Bret Stevens contends that we are living in a time of broken politics because the Left petulantly refuses to face the reality that its ideas have all failed.

[T]he Left is playing a new game which involves trying to mentally separate the concepts of “neoliberalism” from the rest of the Left. They do not want to own the disaster they created, so they came up with a scapegoat: capitalism. In Leftist symbolic reality, capitalism took over the Left and created “neoliberalism,” where True Leftists resisted.

Perhaps the bigger story is that they do not want to point out that they created a managerial society, applying the tactics of business and the military toward ordering people around. This is what the Left do, because they are oriented toward control, or everyone doing the same things all the time so that those in power are secure.

This is typical of the one-dimensional categorical order in which Leftists think. To them, there are the True Believers who know what is right and must be done, and then the masses who must be ordered around. Instead of a hierarchy with multiple levels, for them there are only the controllers and the controlled.

Their strategy is utilitarianism, which is the opposite of having purpose. Utilitarians ask people what will make them happy, and people respond with short-term answers, scapegoats, justifications and the other products of the usual flow of neurotic insanity. They never connect the dots and see that having a thriving, stable civilization is what they need, and everything else are personal problems that they as individuals need to fix. Government cannot do that.