An excellent read from David Solway at Pajama Media, The Insanity of Progressivism Comes Right Out of Gulliver’s Travels:

Indeed, on the major issues of the historical moment—climate change, the war on terror, national borders, “social justice,” gender politics, race conflict, post-colonial theory, immigration—the tribe of progressivist mountebanks wherever we find them get everything wrong, opting for measures that only magnify the problems they affect to settle. We should not be surprised to find Lagadian absurdities in abundance, as for example: journalists who advocate exorbitant spending to neutralize debt (Paul Krugman); politicians who endorse socialized medicine, at a cost of trillions (Barack Obama); senators who propose tax rates over 100 percent (Elizabeth Warren); teachers who believe that history is a narrative to be manipulated for ideological ends (Howard Zinn); leaders who champion near-unlimited Muslim refugee migration, generating communal strife, outright violence, and unsustainable welfare expenditure (Angela Merkel); philosophers who affirm that truth is a relative concept—except for the truth of their own claims (Michel Foucault); revisionists who deplore the “mindless authority in European writing” (Edward Said); writers who promote violence as the road to millennial harmony (Slavoj Zizek); feminists who advocate the homicidal culling of men to create a better world (Mona Eltahawy); sciolists who argue that Islam is a “straight path” (John Esposito, Karen Armstrong); charlatans who claim a cooling world gradually entering a new Little Ice Age is actually warming (Al Gore, James Hanson, Michael Mann); medical practitioners who promote transgenderism and sex re-assignment surgery since the biological bodies we are born with are merely physical accessories (Ray Blanchard et al.); post-colonial theorists who claim that successful free-market societies are profiteering relics (Homi Bhabha); geo-engineers who recommend shooting particles into the atmosphere to block the sun’s harmful rays (John Holden); Luddites who want to selectively eliminate the fruits of technology and kill jobs (Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez); and so on.

Such quacks—Swift called them “speculators” and “virtuosi”—rely upon a mystical grimoire, a “book of shadows” filled with spells, incantations, and rituals that will remake the world as if by magic. It’s not science, it’s enchantment. As Joshua Muravchik writes in Heaven on Earth: The Rise, Fall, and Afterlife of Socialism, the eclipse of historical memory of “the countless failures and abuses of socialism” ensures that the “old dream…retains the capacity to enchant.” Orwell’s observation in Notes on Nationalism that “One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool” continues to apply. We are witnessing the Academy of Lagado on steroids.

 

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