Eighteenth-century essayist Samuel Johnson wryly called second marriages “the triumph of hope over experience.” We are now living through a national version of this. From policing to education to welfare, recently ascendant liberals have imposed woke ideology in place of time-tested policies and practices. And the evidence suggests it’s not going well.

Take the recent progressive crusade against policing. Liberal prosecutors and the defund-the-police movement foresaw a new age of Aquarius as social workers replaced law enforcement. Summarizing their case, Rep. Ilhan Omar, a Minnesota Democrat, stated in June 2020: “The Minneapolis Police Department is rotten to the root, and so when we dismantle it, we get rid of that cancer, and we allow for something beautiful to rise.” Meanwhile, back in reality, Minneapolis “saw an increase in homicides, carjackings, robberies and other criminal acts in 2021,” according to local news outlet KARE 11, which its embattled mayor this month described as “a very grave problem.”