A “utopian” ideology is any ideology that is predicated on good people beyond temptation creating and/or maintaining a good and wonderful society, even when those “good people” do so on an oracular basis, or via the will of the people (who are either a god collectively themselves or the lens of a god’s light).
Sadly, this is an attitude that has been taken up by many on the post-conservative “Right”, as as James Lindsay notes, which is quoted in full below due to the limitations of Twitter/X embeds.
This is what Carl Schmitt (a favorite philosopher on the Woke Right) calls a “commissarial dictatorship,” which is supposed to assume dictatorial decision powers to return the republic to its constitutional normative order.
The problem with Schmitt’s conception is obvious, though. If the executive can declare a special state outside of the constitutional order and bis unbound by it, even just to restore the order, he can declare the demand to restore the order an emergency of its own right, violating his executive sovereignty. Such a dictator, Schmitt calls a “sovereign dictator.”
That means the only barrier between a tyrant and an unbound executive who restores the republic from a state of exception is the conscience of the executive at the precise moment when his temptation to power is highest. It’s not impossible, but it’s exceptionally rare, and it will not last through many such temptations, especially in the hands of another executive with less character.
This road is folly. “The evil Left set the rules, so we have to play by them” is a Satanic temptation we must resist.
Pray for these people, for they are lost.
They’re not our leaders, though. They’ve abdicated the trust necessary to allow that.
