GEORGE WILL ON “THE FOOLISH ‘THEISM’ OF GOVERNMENT ENTHUSIASTS” IN THE WASHINGTON POST, aka, almost everyone in the Washington Post not named George Will:

Presidential campaigns inflate expectations that power wielded from government’s pinnacle will invigorate the nation. Thus campaigns demonstrate that creationists threaten the creative ferment that produces social improvement. Not religious creationists, who are mistaken but inconsequential. It is secular creationists whose social costs are steep.

“Secular theists” — economist Don Boudreaux’s term — produce governments gripped by the fatal conceit that they are wiser than society’s spontaneous experimental order. Such governments imposed order suffocates improvisation and innovation. Like religious creationists gazing upon biological complexity, secular theists assume that social complexity requires an intentional design imposed from on high by wise designers, a.k.a. them.

And even allegedly conservative newspapers aren’t immune from its symptoms: “The Wall Street Journal Hates Ted Cruz. Here’s Why.”