I need to add one thing, though, as I'm listening to this podcast, and maybe Mr. Lindsay will get to this: Marcuse and his ilk were truly utopians (I'm not sure about Alinsky; I think he was a soulless opportunist just like his two very famous acolytes, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama).
However, I have to emphasize something that I see more fully dominating the destruction of Western society than the efforts of the utopians. The utopians also have a generally negative viewpoint about their fellow human beings, but what I'm about to say was very evident to me when I was in the movement, even before I fully grokked that the movement itself was destructive: those movements always have within them a significant amount of people who really don't care if the world ever gets any better. The true believers tend to have allegiance to creating a world they assume will be better for everyone, but they were very often even outnumbered by individuals who only fake being true believers -- and those other people share in common with the higher-level people who use the true believers as useful idiots a disdain for most of their fellow human beings that labeling it as hate is a serious understatement. The level of hate for people in general is palpable among such a large portion of the left that one has to grow a very thick skin to be able to ignore or tolerate it. These movements are great hiding places for stone-cold sociopaths, sadists and serial killers. Like Anthony Fauci, they can hide in plain sight, because the true believers are so duped by their own utopianism that cognitive dissonance prevents them from recognizing the soulless among them. Mentally-lazy liberals are thus just about the easiest people in the world to manipulate into compromising their own sense of integrity in order to support 'movement' people who are deemed to be on the correct side (the correct team) no matter how often those people lie, cheat, steal or even murder. One of the organizing principles is what Alinsky pounded into people's skulls: the ends justify the means.
But it's a mistake to think this is all something that just emerged in the 1950s or 1960s. The Progressives of the late 19th Century are definitively precursors, and they were predominantly eugenicists, so thus Hitler and the Nazis were earlier prototypes as well. But this type of thinking -- that having the correct, acceptable view of what would be utopian -- stretches back through Rousseau, even some of the minor philosophies of those who founded our country, and further back through certain aspects of the creation of the Roman Catholic Church, aspects of the power structure of Judaism (think of the Talmud and its promotion of the legitimacy of lying to Goyim in order to protect the interests of Jews) -- and perhaps the genesis of all of this in our culture was the collective set of philosophies of the circa 6th Century BC Greeks. Many parallels exist between the systematic planning the Greeks engaged in to incrementally overturn the order of the world in order to transfer the allegiance of human beings from their families to the centralized city/nation-state.
I've written more than I intended -- and still haven't fully gotten to my original point, which is that, in many ways, the utopian leftists are the shiny object that those who actually manipulate them are not our most dangerous enemies. Much more dangerous are the people who just truly hate almost all of us. These people have been among us since the dawn of societies, and they believe that almost everyone who exists is almost entirely superfluous, taking up too much space and utilizing too many resources. They would like to somehow exterminate almost everyone, leaving just enough of these deplorable, unsophisticated superfluous losers to perform services for the ruling class that the ruling class doesn't want to have to perform for itself. The proper word for this, when it comes down to it, is serfdom, or maybe even slavery. I've known such people; some of my first wife's best friends (many of whom have high-level public-sector positions) belch out these thoughts every time they have a couple glasses of wine or a line of coke; they're that comfortable with their disdain and murderous hatred. The mirror this puts on the vacuum of where their souls should be is chilling.
And their greatest disdain is reserved for the very people they most visibly claim to want to promote and protect.
