If the hairs on the back of your neck stand up when you read about Tulane University professor and MSNBC commentator Melissa Harris-Perry, who wants to replace a “private notion of children” with a “collective notion” of child-rearing, you’ll appreciate the latest National Review article from Kevin D. Williamson. Williamson compares Harris-Perry to Star Trek’s infamous “Borg Queen.”

Progressives rarely think of themselves as partisans of violence, but it is through violence that the collective will prevails over the individual will, which is a very large part of the reason that conservatives endorse limited government: One resorts to the use of force only on the most important issues, and when doing so is necessary. For progressives, the general will acts as a sort of open-ended warrant for the use of force to make their social preferences mandatory. Like the Borg, they never wonder whether those they are assimilating might define the common good differently — and the only collective will that concerns them is the will of their own collective. For all their odes to diversity, progressives fear and loathe intellectual heterogeneity, which is why they fear and loathe the “private notion of children” — outside the careful tutelage of the state, parents might fill their children’s minds with any old private notions of right and wrong, liberty, or responsibility, any of which might be out of accord with the general will.

The general will often ends up smelling a great deal like the progressive will.