The Gospel According to Useful Idiots

Modern Progressivism Runs on Magical Thinking, Institutional Money, and the Refusal to Ask One Simple Question: “Is It Working?”

Ronald Reagan could not have suspected how prophetically correct he was when he characterized the mind of contemporary American left in his statement that it isn’t so much that the left is ignorant, it is they know so much that isn’t so. Reagan made that statement in his famous “A Time for Choosing” speech on behalf of Barry Goldwater on October 27, 1964, some 62 years ago.

The only thing that has changed in those sixty-plus years is that the left has found ways to get financial and ideological support to fund doubling down on doubling down.

When people attack climate change theories, the Climatistas twist those attacks away from what they have proposed and are doing and port them toward other humans, because attacking something that purports to want to save mankind is actually an attack on mankind itself.

Yes, of course, it is twisting logic to the point of strangling it to death, but it happens all the time – and not just with climate, pretty much every issue about which the left claims to care from homelessness to racism, and because there is a commonality of thought about these issues on the left and the right, this is a left/right political, as well as intellectual, fight.

The key to breaking this dynamic lies in just one thing.

Magical thinking.

Not doing more of it but stopping it.

No matter what people might think, while magical thinking sounds like a good thing, it is not. It is not a component of innovation, it is not aspirational, it is not creative, and not something ground breaking, it is simply believing in solutions that do not work and continuing, by coercive or financial force, to pursue dead end thinking with no endpoint.

In the process, failure becomes a virtue.

I recall an old story of a crew of Spanish conquistadors searching for the Lost City of Gold in the jungles of South America. They set about hacking and chopping through the jungle and every day, one person was designated to climb the highest tree and one day, after several months of chopping, the lookout glimpsed a glint of gold atop a far away mountain. Motivated by the thought of incredible riches, the soldiers chopped even faster. A few weeks later the lookout noticed they were veering off course and when he yelled down that they were going the wrong way, the Captain yelled back for him to get down and shut up because they were making great progress hacking the trail.

The activity became the goal and that is one way to recognize magical thinking because it is not designed to have an end state, it is only designed to perpetuate more magical thinking. Poisonous trees produce poisonous fruit, that would seem to be a universal understanding — but it isn’t, and that is why those on the left who indulge in such intellectual frivolity never even stumble over a solution that works even after trillions of dollars have been poured into it.

But it can be stopped.

Stopping it begins with the willingness to ask the one question that magical thinking is specifically engineered to forbid: Is it working? Not is the effort noble, not are the intentions pure, not are the people involved compassionate — but is it actually working? That single question, honestly asked and honestly answered, is the crowbar that pries magical thinking loose from its institutional moorings.

Reagan understood this. He understood that a idea does not become true because enough people believe it, and it does not become effective because enough money is thrown at it. Results matter. Outcomes matter. The jungle does not care how enthusiastically you swing the machete if you are swinging it in the wrong direction.

The good news is that reality is extraordinarily patient. It will wait. It waited through the Great Society. It waited through decades of failed urban policy, through the hollowing out of American cities by the very compassion industries claiming to save them. It is waiting still. And every time a policy fails — visibly, undeniably, expensively — the opening appears for those willing to say plainly what everyone already suspects: the captain is taking us the wrong way.

That is not cruelty. That is not heartlessness. That, in the end, is the only genuine form of caring there is — insisting that the solutions we pursue actually solve something. Reagan said it sixty-two years ago and it remains as true today as the day he said it. We don’t have to keep hacking the wrong path through the wrong jungle.

We just have to be willing to climb the tree.