Against Utopianism

Robert Stacy McCain makes a good point regarding the prevalence of utopianism in contemporary American politics. You may recall that during the presidential campaign last year, an overzealous Obama supporter named Peggy Joseph exclaimed that under an Obama administration, "I won't have to worry about putting gas in my car; I won't have to worry about paying my mortgage. You know, if I help him, he's gonna help me." Regrettably, that sentiment - that the government should take care of everyone and ensure their happiness at any cost - has become gospel across large swathes of American society.

Since the 1930s, the Democratic Party has benefited from exploiting such unrealistic aspirations, ultimately creating legions of cynical, politically apathetic people when such promises inevitably go unfulfilled. Stacy McCain says it is high time that the Republican Party spoke out loudly and forcefully against such foolishness:

What is needed is not anger or hatred, but patient explanation to the Peggy Josephs that they've been scammed, hustled, burned by Democrats who have done what Democrats have always done: Promised voters the moon, stars and sun, without any real intention of delivering on the promise.

The answer to this kind of Pixie Dust nonsense is not for the Republicans to try to steal the Pixie Dust formula, offering their own magical policy panaceas. Rather, the GOP needs to speak the brutal truth: There are no pixies and no magic.

There are no panaceas. We can neither return to some mythical edenic Golden Age nor are we marching toward some future Utopia of perfection. Decades of trying to vote ourselves into Heaven-on-Earth have created the very problems -- e.g., the actuarial nightmares of Social Security and Medicare -- which today's promise-'em-anything Democrats claim they'll fix.

"Grow Up, America" would be an accurate slogan for what the nation really needs. It wouldn't be a popular message, but it would be a true assessment of what ails us: A childishness, a politics of wishing, of which the naivete of Peggy Josephs was but an extreme example.

I often encounter such mindless utopianism in the form of liberals declaring that conservative policies are on the "wrong side" of history - such as with the issue of gay marriage. Regardless of where one comes down on that issue, having been an academic historian for the better part of a decade I can tell you this: history has no side. Hegel and Marx were wrong. So is Francis Fukuyama. Humanity is by nature imperfect; there will never be a man-made heaven on earth and no secular Messiah, be he John F. Kennedy or Barack Obama, will lead us there. To believe otherwise is foolish, ignorant, and childish.

Terrence Mann (played by James Earl Jones) in Field of Dreams had the right idea. It is time to tell the "peace-love-dope" crowd to grow up and get lost: