yet possess. Thus, because the system demanded outward compliance rather than genuine belief, most people avoided conflict with authority. Conformity cost nothing, obliging only performative displays of allegiance. Since most people recognised the lies propping up the system, their loyalty was often entirely superficial.
The problem, Havel maintained, was that participating in this system led to despair, apathy, and inner moral debasement. That was the psychic cost of outward compliance. It compelled individuals to live within a maze of lies. The energies of the population were intentionally diverted toward maintaining private material comforts, with little attention paid to their shrinking spiritual, ethical and political horizons. By gearing people’s focus toward materialist interests, the system rendered them incapable of recognising their diminishing freedoms. By accepting their life within this system of lies ‘individuals’, in Havel’s haunting words, “confirm the system, fulfil the system, make the system, are the system”.
Havel queried what human qualities such a regime encouraged if outward adaptation was the key to advancement. The answer: selfishness and careerism. Those who resisted performative dissimulation were dismissed as quixotic fools or shunned as threats to society. Such individuals exposed the lies underpinning the system and highlighted the cowardice and moral compromises of those who conformed. To protect their small worlds of self-preservation, even sympathisers avoided associating with such mavericks.
For all its cynicism, the post-totalitarian system was, however, intrinsically entropic. Over time, it immobilised itself, suppressing cultural vitality and stifling society’s ability to expand liberty and discover truth. The regime promoted only its own ideological ‘truth’, discounting genuine knowledge and flourishing. It engendered intellectual stagnation, dogma and a cheerless, resentful obedience. Leadership positions were filled by flunkeys, opportunists and incompetents. The system, as a consequence, promoted only banality and the cult of ‘right thinking mediocrity’.
Any capacity to express yourself freely under such a dispensation was, of course, an illusion. One might, in theory, have the right to speak one’s mind, but the exclusionary and latently punitive mechanisms of the post-totalitarian state ensured that no one else would be listening. People would naturally recoil from proximity to dissenting voices, fearful of endangering their, often meagre, privileges.
The result was that creativity withered, innovation dwindled, and cultural and technological dynamism faded into irrelevance. Not only was there no real political competition for political power, which of course was the whole point of the post-totalitarian system, but no channels for any meaningful political discourse and exchange existed either. Pressing questions were silenced or brushed aside, leaving a society that seemed calm on the surface. Or “Calm as a morgue or a grave – would you not say?” as Havel memorably put it in his letter to Dr Husák.
Echoes from the East: The West’s ‘Prague’ Spring?
Does any of this strike an unsettling chord with those of us in the modern West? The warnings of Eastern European dissidents echo with uncomfortable clarity today. Communist governments in Eastern Europe ultimately wielded a police-state that dwarfs anything seen in contemporary Western democracies, yet some of the patterns they described feel oddly recognisable.
While the United States may be shaking off the creeping authoritarianism experienced under the Biden administration’s tenure, Western Europe in particular remains mired in what might seem a not dissimilar malaise to end-of-era Communism in Eastern Europe. As Havel cautioned, such systems drain vitality, enforce conformity and corrode the moral and spiritual core of society. His message – and that of his fellow dissidents – demands renewed attention, since history is rhyming once again.
Before probing into the evolution of post-totalitarianism in the West, consider this: has the West already experienced its own version of the Prague Spring – in 2016? Havel described the events of Prague in 1968 as a moment when people broke free from illusions to live in truth. The two electoral shocks of 2016 – Britain’s Brexit vote and Donald Trump’s surprise election – can be seen in a similar light. As Havel noted, such moments arise when something long suppressed erupts from the ‘hidden sphere’, disrupting the carefully constructed façade of political consensus. Recall how often commentators dismissed the chances of Brexit or Trump’s victory – until reality shattered those illusions.
The events of 2016 can be interpreted in various ways, but one compelling perspective is that they represented democratic jailbreaks – attempts to escape from the suffocating ideological orthodoxy that had dominated Western governance since at least the end of the Cold War. While this orthodoxy was not totalitarian, it was nevertheless totalising in its globalist outlook, shaped by the belief that liberal democracy had emerged as the inevitable ‘end of history’.
After 1991, globalist ideology assumed that convergence toward liberal norms was both desirable – expanding personal freedoms and enabling global capital – and inevitable, given the absence of viable ideological alternatives. However, this homogenising vision, reinforced by neo-liberal economic policies, failed to deliver a more just and equitable world. Instead, it deepened wealth disparities within states, fuelled aggression abroad, and imposed a rigid, one-size-fits-all framework – most conspicuously embodied in the European Union’s bureaucracy. This process not only eroded democratic autonomy but also stripped communities and nations of their distinct customs, cultures and traditions – echoing, in some ways, the mechanisms of East European Communism that Havel once criticised.
