Dangerous dreamers

Patrick Kurp begins his post today quoting Samuel Johnson:

How small of all that human hearts endure

That part which laws or kings can cause or cure!

Still to ourselves in every place consign’d,

Our own felicity we make or find.

Kurp continues:

A reader complains about the absence of politics at Anecdotal Evidence, and I thank him for noticing. It’s not a compelling subject. Busybodies with big ideas, unafraid to impose them on others, are dangerous. In Reflections on a Ravaged Century (2000), Robert Conquest — poet and historian, Jeremiah of Communism and its evils — writes:

[I]t is no part of its culture that a government elected by a bare majority, or even by a fairly large majority, is thereby empowered to totally reconstruct the social and political order by sacrificing the minority. That great political philosopher Michael Oakeshott notes that for some people government is ‘an instrument of passion; the art of politics is to inflame and direct desire.’ For others, which is to say, in general, for those who have a traditional regard for the unity and continuity of a culture, the business of government is something different: ‘to restrain, to deflate, to pacify, and to reconcile; not to stoke the fires of desire, but to damp them down,’ on the grounds that, as Oakeshott puts it, ‘the conjunction of dreaming and ruling generates tyranny.’

Conquest is quoting Oakeshott’s Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays (1962; rev. 1991). .... (more)

A contemporary example: "I Was in the DSA. Here’s What They Really Believe"

Patrick Kurp, "The Conjunction of Dreaming and Ruling," Anecdotal Evidence, July 21, 2026.