UTOPIA'S DEAD-END ROAD: America's ignorant and disillusioned Utopians are on a road to nowhere as they attempt to rewrite history.

• Author: Bresler, Robert J.
• Position: NATIONAL AFFAIRS

DECADES ago, Bing Crosby and Bob Hope starred together in "Road to Utopia." It is an insane trip to the Yukon, filled with gags, songs, and, of course, Dorothy Lamour. In this one, Hope ends up with Lamour, but their son looks like Crosby. The censors let it pass. However, the trio never gets to Utopia and it is clear from the start of the picture that Utopia never existed.

There was a lesson in this madness. Of course, Utopia does not exist, but for many, the belief is that it does--and there is a road to take you there. History keeps teaching that this road, in reality, looks nothing like a fun-loving Crosby and Hope road picture. Some Americans, feeling that our country, despite all of its endless opportunities, is not the Utopia they seek, and so have set out on a journey to remake the nation--piece by piece, enclave by enclave.

Utopian socialist communities go back to Robert Owen's early-19th-century experimental community in Indiana. These Utopians believed that human nature could be perfected under the right social conditions. Thus, likeminded people could create small egalitarian communities as an example for the larger world. In the 1970s, hippy communes were established with a vaguely similar idea in mind. Few lasted and some ended in tragedy.

Marxists, not quite so starry-eyed, believed Utopian socialism required traveling the tortuous road of class conflict. Leninists believed the road required guidance of a dictatorship. These Marxist-Leninist Utopian experiments were not performed by a group of relatively harmless idealists living in the back roads of rural America. These experiments were conducted on entire populations in the Soviet Union, Mao Zedong's China, Fidel Castro's Cuba, North Korea, and Venezuela. The result has been brutality and impoverishment.

George Orwell, Arthur Koestler, and Albert Camus looked on in horror as the Utopian dreams they once held about the Russian Revolution turned into the Soviet nightmare. Another prescient essayist of that generation, Isaiah Berlin wrote of what they all saw, "ideals . . . brutally reduced to uniformity, pressed into a social and political straight jacket which hurts and maims and ends by crushing men in the name of a monastic theory, a dream of a perfect static order."

Indeed, the misguided 20th-century Utopians ignored Immanuel Kant's warning, "Out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made." The effort to perfect human affairs is likely, as Berlin...