What an excellent article! To call such people as Hobsbaum a “historian” is an insult to historians, such as you cannot imagine. He was an ideologue.
From Plato, to More, to Marx, to Rousseau, to Dewey, leftism has never worked and never WILL work, because of its determination to deny the nature of man. It can be no surprise to anyone that the stellar lights of academia have never existed outside the bubbles of their comfortable lives and the universities. If dropped into a city with nothing but their wits, it wouldn’t take long to see them as the crazy people they truly are, muttering and talking to themselves.
This is not to deny, however, the brand of bigoted leftist who truly believes that they are superior to the “masses” and entitled to rule over them. These STILL believe in the mission of Margaret Sanger, and always will.
The denial of those who embrace leftism, is the denial of those fellow travelers who are responsible for, at least, 120 million dead across the planet. It is tyranny, and nothing else. It IS that barbarism that so many “intellectuals” lay at the free market’s door.
".........Their cynicism flows from the very perception they have of right and wrong. They do it for higher ends. They do it for the progressive faith. They do it because they see themselves as having the power to redeem the world from evil. It is that terrifyingly exalted ambition that fuels their spiritual arrogance and justifies their sordid and, if necessary, criminal means.
And that is why they hate conservatives. They hate you because you are killers of their dream. Because you are defenders of a Constitution that thwarts their cause. They hate you because your "reactionary" commitment to individual rights, to a single standard and to a neutral and limited state obstructs their progressive designs. They hate you because you are believers in property and its rights as the cornerstones of prosperity and human freedom; because you do not see the market economy as a mere instrument for acquiring personal wealth and political war chests, to be overcome in the end by bureaucratic schemes.
Conservatives who think progressives are misinformed idealists will forever be blind-sided by the malice of the left by the cynicism of those who pride themselves on principle, by the viciousness of those who champion sensitivity, by the intolerance of those who call themselves liberal, and by the ruthless disregard for the well-being of the downtrodden by those who preen themselves as social saints.
Conservatives are caught by surprise because they see progressives as merely misguided, when in fact they are fundamentally misdirected. They are the messianists of a religious faith. But it is a false faith and a self-serving religion. Since the redeemed future that justifies their existence and rationalizes their hypocrisy can never be realized, what really motivates progressives is a modern idolatry: their limitless passion for the continuance of Them." - "Hillary Clinton and the Third Way" - By David Horowitz, June 2000