Question: "As a regular reader of your blog for the past year or so, I enjoy and respect your opinions as they are typically quite accurate and realistic. I was curious, however, what your opinion was on the following issue.

You highlight blog/diary entries from liberal "progressive" sites which seem to defy any type of common sense or reality, at least to me. My question is, in your opinion, if "progressives" completely had "their way", what would their Utopian country/world look like? In other words, what do they believe they are "progressing" to as an endpoint?" -- CowboyBarney

Answer: Of course, there's no way to know exactly what liberals would do if they were able to gain absolute political power in the US, but it's possible to make some educated guesses based on what the libs believe, try to do now, and what their ideological ilk have done when they've had that sort of power in other nations.

If the Left were able to totally dominate American politics starting tomorrow, all 50 governors, every seat in Congress, the presidency, and all 9 Supreme Court Justices, my guess is that they'd immediately start implementing the worst aspects of European socialism wholesale.

In other words, you'd see socialized medicine, government takeovers of industry, reams of new regulations on businesses, sky high tax rates. The military would be gutted, the national debt would grow to unimaginable levels; drugs, prostitution, gay marriage, and polygamy would be legalized, penalties for committing crimes would be greatly reduced, and draconian speech codes would be put into place.

This would, of course, have disastrous consequences for the country and the world. The US economy would start to fall apart, crime would explode, and conflicts would break out all over the globe as terrorists were given free reign, other nations rapidly escalated their conventional military spending, and dozens of nations built nuclear weapons. Within a couple of decades, multiple "small" nuclear wars would probably break out in Asia, South America, and the Middle East even as the global economy started to tank.

Now, you might think that if this were to happen, the libs would see the error of their ways and move back to the right -- but, that doesn't take into account the nature of the Left.

When a liberal idea fails miserably in practice, which is most of the time, their response isn't to go in the other direction, it's to go FURTHER in the direction that they were already moving. This is exactly what the Left did in countries like China and the Soviet Union and it's what seems likely that they would do in the US as well when it became clear that turning the United States into a giant version of Belgium/Amsterdam wasn't working out so well.

What you'd probably get then would be a madcap combination of the world in George Orwell's 1984 mixed with the dictates of Stalin. Religion would be banned, conservatism would be illegal, the state would take over ever larger portions of industry, and the Constitution would be scrapped and replaced with a 500 page tangle of bureaucrat speak that spells out everything from what political ideas would be made "thought crimes" to what sort of light bulbs people would be allowed to use.

Does that sound too fantastic to be true? Maybe it is. But, if people like Ted Kennedy, Rosie O'Donnell, Al Gore, Hillary Clinton, and Michael Moore were allowed to actually implement their ideas without having to worry about the voters, the wildest excesses of liberalism that you can imagine would probably pale in comparison to what they'd actually end up implementing.