Remember On Guillotines and Gibbets?.

An essay I wrote back in December? Part of what it was about was the cockroach-like endurance of bad Leftist ideas:

If it is so blindingly obvious to many of us that the ideologies behind, for example, gun control and welfare are so fundamentally flawed, why are these ideologies not dead? Not only are they not dead, in many ways, still flourishing? Why is the demonstrably erroneous ideology of the Left still advanced by people who just want to keep turning up the power, with the resultant escalation of failure?

And I answered my question:

I submit, it is because the Left has never been significantly checked as it strives to spread its flawed ideology. Leftists occupy the majority of journalism positions, both as reporters and editors.

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Leftists make up an overwhelming majority of educators and administrators in both primary and secondary education. Through these vectors of media and public education the Left has spread its ideology largely without any effective opposition for literally decades. Bear in mind also, I'm not attributing this occupation of media and education to some "vast Left-wing conspiracy." It's a natural outgrowth of a philosophy that builds unquestioning "true believers" who take their flawed ideology as gospel and are thereby inspired to evangelize. A fundamental tenet of Socialism is to proselytize the proletariat so that it recognizes the oppressive bourgeoisie and can then take steps to pull it down. The two places to best accomplish this are media and schools, so the evangelical migrate there, and steadily chip, chip, chip away at the proletariat, spreading the "hate the bourgeoisie" meme that produces women who tell mayors, in all seriousness, "It's my job to have kids, Mr. Mayor, and your job to take care of them."

Well I just came across a July 27 Theodore Dalrymple piece that illustrates my point, The Triumph of Reason? An excerpt:

In Australia recently, I shared a public platform with an educationist, who had won awards for social innovation in the field of education for disadvantaged minorities. I was looking forward to what she had to say.

I was soon in a towering rage, however. She uttered some of the most foolish cliches of radical education theory, now about 40 years old - theories that I had fondly thought were now behind us, such as the harmful effects upon the children of disadvantaged ethnic groups or families of an emphasis on education as learning, with particular reference to the damage done to their self-esteem by the dominant culture’s fetish about reading and writing.

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This was all said with such smugness, with such an expression of beatific complacency and self-content, that I wanted to get up and strangle the innovator there and then. As a believer in the necessity of self-expression, she would no doubt have understood.

In Guillotines I wrote:

We've not had much success (at defeating bad ideas) because we're not "true believers." (M)ost of those of us who recognize the flawed ideology of the Left have to earn a living. The efforts we make in fighting them are on or own time and on our own dime. The Left is getting paid to evangelize, often on our tax dollars. We shine the light, but when it passes they come back out and keep on going. It's tiring, soul-sapping, and we're overwhelmed by the media and education vectors.

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When (or if) the Left finally achieves unbridled control, it will continue in its cognitive dissonance, and keep turning up the power until guillotines are erected in public squares or mass starvation is seen again as a regrettable but necessary step towards Utopia.

Dalrymple:

Halfway through my own reply, however, I suddenly became bored. Why do I spend so much time arguing against such obvious rubbish, which should be both self-refuting and auto-satirizing the moment someone utters it? Why not just go and read a good book?

The problem is that nonsense can and does go by default. It wins the argument by sheer persistence, by inexhaustible re-iteration, by staying at the meeting when everyone else has gone home, by monomania, by boring people into submission and indifference. And the reward of monomania? Power.

It's nice to know that we're still on the same frequency, though I too am getting to the point where the idea of physical violence as a solution is getting to be less and less abhorrent.