In the Library of Law and Liberty Dalrymple reviews The Demon in Democracy: Totalitarian Temptations in Free Societies by Ryszard Legutko, who, as both a professor of philosophy and a member of “the European Pseudo-Parliament”, and as an observer of both the EU and the Poland of the communist era, sounds like a writer any Dalrymple reader would want to evaluate.

Legutko’s book calls out the similarities between the EU and the totalitarian Poland of his youth, and Dalrymple’s review of it includes descriptions of the current regime that will also be recognizable by any first-hand observer of the “social justice” left:

According to Professor Legutko’s analysis, the similarities that he has observed under communism and the current liberal democratic regime are not attributable to accidents of history or to the activities of a few misguided men, but are the logical consequences of their whole world outlook. And perhaps the single most important similarity is that each of the systems is forward-looking and judges the present not by what has existed in an imperfect past, or by what is possible for human beings given their essential and abiding nature, let alone by any deontological precepts, but by a future state of perfection that the systems responsible for the present will allegedly call into existence.