The Emergence of Post-Liberal Totalitarianism
Although the political establishment did not respond to these electoral shocks by sending tanks into the streets, the way globalist-minded elites sought to reassert their authority was distinctly post-totalitarian in nature. Since the pre-2016 status quo was not overtly repressive, as in Eastern Europe, but rather an implicit liberal-minded hegemony among the governing classes of the West, the backlash from entrenched elites took on a different character – one that might be called post-liberal totalitarianism. This shift moved society away from traditional liberal principles, toward an increasingly illiberal intolerance, marked by a growing tendency to police thought and speech that contradicted officially approved narratives.
In much of the West, political elites – alarmed and affronted by challenges to their moral authority – responded with remarkable uniformity. A modern-day nomenklatura in politics and among the secular priesthood that controlled key institutions – the civil service, universities, the arts, the legal profession, even business and finance – closed ranks, tightening restrictions on freedom of expression, constrained democratic participation and sought to marginalise political opposition: all marking a dangerously authoritarian turn in Western politics as they moved to suppress rising insurgent ‘populist’ sentiments.
This trend, emerging across the Western hemisphere after 2016, mirrored the tactics of post-totalitarian regimes in Eastern Europe during the 1970s and 1980s. It involved a steady resurgence of elite-driven authoritarianism. The global response to the Covid-19 pandemic – with draconian lockdowns – served as a stark illustration of this shift.
In parallel, civic institutions like the civil service or the universities, once regarded as bastions of impartiality and creativity respectively became politicised and their integrity crumbled. Universities, once hubs for free thought and debate became platforms for advancing partisan, pro-regime agendas. The rise of ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion’ (DEI) initiatives, for instance, actively stifled pluralism and silenced dissent.
The authoritarian turn spread into the cultural and commercial spheres. State-approved moral messaging – essentially propaganda – has become pervasive in films, television and advertisements. The social realm is now dominated by performative rituals reminiscent of those in Eastern Europe. Instead of displaying a ‘Workers of the World Unite’ sign, one might now fly a rainbow flag, or pledge allegiance to DEI in job applications. These acts became modern symbols of regime loyalty.
Opting out of these rituals, as in the Communist East, carried consequences – career setbacks, ostracism and the threat of ‘cancellation’. Dissenters, labelled as extremists, populists, far-right agitators (or worse), were to be deemed toxic and cold-shouldered. The diminishing of the social and cultural space, again mimicking the post-totalitarianism of the East, forces people into a web of dissimulation. People in the West found themselves trapped in a world of appearances, performing rituals like announcing pronouns or taking the knee to signal compliance with the prevailing ideology.
As Havel pointed out, this is a dictatorship of bureaucracy, a defining feature of post-totalitarianism. It pressures individuals to conform, gesturing their understanding of what is expected of them: to prove they are ‘good people’ on the ‘right side of history’. The unspoken message is clear: We know how to obey, leave me in peace and don’t denounce me.
In this world of falsehoods, power – both political and corporate – aligns more with ideology than with reality. Corporations and institutions increasingly bow to progressive ideology, which permeates every corner of public life. Havel would have no doubt recognised these as classic post-totalitarian impulses – trends that poison the public square and subvert individual autonomy. The space for independent thought shrinks, while censorship and punishment for wrongthink intensify.
Western Post-Liberal Totalitarianism: A Globalist Mask, An Authoritarian Soul
Post-liberal totalitarianism in the West has taken on various forms, each tailored to the peculiarities of its host country. Canada, under the ever-smiling yet increasingly authoritarian Justin Trudeau, has provided one of the most dramatic case studies. His government’s 2022 decision to freeze the bank accounts of anti-vaccine mandate protesters – effectively exiling them from financial existence – marked a spectacular descent from the country’s once-pristine liberal ideals.
Germany, meanwhile, is toying with a more traditional approach: banning political opponents. Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s SPD, along with state institutions such as the Interior Ministry and the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, are openly discussing outlawing the surging Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), branding it a ‘threat to democracy’ – an ironic label for a popular opposition party in an electoral democracy. The establishment is also keen to clamp down on dissenting voices online, dismissing unwelcome opinions as ‘disinformation’ and ‘fake news’ (because nothing safeguards democracy quite like silencing the people).
