Liberal Fascism is the new black
...According to Ryan: “The Constitution imposes too many restrictions on government interference for Mr. Sachs, and we’d be better served if we moved toward a ‘French-style’ constitution that consolidated the executive and legislative branches and empowered experts to help us manage the ‘complexity of our economy.’ ” Ryan also notes that Sachs echoes the arguments of French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the Utilitarian philosophy of Jeremy Bentham. Ryan does not mention that Rousseau’s theory of the general will is the forerunner of modern totalitarianism and Bentham’s idea of Utopia was a prison under his total control.

It is worth noting that Sachs is not considered a fringe character. He has been named one of TIME magazine’s “100 Most Influential People in the World” twice and Vanity Fair magazine put him on its list of 100 members of the New Establishment. Moreover, Sachs is hardly alone in indulging these sorts of thoughts on the left.

Ed Driscoll collects a few examples. Gov. Bev Purdue (D-NC) recently suggested “we ought to suspend, perhaps, elections for Congress for two years and just tell them we won’t hold it against them, whatever decisions they make, to just let them help this country recover.” Former Obama budget director Peter Orszag wrote a piece for TNR arguing “we need to jettison the Civics 101 fairy tale about pure representative democracy and instead begin to build a new set of rules and institutions that would make legislative inertia less detrimental to our nation’s long-term health.”...