The Munchkinland theory of politics:
This is the belief that although the majority population of any place might be intimidated and silenced by an oppressive force—capitalism or special interests or the Church—they would, given the chance, sing ding-dong in unison and celebrate their liberation. They just need a house dropped on their witch.
The perennial temptation of leftist politics is to suppose that opposition to its policies among the rank and file must be rooted in plutocratic manipulation, and therefore curable by the reassertion of the popular will. The evidence suggests, alas, that very often what looks like plutocratic manipulation really is the popular will. Many Munchkins like the witch, or at least work for the witch out of dislike for some other ascendant group of Munchkins. (Readers of the later L. Frank Baum books will recall that Munchkin Country is full of diverse and sometimes discordant groupings.) The awkward truth is that Thatcher and Reagan were free to give the plutocrats what they wanted because they were giving the people what they wanted: in one case, release from what had come to seem a stifling, union-heavy statist system; in the other, a spirit of national, call it tribal, self-affirmation. One can deplore these positions, but to deny that they were popular is to pretend that a two-decade Tory reign, in many ways not yet completed, and a forty-nine-state sweep in 1984 were mass delusions.
Although pro-witch Munchkins may be called collaborators after their liberation, they persist in their ways, and resent their liberators quite as much as they ever feared the witch. “Of course, I never liked all those scary messages she wrote in the sky with her broom,” they whisper among themselves. “But at least she got things done. Look at this place now. The bricks are all turning yellow'.”
- Adam Gopnik, Can’t We Come Up with Something Better Than Liberal Democracy? September 12, 2022 Issue of The New Yorker.