I am referring to the intellectuals who made their political début as more or less notorious dissidents before the Romanian Revolution and were fully acclaimed as such during the ‘90s and early 2000s. Many became flagbearers of the “anti-corruption battle” in the recent years, alongside with their disciples. When asked for their stance, they all declare themselves “rightists” or at least reject the “leftist” political option, after the criminal experiment of the Communist totalitarianism.

How can this totalitarianism be defined? I can only describe it as a monstrous exacerbation and fetishisation of the State powers over the individuals, families, communities and society altogether. We often discuss the results without drawing our attention to the social-humanitarian pretexts of the Bolshevik Revolution which brought in the Gulag and into which many naives have placed their faith.

You would think anyone who has been through that, especially a self-styled “rightist” intellectual (or even an explicitly “liberal” or “conservative” one) has learned the need for minimising or restricting the institutional and legal powers of the State. The peril of totalitarianism grows and wanes in conjunction with the state’s power to influence and control the lives of individuals, families, communities, society, legitimised by law. The State, capable of exerting exhaustive power over the society, insofar still considered a necessary evil, should be as small one as possible.

Well, this is hardly the case. We observe that the sort of intellectuals I refer to stray away from thinking in this way. For them, the state power in Communism has not been inherently bad; just the values it promoted were wrong. At most, the coercion methods were exaggerated. But not the idea of coercion itself. The State is beneficial and so are its powers, if it promotes and warrants the “proper values.” Right-wing political correctness is more insidious than the leftist one.

This is exactly why such intellectuals are unable to realise that the very magnitude of state presence in the economy – through taxes, regulations and public investment – is the source of corruption. On the contrary, they perceive corruption as indicative of the State’s weakness and want its capacity strengthened, thus creating opportunities of fine-tuning the plundering, ramping up the inefficiency and adding to the administrative burden of honest people.

“Right-wing” intellectuals do not view the educational sector disaster as a symptom of the State’s failure in this area. They do not deem it a reason to begin a complete liberalisation of this field, including homeschooling. Instead, they claim that the share of GDP allotted to public education, whatever its kind, is too small. They complain that the curriculum is increasingly loaded with “cultural Marxism”, not once thinking that then solution is not breeding a conservative thought police in State schools, but actually dismantling the public educational monopoly.