There is something almost charming about the left’s habit of using childish name-calling in the service of declaring their political opponents to be intellectually unserious. And so we should probably have expected nothing less (or nothing more) in Michael Lind’s Salon essay explaining why he has moved away from the American right. But conservatives shouldn’t be deterred by the headline, “Right-wing dreams of demented utopias,” because it isn’t at all clear that Lind knows what the word “utopia” means.
Lind, the author of a clumsy and error-riddled new book on American economic history, sets out to demonstrate that conservatives have inherited the left’s predilection for the pursuit of transformative utopian politics. But, as one might expect, Lind ends up making a powerful case against his own thesis.
