Today's liberalism has been reduced to an opposition movement...today's liberal movement offers no direction, just resistance.
We have been pointing this out on FR for some time now. The reason is that an opposition movement is its origin - this dates back to the liberal Golden Age of the mid-60's - and the source of its romance. The self-image of the average contemporary progressive - "liberal" is a term not quite evocative enough and hence has been discarded - is one of a feisty revolutionary Fighting The Power. That doesn't work very well when they're actually in power themselves because they have to take responsibility for their actions and the results, not pant after fantasies that never were because their opponents were so repressive. Do you know why we haven't had a budget during the three years of the lamentably incompetent 0bama administration? That's why. Because if we had, they'd have to own it and the prospect frightens the hell out of them.
However, the author may be a bit optimistic in declaring the whole thing passe. It isn't, exactly. One of the enduring qualities of a progressive is his insistence that the only reasons his idiot schemes didn't achieve the desired results is repression by the Other Side and that they didn't go far enough. Reality has no bearing here. That isn't changing, which is why we hear ostensibly intelligent people still regurgitating the same, old, tired Marxian nostrums that have always failed, that have always caused poverty, cultural sterility, and police-state ossification, that have managed to accomplish absolutely nothing except to look good under the right sort of sympathetic light if the observer is willing to squint hard enough. This stuff persists because of the eternal attractions of envy, acquisitiveness, and a desire for a moral sanction for violence and theft. Yes, the movement is intellectually bankrupt, but it is emotionally pervasive among the weak, the incompetent, and the evil.
Great post! Spot on.