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Hitler did everything in the name of the mob he dubbed “Das Volk.” In Mein Kampf, he declared “war against the order of things which exist, against the structure of the world which presently exists.”23 He denounced both Bolshevism and Christianity as Jewish conspiracies.

As is common to mob movements, the Nazis’ new order would require elimination of the Christian Church—messianic government doesn’t like competition. As Joseph Goebbels explained: “The insanity of the Christian doctrine of redemption really doesn’t fit at all into our time.”24 Sounding remarkably like the French revolutionaries, the Nazis demanded that priests and ministers swear loyalty to the state and its Fuhrer. In 1935, Heinrich Himmler prohibited SS officers from being members of religious organizations or even participating in services, in or out of uniform.

Reminiscent of France’s “Cult of Reason,” the Nazis planned to replace Christianity with the “Reich Church,” based on a 30-point plan drawn up by Nazi leader Alfred Rosenberg. Crosses were to be stripped from churches, cathedrals, and chapels and replaced by the swastika. Bibles, crucifixes, and saints would be forbidden from the altars, which would instead display a copy of Mein Kampf and a sword.25 (If they had thought of it, they might have put Christ in a jar of urine.)

A century earlier, Heinrich Heine had observed that Christianity had only “mitigated that brutal German love of war,” not extinguished it. But should the cross be destroyed, he said, the “insane Berserk rage of which Nordic bards have spoken and sung so often, will once more burst into flame.” And when it did, “A play will be performed in Germany which will make the French Revolution look like an innocent idyll.”26

Again in Russia, we find a tiny group of zealots—calling themselves “the majority” (Bolsheviks)—who planned to control everything from a central authority. Lenin wrote most of the “scientific” program for a dictatorship of the proletariat in Russia, which was then debated and modified by other communist leaders. Socialism had to be imposed from above, by educated elites. There would be no from-the-bottom-up modifications. And so a small group of men spent their time banging out grand theories for how to control every aspect of a gigantic nation, down to setting prices for 24 million different goods.27

In Cambodia, the communist Khmer Rouge’s first order of business was to empty the cities for the new back-to-nature agricultural plan. The millions of Cambodians who lived in cities—about half the population—were given 24 hours to leave their homes. Within a week the cities were emptied. Then the planners congratulated themselves on having solved “the ancient antagonism between urban and rural areas.” As in France, it was a new world—it was “Year Zero.”

Next, the Cambodian planners turned to the destruction of religion, commerce, education, and parental authority. Young people were taken from their parents to be raised in communes. Money was abolished in a week. As with the ludicrous French calendar, workers were allowed one day off every ten days. Religion was inconsistent with the program, so nearly half of all Catholics were exterminated and the cathedral in Phnom Penh reduced to rubble.28 Buddhist monks were slaughtered and their temples destroyed.

The details of totalitarian regimes may vary, but the inspiration is always the same Rousseauian fantasy: A select group of elites with absolutely no grasp of human nature will figure out the program, inflexibly impose it on the people, and thereby regenerate mankind. You will note the similarities in all these totalitarian plans to many of the Democrats’ schemes.

Finley Peter Dunne described a fanatic as “a man that does what he thinks the Lord would do if He knew the facts of the case.” Inasmuch as liberals don’t believe in God, it’s a one-step process: “What would I do?” What they would do is use the power of the state to revoke nature, tradition, the market, the existence of two sexes, and popular opinion