RIP Robert Conquest

There was a great Marxist named Lenin
Who did two or three million men in.
—That’s a lot to have done in,
But where he did one in
The grand Marxist Stalin did ten in.

The great Soviet historian, Robert Conquest, just passed away. His obituary in WSJ is here. I was an avid reader of his histories of Stalin, The Great Terror (dealing with the Stalinist show trials and purges in the 1930's) and Harvest of Sorrow (dealing with the dekulakization and collectivization of agriculture in Ukraine and its disastrous results).

These books may have overestimated (perhaps grossly so) the number of people "done in" by Stalin, but when Conquest first published The Great Terror in 1968, his was almost the only voice of his era decrying the utter villainy of Stalin's regime. In those years, the Soviet Union was viewed by idealistic Progressives (actually, dupes and useful idiots) through rose-colored glasses as a kind of utopia to which Americans should aspire.

Conquest's histories, though perhaps now superseded by later works incorporating information from Soviet archives (unavailable to Conquest when he first wrote and themselves of uncertain accuracy), supplied some of the first realistic portrayals of the horrors of Stalinist Russia.

A tyrant seizes power

The Obama modus operandi is clear.

Go it alone. Use the clout of the executive branch to make sweeping changes through executive action. For example, declare that you won't enforce the immigration laws, or have your Secretary of State negotiate a nuclear deal with Iran behind closed doors, or have the EPA announce new carbon emission rules that will force a complete reorganization of the American energy industry.

Then, get the Justice Department to issue various opinions to the effect that your executive actions are legal.

Then, if possible, get some international body to validate your executive actions, as, for example, you got the UN Security Council to ratify your deal with Iran and as you will try to get the Pope and the UN climate treaty conference in December to support the EPA's carbon emission rules.

Your strategy is to overwhelm the legislative and judicial branches of the federal government and any states that resist, to present them with a fait accompli that they will not be able to overturn. For example, the fact that the UN has already ratified your Iran nuclear deal can be used to bludgeon Congress into accepting that deal (in spite of the fact that it is the duty of the Senate, not the UN, to ratify American treaties). Likewise, your executive actions on immigration and carbon emissions will certainly be challenged in the courts, but the litigation will take years, and, by the time the Supreme Court issues its ruling, Democratic presidents may well have stuffed the Court with enough liberal judges that the Court will decide in your favor (employing, say, Chevron deference). Besides, even if the Court decides against you, your administrative changes will have become so entrenched by then that the Court's decision will be moot.

What we are witnessing is nothing less than a tyrant seizing power, manipulating the executive branch of government to crush the other two federal branches of government and the states and to force upon the nation the elitist vision of one man.