A few thoughts on utopian projects
The word "utopia" inspires revolutionaries the world over. Believe in us, follow us, they say, and we will return to a prelapsarian world. The lion will lie down with the lamb, and swords will be beaten into plowshares.
The word came into the English language with Sir Thomas More's philosophical work of the same name. Of course, two things stand out: the source of the word, and it's meaning.
More, a Latin and Greek scholar, invented the word. Outopia: "ou", no, and "topia", place. Literally, "No Place", or, to be a hepcat, "Nowheresville, man".
In his Utopia, More writes about a fantasy island whose politics, economics, and legal system are perfect. All citizens are happy, there is no want, no war, no disease.
But of course, we go back to the word's etymology: "No Place". More was describing an ideal world which had never and would never exist.
Utopian leaders sell their flocks a bill of goods. Follow me, they say, and you will have the keys to paradise.
All the totalitarian regimes of the 20th century, of the right and left, were utopian dreams. Communists promised a new Eden for workers and the downtrodden. Fascists promised a renewed national community. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, Inner Party member O'Brien mocked both Communists and Nazis for their utopian pretensions. In seeking out paradise, they all created hell, but weren't honest with themselves that Hell was the end-goal, that power for its own sake was what they worked for. The greatest utopian projects of the 20th century weren't communes, but governments which brought devastation upon millions.
Utopians start from the premise that this world is rotten, and needs to be swept away. The problem with that, however, is that you sweep away the good with the bad. Furthermore, you rid yourselves of historical memory. For an extreme example of this, one has to merely witness the Cambodian experiment. The Khmer Rouge upended the old order, and in the process committed the greatest genocide since the Holocaust.
This isn't in any way to say that the world is in fine fettle. Of course it's not. But in setting things to rights, one must take care to not make things worse. Utopia is a "no place", because the disruption those projects cause preclude ever reaching that sunny paradise they promise. They take a broken world and then completely shatter it, and what they replace it with is in many ways worse. "Incrementalism" is a much-derided concept on both the left and right; but evolutionary change is the only way to make things better while minimizing the cost.
In the US we're buffeted by two utopian visions: those of Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump. They fall along the old left-right axis. We're living in the MAGA utopia right now, and as I think we can all agree, it's not paradise. Sanders' utopian vision seems to be heading to a second straight defeat. Both Sanders and Trump sell their followers the same bill of goods all utopian visionaries put up. And the most diehard of the cultists will not give up the dream, even in the face catastrophic defeat. We'll be living with sniping from the left and right for years to come, as they long for a great cleansing.
The greatest threat to democracy is not from foreign actors, but from our own citizens who've lost faith in the democratic process. We're seeing that across the breadth of the West. How states deal with that will be the defining struggle of the 21st century.