Across Europe, the EU continues to perfect its role as a post-liberal busybody. It has a rich history of interfering in member states’ affairs, whether by forcing re-runs of referendums that produce the ‘wrong’ result or manoeuvring to unseat governments that resist its economic agenda. More recently, the EU has armed itself with sweeping powers to regulate online speech under the guise of ‘digital services’, ‘media freedoms’ and ‘artificial intelligence’ – a legislative buffet that allows Brussels to micromanage discourse across the continent. Romania provided a particularly shameless spectacle when its Supreme Court annulled a presidential election after populist candidate Călin Georgescu led in the first round – on the dubious grounds of ‘Russian interference’ via TikTok. Naturally, the EU, self-proclaimed champion of democracy, responded with a deafening silence, while the European Court of Human Rights dismissed his case.
The Anglosphere is hardly immune to these tendencies. Britain and Australia have both pursued aggressive online censorship regimes, but the UK, in particular, has witnessed a cultural freefall. The BBC, once the paragon of objectivity, now serves as the state’s official ‘disinformation’ watchdog. Popular culture has suffered a parallel fate: comedy is now often played within painfully safe boundaries (and therefore unfunny), while TV dramas are often dull and bloated with moral instruction. Once edgy political programmes like Have I Got News for You abandoned any pretence of even-handedness, preferring to aim their punches at Brexiteers, conservatives and anyone insufficiently deferential to the latest progressive dogma. Erstwhile anti-establishment publications like Private Eye and even Viz now parrot regime-approved talking points with all the rebellious spirit of a government press release.
Meanwhile, Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour government seems particularly enamoured with post-totalitarian habits. Accusations of a ‘two-tier’ justice system abound, with critics suggesting that wrong-thinkers are more aggressively policed than actual criminals. There is even talk of outlawing ‘offensive’ pub banter – because evidently, the real crisis facing Britain is the unchecked menace of mildly inappropriate jokes over pints.
A Democratic Façade?
What should we make of all this? Dissidents from Eastern Europe would find it strangely familiar – a system that habitually styles itself as ‘democratic’ while ensuring that only the ‘right’ people get to speak, govern, or even exist comfortably within society. As ever, there is both cause for concern and cause for hope.
One point worth revisiting in the writings of dissidents like Václav Havel is the idea that post-totalitarian regimes are inherently degenerative. Unlike the Communist states of Eastern Europe, which relied on an unambiguous police state, post-liberal totalitarianism in the West has, until recently, maintained the illusion of openness. But as public trust in ruling institutions and the media declines, the response has been predictable: the more the regime’s narratives weaken, the more it resorts to coercion, adopting the habits of a police state to surveil, censor and suppress dissent.
Consider the Biden administration’s collaboration with social media platforms, using the intelligence agencies to strong-arm Twitter and Facebook into suppressing content deemed ‘misinformation’. Conservative and right-wing views were no longer treated as political opposition, but as dangerous subversion. At one point, even concerned parents who opposed critical race theory in schools found themselves labelled ‘domestic terrorists’ by the FBI.
In the UK, the shift toward a ‘psycho-state’ – where authorities police thought as much as action – has been even more brazen. Online dissent has become a particular obsession. During Covid, the government deployed a psychological operations unit – the ominously named 77th Brigade – to monitor critics under the guise of combating ‘disinformation’. Meanwhile, a National Security Online Information Team reportedly spied on social media accounts linked to ‘far-right’ activism in the wake of the Southport killings, after the radicalised teenager, Axel Rudakabana, murdered three young girls at a dance class.
And it doesn’t stop there. A recent Home Office report, commissioned by the incoming Labour government, proposed expanding the use of ‘non-crime hate incidents’ to effectively legalise the sanctioning of wrongthink. It even entertained the idea of making it illegal to criticise the police. The Policy Exchange think tank analysed the dossier and found it dripping with the usual euphemisms: concerns about ‘two-tier’ policing were dismissed as a ‘right-wing extremist narrative’, while the existence of ‘grooming gangs’ was framed as an alleged problem that the far-right supposedly exploited.
The message is clear enough: some truths are simply too inconvenient to acknowledge, and those who persist in voicing them will find themselves not in the arena of debate, but in the crosshairs of institutional suppression.
Hope in the Twilight?
Historical experience offers the possibility of two outcomes in such a climate, as Eastern Europe’s past demonstrates. The first outcome is that society simply resigns itself to the drab embrace of a surveillance state – a regime wheezing through its twilight years, obsessed with order, discipline and the joyless grind of conformity, propped up by ever more desperate authoritarian measures.
