Theodore Dalrymple on a Bad Day: Depicts Socialists/Communists/Whatevers as Perfection-Seeking “Utopians”

By Nicholas Stix

I don’t know where the idea got around that leftists are “utopians.” That Republican writers would say such drivel is unsurprising, since they’re hacks. But when brilliant people like Theodore Dalrymple/Anthony Daniels or Thomas Sowell say it…

All my adult life, I’ve heard it said that Marxists seek “utopia.” But all of the Marxists, etc. I’ve seen have worshiped hatred, genocidal violence, and pursued politics as a zero-sum game, none of which is remotely utopian.

In a new column, Dalrymple gives the example of Irish demonstrators demanding “free” water, at other’s expense. They know that they are demanding that their fellow citizens pay for their “free” water, in addition to the former having to pay for their own. Rather than being utopian, such demands are the stuff of the ugliest imaginable power play. And so it is with every leftist demand. That such demands are couched in the language of “human rights” doesn’t fool anyone above the age of eight, or an intelligent five-year-old.

One explanation for such a mistaken description is that everyone has a bad day now and then, in which he surrenders to his inner Republican. Another is that these are old men, from a time in which communists worked harder to disguise their murderous intentions—though they didn’t fool George Orwell—and in Sowell’s case, could be a sentimental carry-over from his own days as a young Marxist.

“The Demand for Perfection.”