Kevin Williamson goes directly to a thought toward which I’ve been edging from a different direction:

At a time in which the Left is rediscovering the joy of totalitarianism in the pages of Rolling Stone, when Occupy activists are attempting acts of terrorism, and the organs of the state are being turned against the president’s political enemies, it is worth keeping in mind who and what the Left is at its heart. The Left gets good PR, but it is not really about the minimum wage or Head Start or bigger school budgets. Its agenda is control and domination, and it has been known to endorse and use political violence to achieve those ends. When part of the Left’s corporate arm is happily contemplating the Terror, we should take note, and perhaps ask our progressive friends under which other circumstances execution without trial seems to them an admirable course of action.

I periodically try to point out to progressive associates when their mode of thinking (at least as expressed publicly or personally to me) begins to take on the character of those who perpetrated the French Terror, pogroms, ethnic cleansings, and other atrocities.  My impression is that they just don’t see the link. After all, isn’t the political right promoted at our left-wing-dominated universities and popular culture as the home of all things evil?

Of course, that they don’t see any similarities between their practices and beliefs and those of societies that have gone horribly wrong doesn’t exactly decrease the likelihood of our society following that path.