I suggest you find a definition of "totalitarianism" and post it. Until then you don't seem to be getting the point.
Ok, well here is what popped up in google top of the page
a system of government that is centralized and dictatorial and requires complete subservience to the state.
The next result says
In the broadest sense, totalitarianism is characterized by strong central rule that attempts to control and direct all aspects of individual life through coercion and repression.
Totalitarianism, form of government that permits no individual freedom and seeks to subordinate all aspects of individual life to the authority of the state. Coined by the Italian dictator Benito Mussolini in the early 1920s, the term has become synonymous with absolute and oppressive...
www.britannica.com
Law is the State but Rule of Rule is the principle that stops the State from abusing their power with Lawfare. Proper processes that ensure equal and fair application of the law.
We have examples of lawfare committed by the present Biden/Harris aministration and of Harris herself as DA.
education is a function of the state,
Yes that puts them in a position to abuse their power by controlling what is taught. Just as the current administration is doing.
and marriage is a contract regulated by the state. It has been like that for a very long time.
Only really since the 'No fault' divorce law and other stipulations like SSM. But as we can see with these changes that it was more than just a political decision but also an ideological one.
But I noticed you missed the most important one 'family'. It is this institution that relates to marriage, parenting and child rearing. It is this institution that is most relevant when undermined that leads to more centralised control of the State of the private sphere. Which the Left have a history of undermining and destroying. Thus unsurping more control over our lives.
None of this is about "centralizing" the power of the state.
That you will have to take that up with the definitions I linked above.
A central or decentralized government is not related to the level of individual rights.
Yes it is in many situations. For example the State may deem certain identities have rights over others which then upholds one groups rights over another. It is the State that is the moral dictator on this and not any independent determination. They are centralising power by the fact that they have stepped into an ideological situation and dictated how society should be ordered.
Finally, in some cases, you are getting close to totalitarians states with theocracies. (And no this is no part of the US at any time).
As I said we can analyse how certain State behaviours that tell us how they are cultivating centralised control over the nation. It doesn't have to be full on totalitarianism to be cultivating totalitarianism. There are certain red flags we can identify on the road to totalitarianism.
That video I linked is a good example of how the Left is cultivating totalitarianism. One example is the culling of free speech which we see happening in State institutions and the manipulation of the media and narratives with State propaganda.
Did Australia end federalism when I wasn't looking?
Once again its not necessarily about full on totalitarianism but cultivating such on the road to full on totalitarianism. But even abuse of power and taking over aspects of our lives is part of the problem. Governments are more complicated and Federal power has been scaled back in many areas. But if anything Federalism is more conducive of control that decentralised government.
A large bureaucracy is not an indicator of totalitarianism. Please post that definition and justify your claim.
It can be. The more a State controls more aspects of peoples lives the more a bureaucracy is needed. Like the Welfare State or even the forced ideology of DEI. Since DEI ideological has been endoreced by the State HR and Human services administrators have risen 10 fold to implement the policies and codes of conducts that uphold it.
This is an example of how 'Ideology' and not 'reality' is used as the basis for how we should order society that is taken on by the State as a belief and not fact to enforce a certain social order. The Welfare state can also be all consuming, dictating obligations and regulations to exist within the welfare State. For which a growing number of people have become dependent and have little choice.
But let me say also that it doesn't just have to be about full on totalitarianism or totalitarianism at all. There are many ways to enforce control and all are wrong if they are based on ideology rather than reality, objective reality and lived reality.
Carl Friedrich’s Path to “Totalitarianism”
In the totalitarian system, “true authority” is replaced by the party line, the social control exercised by the party over its members through the law of anticipated reactions, and over society by a combination of ordinary bureaucratic means, legal coercion, anticipated reactions, and importantly, terror.
The modern state is the bureaucratic order. It is a state with a democratic deficit, which operates on the basis of output legitimacy rather than legitimacy derived from input processes, such as the activity of elected legislators with significant control over the actions of bureaucrats. This image is sharply different from the idea of democracy governed by the rule of law in which the discretionary power of bureaucrats was limited as much as possible, so that the actions of the state were outcomes of legally organized processes of representation.
The most visible feature of totalitarian ideology: its anti-liberalism and collectivist anti-individualism.
Carl Friedrich produced a list of characteristics of totalitarianism that for nearly a decade was influential as a “theory of totalitarianism” and a point of reference afterward. It was the product of Friedrich’s long and complex intellectual engagem...
www.qeios.com
The Bureaucratic Danger in Academia
A striking feature of the modern university has been the expansion of non-academic personnel vis-à-vis teaching and research faculty. The figures speak for themselves. Let’s take the US: 450,000 faculty and 270,000 administrators were employed by universities in 1975.2 By 2009 there were 728,977 full-time faculty (a 63 per cent increase) and 890,540 administrators (a 231 per cent increase).
This reflects the universities attempt to emulate the corporate form, which celebrates executive chains of command, technical solutions above collegial deliberation and continuous programme/performance reviews.
The Bureaucratic Danger in Academia
The following article is of particular relevance in how the modern State uses the power of imagination and narratives to re-engineer and create new meanings, new histories and new ways of thinking that subvert and control society through the Institutions, agencies and corporations to conform with the States ideology and social order.
This is exactly what we are seeing with the Lefts manipulation of the narratives, the media and social order in the public and now private spheres.
Totalitarian bureaucracy and Bauman's sociological imagination
It is argued that Bauman's interrogation of the Holocaust's true historical meaning encapsulates the best aspects of a truly sociological imagination — or what Arendt defines as "the power of narratives to release new meanings", "thinking without a banister", "enlarged thought" and "training the imagination to go visiting" (Arendt cited in Taylor, Barr and Steele 2002: 48).
karlbuehler.org
