Communism works perfectly in textbooks. Within nations, it doesn't operate so flawlessly. Since academics inhabit the theoretic world and not the practical world, it's unsurprising that they would embrace something that works in the former but not in the latter.

For too long intellectuals have been traveling briskly down the wrong paths, taking the rest of us along for the ride. It's time to get off and turn back, quickly.

Herbert Marcuse, the guru of the New Left of the 1960s, waged war on language by renaming intolerance as tolerance, violence as nonviolence, and dictatorship as democracy. Marcuse's Newspeak led to the Left rationalizing censorship, acts of violence by radicals, and support of totalitarians like Castro or the Palestinian terrorists, all while claiming to advocate tolerance, non-violence, and democracy.

History is too complicated to find a perfect fit within any theory. For the true believer, this inconvenience can be overcome. When fact and theory clash, the ideologue chooses theory. To the true believer, ideology is truth.

Ideology makes smart people stupid.

Political skirmishes among adversaries are rough, but the roughest battles are normally reserved for former friends who've become skeptics. It's the heretic who is more likely than the heathen to get burned at the stake.

The road to heaven on earth always seems to detour to hell on earth. If you really believe that your ideology will bring salvation to humanity, what would you be willing to do to impose this world-saving idea? Would you be willing to lie? To kill? Looking back on the last hundred years, the answer too often is yes.

When you're building utopia, all is permitted. No end is greater, so no means can be too base to get there.