Politics of Illusion

Illusion is a tenacious force in the life of any society, and political illusion, like any other work of the imagination, can exert a powerful attraction upon citizens tired in one way or another with the given. Indeed, like the utopian impulse, its first cousin, it can serve beneficent or innocent purposes. But where it gives rise to settled taboos and right or left limits-of-mind which inhibit political truth-telling, it becomes a menace as well as a consolation.1