MICHAEL WALSH: Barbarians Within: Why Brit-Style Riots Could Spread To The U.S.

We’ve already seen it, on a smaller scale, in Wisconsin, during the recent battle over Gov. Scott Walker’s plan to rein in the public-employee unions. In Madison, the capitol was occupied by hordes of protesters and the lives of some Republican state legislators were threatened.

This is no way to run a democracy. Peaceful protests are one thing, but massed force and ominous warnings about dire consequences are another. Throw into the mix the free-floating anarchists who routinely show up at such events — most recently at the G-20 summit last year in Toronto — and you have a prescription for serious trouble.

Yet, all too often, any attempt to open a civil discussion about the future is met with the same dreary charges that “hateful” conservatives want to kill old people and steal candy from babies.

For some on the left, too much is never enough — because, by definition, it can’t be. They operate on a modified version of the old Brezhnev Doctrine, which stated that once a country went communist, it could never go back: Once a government program is in place, it can never be cut or rescinded, only fattened. It doesn’t even matter whether it’s effective. The self-interested and the self-deluded have too much to lose to give up the fantasy of the perfect nanny state.

It’s LePetomaine Syndrome.