Woke Utopianism is destined to fail.

But how much damage will it produce in the meantime?

Michael Lind argues that “twice in the last half century utopian politics has emerged in the U.S.—once with the Republican Party as its vehicle, and now with the Democratic Party as its base.” The first instance, he claims, occurred under George W. Bush. The second is occurring now, thanks to the radical left’s three utopian social engineering projects: the Green Project, the Quota Project, and the Androgyny Project.

I want to focus on Lind’s discussion of the latter development. But before doing so, I should say that Lind’s discussion of the Bush administration presents a caricature, not an accurate portrait.

For example, Lind says it was Bush’s project to “spread ‘the global democratic revolution’ through ‘wars of choice’ and ‘humanitarian interventions’ in the Middle East and elsewhere. He points to Bush’s second inaugural address that supports this view to some extent.

But Bush’s actions do not. He started two wars, both of which had broad bipartisan support at the beginning. Neither war was initiated for the purpose of spreading a democratic revolution. The purpose of the Afghanistan war was to remove a government that shared responsibility for the 9/11 attacks. The purpose of the Iraq war was to topple a regime with a record of aggression against our interests that our government believed had amassed an arsenal of weapons of mass destruction.

Lind also overlooks what Bush did not do. Unlike Barack Obama, he did not topple an undemocratic regime (Libya’s) that was no longer antagonistic towards our interests. Nor did he facilitate the toppling of an undemocratic regime (Egypt’s) that was in our camp. And Bush never did anything remotely as soft headed as hanging the Shah of Iran out to dry in the name of democracy and human rights. That was Jimmy Carter.

Lind is on much stronger ground when he turns to the current woke revolution and three of its major projects. As to the first, he writes:

The Green Project is not limited to mitigating global warming by reducing greenhouse gas emissions by industry and energy production. 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.

Lind calls this project utopian. Some consider it dystopian.

The Quota Project (an excellent description I hadn’t seen before) is also utopian in the same sense:

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. Like the Green Transition, the Quota Project is a radical utopian program of social reconstruction in search of an excuse that might justify it.

The Quota Project is especially noxious because it’s based on the view that America is too irredeemably racist to treat minority group members fairly and that all fault for any shortcomings in the performance of minorities resides in white racism.

These views are starkly at odds with reality. But the prize for reality denial goes to the Androgyny Project:

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.”

Far more comprehensive than “trans rights,” which affect fewer than 1% of the population, the Androgyny Project seeks to redefine all male and female human beings as generic, androgynous humanoids whose sex is a matter of subjective self-definition rather than objective reality.

This view is insane.

Lind is confident that the left’s three woke projects are destined to fail because they are so desperately unrealistic.

The Green Project, he says, is “doomed by physics and engineering.”

Today 80% of the world’s energy comes from fossil fuels. Without reliance on nuclear fission or, perhaps, in the future, nuclear fusion, the transition from fossil fuels may never take place at the global level, though it might happen in a few small countries. Politicians can make all the commitments they like, but most energy is likely to come from fossil fuels in 2050, 2100, and perhaps beyond.

The Quota Project is “doomed by its own internal contradictions.”

If the goal is that every occupation, every club, every reading list, and every sports team in the U.S. have exact proportions of each “race” defined by the census, then every 10 years following the latest census the racial composition of corporate boards, university faculties, sports teams, and artists displayed by museums must be readjusted, with some groups losing their shares and others increasing their shares.

Suppose that a wave of immigration from Asia shrinks the relative share of Hispanics and Black Americans in the U.S. population. Does that mean that jobs, grants, and congressional districts should be taken away from Black Americans and Hispanic Americans and given to Asian Americans, to prevent Black American and Hispanic “overrepresentation”? Far better are the alternatives of race-neutral, anti-discrimination laws, protecting individuals of all races, and race-neutral reforms that help economically disadvantaged individuals of all races.

I hope the Quota Project is doomed not just for technical reasons, but also because there are limits to the degree that Americans will accept the overriding of merit. These limits are being tested.

Finally:

The Androgyny Project, for its part, is bound to crash against reality in the form of human biology. I predict that in a generation the “progressive” policy of so-called “gender-affirming health care” will be viewed in hindsight the way the prescription of lobotomies and chemical castration as cures for homosexuality in the 1950s is viewed today.

I hope this doesn’t take a generation.

The three woke revolutions Lind describes are, as he says, doomed to fail. But each can cause plenty of damage before it crashes. Each already is.