Columnist Michael Lind has a piece up at Tablet arguing that “power-mad utopians” have appeared on both sides of the aisle in recent history. As he sees it there was a group of such people in power during the Bush administration who arose on the right. But today Lind argues the ascendant power-mad utopians are on the left. He divides their overall priorities into three distinct social engineering projects which he dubs the Green Project, the Quota project and the Androgyny Project:

By itself, decarbonization is a technical project that can be carried out by methods like building nuclear power plants and replacing coal with natural gas in electrical generation.

The Green Project or Green New Deal is not satisfied with decarbonizing energy sources. It invokes climate change as an excuse to radically restructure the society of the U.S. and other advanced industrial democracies, from the way that food is grown to where people live to how people behave. Under the banner of the Green New Deal or the Green Transition, various lesser ideological projects on the left—veganism, replacing cars and trucks with mass transit, urban densification, anti-natalism—have rallied, even though none of these is necessary for decarbonizing the energy supply.

The Quota Project, embodied in the rote bureaucratic phrase “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI), is another utopian project. Its goal is the radical restructuring of the U.S. and other Western societies on the basis of racial quotas, so that all racial and ethnic groups are represented in equal proportions in all occupations, classes, academic curriculums, and even literary and artistic canons. DEI is affirmative action on LSD.

For the Quota Project, anti-racism is the public justification. But quota-based tokenism is not a solution for specific cases of discrimination against individuals—which can and should be dealt with by race-neutral, anti-discrimination laws. Nor does the Quota Project have any real solutions to offer in the case of class or cultural differences which—even in the absence of racism, conscious or “structural”—would result in some groups doing better than others in various occupations…

The third of the three utopian projects that define contemporary trans-Atlantic progressivism is the Androgyny Project. This goes far beyond civil rights and humane treatment for victims of gender dysphoria and has nothing to do with the hard-won rights of gay men and lesbians. The Androgyny Project holds that gender identity is independent of biological sex and purely subjective. If a middle-aged man claims that he is a woman, then progressives favor requiring local government to retroactively falsify his birth certificate to show that he was “really” born female and “misassigned at birth.”

In Lind’s view all three of these projects are doomed to failure and yet making that failure a reality won’t happen on its own. “We need to stop them in their tracks,” he writes. And the key here is the “we” part. The preservation of some kind of status quo sanity on these issues will require a broad coalition. Not just conservatives and populists who are already against it but also what Lind describes as “frightened refugees” who are leaving progressivism because they can’t accept the demands to keep up with and defend silly idea like “men can get pregnant.” What he envisions is an ” anti-progressive front” made up of both parties and every conceivable niche.

But at the moment, there are some powerful forces keeping Democrats and uncomfortable progressives from speaking up. He boils this down to three ideas: cowardice, careerism and cash. Cowardice is simply the unwillingness to nominate oneself for cancelation and public harassment. Careerism refers to all of the DEI jobs and woke professorships that wouldn’t exist if these ideas were broadly rejected. Cash is simply the desire of various hacks and grifters to profit from the the new religion, no different from money changers in the temple.

Lind closes by pointing out he’s not calling for violence against anyone but is calling for all legal and peaceful means of opposition to what he calls the “three lumbering juggernauts” of lunacy described in his piece.

I’m not as confident as Lind seems to be that sanity will prevail. I think he’s correct that with conservatives already opposing much of this, it really falls on sensible left-of-center people to speak up. Some have. I can think of several well-known individuals (Dave Chappelle, Joe Rogan, Bill Maher, Andrew Sullivan JK Rowling and even Elon Musk) who’ve refused to play along despite being closer to the left than the right in most respects. But I think we all know how that’s gone for these apostates. No, they haven’t been canceled. They continue to be successful despite constant attempts to drag them down and portray them as heartless monsters. The abuse they endure probably does a lot to discourage others from following their lead, as it’s no doubt intended to. It’s going to take a lot more brave people to defeat the power-mad utopians of the left.