Reply #2: Maybe

[Squeech]

Couple points:

(1) I don't think utopian thinkers are all that influential. (There was the obvious counterexample of Marx, but I see him as a framework upon which Lenin and his allies hung their revolution.) I think most people have internalized that the best is the enemy of the good and are way more comfortable with incremental change.

(2) Winger projection is unquestionably a force to be reckoned with. In your example, you portray the anti-utopians fearing the powers of a world government unleashed. I think that's what they really want-- except that theirs would not be an enlightened classical-liberal managerial state that would take care of its citizens and help them achieve, it'd be a corporate feudalism in league with the Church. (Kinda like how their forefathers of the last generation used to blame everything on the Soviets, as if a superpower that could barely even brew enough vodka for export was nevertheless capable of pulling strings all over the Third World-- while in the meantime the CIA was toppling legitimate governments from Mossadegh to Allende. Talk of what they fear is how they telegraph their actions, since hypocrisy is woven into the very fiber of their being.)