Which brings us to the curious case of figures like Keir Starmer in the UK and Olaf Scholz in Germany, who seem oddly reminiscent of the grey, true-believer apparatchiks, the last clapped out remnants of East European Communism. These two could easily be cast as the modern-day equivalents of Gustáv Husák from Czechoslovakia and János Kádár from Hungary – earnest, rigid and possessed of all the charisma of a damp instruction manual. In a peculiar coincidental twist Starmer even attended a youth camp in Czechoslovakia during the Cold War. And the resemblance isn’t just in their policy obsessions; even their faces seem eerily similar. In a world where the green, environmentalist obsessions of liberal totalitarians reign, perhaps history, in its circular wisdom, has opted for a bit of recycling itself.
If the descent into late-stage authoritarian decline makes for a grim prognosis, there is, nevertheless, cause for hope. Here, Havel offers guidance: “Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how well it turns out.” His hope lay in the certainty that Communist regimes were ultimately unsustainable, as they ran counter to the grain of the human spirit. If post-totalitarianism constantly pushes towards conformity and control, degrading individual dignity and breeding hypocrisy, the irrepressible human desire to live in truth pulls in the opposite direction – towards plurality, independence and life.
This is the second possible outcome, namely, that the enduring spirit of humankind, remarkably consistent throughout history, ensures that civilisations and their systems, like all living things, follow a cycle of birth, life, death and regeneration. Where this spirit endures, hope persists. Even amidst the smothering twilight of Communist rule, this hope found expression through civil associations that quietly defied the system. In Czechoslovakia, this saw initiatives like Charter 77 – of which Havel was a signatory – demanding the recognition of basic human rights, or the Jan Hus Educational Foundation, which organised clandestine seminars with scholars like Roger Scruton to keep intellectual freedom alive in the shadows.
In today’s fin de siècle post-liberal order, where dissent is managed rather than crushed, Britain’s modern equivalents might be groups like the Free Speech Union or the Committee for Academic Freedom, or indeed august organs of dissent like the Daily Sceptic – reminders that the struggle against creeping authoritarianism never disappears but always offers the hope for recuperation and restoration. The names change, but the story remains the same: power tightens its grip, and somewhere, someone starts whispering in the dark.
The Fate of the West
This was the script Eastern Europe followed with its velvet revolutions in 1989 and 1990. If we’re feeling generous with historical analogies, we might even frame Donald Trump’s re-election as America’s own velvet revolution – though, admittedly, with considerably less velvet.
In the age of techno-populism, where traditional media controls are under siege from below, post-liberal authoritarianism looks even wobblier than its Cold War counterparts. Whether civil and democratic resistance in Europe will produce its own velvet revolutions remains to be seen. For now, with years of grinding toil in the UK under its distinctly post-liberal totalitarian rulers, as well as across much of the EU, the immediate future looks bleak: dour, repressive, something like Czechoslovakia in 1985, all of us just waiting for the day when the will to ‘live in truth’ makes a comeback.
But let’s end with an even more sobering thought: post-liberal totalitarianism in the West is, in some ways, even more insidious than its East European predecessor. At least the Cold War-era regimes had the decency to be honest about their brutality. One-party rule backed by an openly bullying police state made no attempt to disguise the nature of power. The post-liberal West, on the other hand, has mastered the art of deception. Today’s totalitarianism comes draped in democratic theatre and self-congratulatory progressivism. There’s no central party handing down orders – just a web of supposedly independent institutions and nominally neutral public bodies ensuring ideological conformity through a mix of incentives, soft coercion and the ever-present spectre of informal punishment for dissent.
Sure, political channels and insurgent parties exist, should voters dare to choose them. But Western Europe faces a unique challenge: rapid, often unregulated demographic upheaval, imposed without democratic consent. This, in turn, has provided the perfect excuse for post-liberal authoritarians to tighten their grip, ramp up surveillance and silence any questioning of their progressive dogmas on multiculturalism – despite those dogmas’ increasingly obvious failures. Eastern Europe never had to deal with this during the Cold War and has wisely avoided it since. The result? Greater social cohesion and fewer reasons for their elites to manufacture repressive ‘solutions’.
Meanwhile, for some Western nations the trajectory feels less toward a velvet revolution in waiting and more like a slow-motion implosion – fragmentation, disintegration, re-tribalisation. In other words, Balkanisation. And that of course points to the fate of another East European nation that wasn’t so lucky. Is this what the future holds? Not so much Prague 1989 but Yugoslavia 1991?
This article was originally published by the Daily Sceptic.
