THE FRUIT OF UTOPIANISM IS REACTION.

Instapundit points to John Powers, engaging in more soul-searching on the Left:

In contrast, the left has become — there’s no other word for it — reactionary.
Still unable to accept that the right has dominated our national life for the last quarter-century, the left hasn’t done the hard, slow work of thinking through what it means to be progressive during an era of ultraglobalized capitalism in which the only successful Democratic president in the last 35 years, Bill Clinton, followed policies that even he compared to Dwight Eisenhower’s.

Perhaps that's not a failing. The years from 1946 to 1965 were the last years in which civil, commercial, and political society in the United States functioned reasonably well. Milt's File links to an Economist editorial reporting this interesting development.

First-term tax cuts have already helped to reduce America's tax revenue, as a percentage of GDP, to its lowest level since the 1950s (see chart 1). If Mr Bush's new-found fiscal prudence is genuine (he promises to halve the budget deficit), he has no business making America's fiscal problems worse.

Their focus is on tax-code reform. But I see nothing in either the editorial or Mr Powers's column suggesting that the President bring spending in line with revenues, say, by ending the national government's spending on goods and services not considered in 1954. Rather than engage in hair-splitting over what is a "left" ideology or a "right" ideology, why not a conversation over what works and what institutional arrangements -- not necessarily new faces in Washington or new agencies -- most efficiently deliver?

Andrew Sullivan has noted that President Bush is not a conservative.

Bush killed off small government conservatism years ago. Bush is a Wilsonian liberal abroad and a Bismarckian at home.

That sounds about right, although his willingness to trade medical savings accounts for federally-funded prescriptions for seniors is a baby step in a new direction, and his intention to put private retirement accounts on the table is encouraging.

The old divisions lose their usefulness. Mr Powers sees it but doesn't recognize it.

The left now needs a position on how best to battle a Muslim ideology that, at bottom, despises all the freedoms we should be defending. America should be actively promoting the freedom of everyone on the planet, and the key question is, how would the left do it differently from the Bush administration?

One useless division? Here's another.

Rather than coming off as anti-consumerist puritans in a consumerist culture, the left should be fighting on the side of freedom and pleasure — for instance, arguing that ordinary people should have more time off from the endless hours of work that increasingly devour our souls. This is the kind of idea we should own — and force the right to argue against.

Huh? I'll never lack for work explaining the backward-bending labor supply curve. The Left and the Right have been trading shots for years over whether it's unions or economic growth that contributed to rising wages, and whether the shorter workweek antedated the Fair Labor Standards Act.

And then there's this.

The right controls the machinery of government and isn’t shy about using it to change the world to make it fit the twin religions that drive it — Christianity and untrammeled free-market economics. To fight such a radical, all-encompassing vision, we need an equally big countervision of our own. I’m not talking about some mad fantasy of heaven on earth (those usually lead to death camps), but a dream bigger than hopes that the Democratic Party will come back into power four years from now. To create the world we want, we have to regain the hopeful belief that we are trying to create a world thrillingly better than the one we now live in.

Is it time to revisit the fallacy of insufficient alternatives? The premise ... whether it be motivated by the Protestant Ethic or the Social Gospel ... that there is a better world and a path to it ... is the same, it's simply a struggle over who shall be the trail guide.

(Yes, I'm repeating myself. Even the brightest among you will benefit from a modicum of reiteration.) Hence:

But there is no convincing improvement offered by polemicists of the Left, nor convincing refutation offered by polemicists of the Right.

And I commend, once again, Jesse at Hit and Run, who last November expressed disappointment with the dimensions of the soul-searching.

There is no party of tolerance in Washington -- just a party that wages its crusades in the name of Christ and a party that wages its crusades in the name of Four Out Of Five Experts Agree. I say fie on both.

Exactly. Nobody has come out and said that one collective vision ought not to be a quest for a collective vision.