The Quotable Mr. Murray
To my astonishment, Iain Murray has brought "the Emperor's New Clothes" back to life as a meaningful (read "not boring") political allegory. The immediate subject is the folly of the social engineering schemes fashionable in the 60s, but it could easily be applied to many other cases where earnest, unthinking revisionists have, in the name of progress, destroyed everything of substance in traditional institutions while offering very little of value to take its place (e.g. Vatican II, education in the liberal arts, "the Canon," etc.):
The true situation was, it seems to me, the reverse of Hans Christian Anderson's tale. The Emperor was fully, and splendidly, clothed, but the little boy said he was naked. No-one wanted to contradict the little boy, so obviously the representative of progress, a visionary indeed, and so the Emperor was stripped naked and left to shiver in the cold, ridiculed by all.