In an era of resurgent collectivism, Religious Freedom Coalition founder William J. Murray “stands athwart history yelling ‘stop’” with his new book Utopian Road to Hell: Enslaving America and the World with Central Planning. Therein he provides a valuable primer into mankind’s rogue gallery of radicals who have ravaged humanity from antiquity to the present with interrelated utopian delusions both authoritarian and hedonistic in nature.
The born-again Christian conservative Murray brings unique personal perspective to his intellectual subject matter as a self-professed “‘Red diaper’ baby.” His family attempted to defect to the Soviet Union in 1960 and as a teenager he met Communist Party USA chairman Gus Hall, among other leftist luminaries. Murray has thus “served nearly equal periods of my life on opposing sides of reality.”
Murray surveys the collectivist thought of intellectuals from Plato, born in 429 B.C. in Athens, to Edward Bellamy, author of the 1888 socialist paean Looking Backward, and President Woodrow Wilsonadvisor Edward Mandell House. “If Plato had lived in the early nineteenth century, he would likely have become a dedicated Marxist,” Murray interestingly reveals. Plato’s Republic, for example, envisioned a society that denied medical care to the chronically ill who had no value to the state.
Likewise English statesman Sir Thomas More’s 1516 book Utopia described a totalitarian government that offered free medical care but urged gravely ill persons to commit suicide. Utopianism’s namesake fictional writing “had great influence on the collectivist leaders of the twentieth century,” Murray notes. Vladimir Lenin “championed More’s Utopia as worthy of honor in his newly created worker’s paradise of the Soviet Union.”
Statistics cited by Murray attributing almost 100 million deaths to Communist regimes bear witness to Marxism’s harsh reality. “This is the legacy of utopian thinking: people die by the millions,” he writes, and quotes William Bradford’s seminal 1623 recounting of the Pilgrims’ experiment with collective agriculture. Struggling for survival in a harsh, infant New England colony removed from intellectual thought experiments, the Plymouth governor noted that the Pilgrims experienced the
emptiness of the theory of Plato and other ancients, applauded by some of later times, that the taking away of private property, and the possession of it in community, by a commonwealth, would make a state happy and flourishing; as if they were wiser than God.