#conspiracy theories lol. human aims are a lot more synchronised than politics makes them seem with only the extremely wealthy attempting to

[saintkevorkian]

this is a rather more cogent expression of something ive tried putting into words before

People spend a lot of time arguing about whether this or that use of "fascist" or "socialist" is excessively broad or excessively narrow, but regardless, these words get thrown around a lot. On the other hand, a word that I think gets less discourse than it should is "totalitarian."

A big distinction between authoritarianism and totalitarianism is that an authoritarian system doesn't care about the political commitments of its subjects, or rather, it doesn't want them to have any. "Leave politics to the people in charge, keep your head down, do what you're told, and you'll be fine." By contrast, a totalitarian system considers having no political commitments to be somewhere on the spectrum between disreputable and criminal. It demands ideological commitment even in private life.

When you have this framing in mind, it is hard to miss the totalitarian tendencies around you. On the one hand, the religious right (now sometimes fronted by people who aren't even religious, a la Chris Rufo) has always had totalitarian tendencies. And what else would you call making it a firing offense for a teacher to refer to her wife in casual conversation, or the attempt to ban people from choosing which books to read at the library, or allowing coaches to coerce student athletes into prayer sessions?

But the puritanical left is also like this. Not (currently) in the sense of using the law to compel ideology, but in the sense that they take "the personal is political" to an extreme. The idea that one might be allowed to just enjoy books or games without considering whether their content serves the needs of social justice is anathema to them. What is one to call the accusation that its some sort of obscene privilege to want to occasionally take a break from thinking about politics, because of the false premise that members of marginalized populations never have the opportunity to do so, if not "totalitarian"? (The absurd take that atheists lean right-wing is downstream of this; "atheism plus" is the totalitarian impulse to say that nothing can ever be about anything else except "social justice" as defined by its totalitarian adherents.)

This tends to get branded as people "making their politics their personality," which isn't necessarily incorrect, but also wildly understates how frightening it should be to have people like that in positions of power.