[Billthedrill]

Mr. Lind certainly has to choose his measurements carefully before he engages in a rather embarrassingly juvenile triumphalism. In fact, nearly none of his benchmarks are (1) unaltered, or (2) exclusively liberal. I note with some amusement that he insists that the wicked right-wing blahblahblahs were out to "end" Social Security, that torchlight of liberal enlightenment that (ahem!) will fail by any measurement due to simple demographics. The attempt at privatization was not, as Lind quite simply lies, to end Social Security, but to save it. It was defeated. And now Social Security will fail, and guess who will end up blaming the eeeevil conservatives for liberal folly?

Liberal internationalism - his term, not mine - has resulted in a stifling bureaucracy, corrupt institutions, and a system of diplomacy whose principal function appears to be to apologize for and enable terror wars by proxy armies. Its failures are legion, its successes largely self-declared and of minimal impact to their nominal beneficiaries. It is internationalism that has failed, not conservatism, and its stinking corpse is still doing its best to drag the world down with it.

As for some grotesque abstraction Mr. Lind characterizes as "liberal individualism" there is nary a sign in the current rage among progressives to stamp out individualism of every sort through hate speech laws, legislated class warfare, political correctness, and codified racial intolerance.

All of this liberal self-congratulation has succeeded largely through redefinition and historical revisionism, not through any systemic rejection of a "counter-revolution" that exists - both rejection and counter-revolution - largely in the perfervid imaginations of liberal commentators. Mr. Lind may crow that neither of the Presidential candidates is a conservative but only by sidestepping the inconvenient fact that neither was their predecessor, nor his predecessor, nor his predecessor. In point of fact there has been relatively little good news for conservatives since the Gingrich Contract in 1994 which returned Congress to the Republicans for the first time in some 40 years.

I would, therefore, pose an alternate interpretation of these events that is far less flattering to Mr. Lind and his co-religionists. It is that liberalism has learned nothing from its failures and will continue stubbornly down the same failed paths that led it to its current passionate and defiant irrelevance. And the biggest certainty of all is that its adherents will continue to risk rotator cuff damage by patting themselves on the back while the country whose charge it is for them to lead suffers from their self-absorption, self-aggrandizement, and self-deception.

[Reeses]

Are you a professional writer? Your writing is well put together.

One thing often assumed is that leftists don't want failure, that it's just an inevitable side effect of their misconceptions about the world. Actually that is a key goal, not for themselves but for others. They seek to raise themselves up by bringing those more successful down. Leftists want failure in America. It's much easier to succeed at failure than to succeed at prosperity.