Liberalism in Retreat

In a thought-provoking piece published just before Christmas, academic Walter Russell Mead argues that the "Obama administration may represent 'Peak Left' in American politics" and, "as a result, what we are getting from the left these days is a mix of bewilderment and anger as it realizes that this is as good as it gets."

For liberals, these are bleak times of hollow victories (Obamacare) and tipping points that don’t tip.

Public opinion didn't move to the left after Sandy Hook (gun control), the 2014 IPCC report (climate change), Ferguson and Garner, the Senate "torture report," or the Rolling Stone campus rape story (to name a few).

In all of these cases, liberals got what, from a liberal perspective, appeared to be conclusive evidence that long cherished liberal policy ideas were as correct as liberals have always thought they were. In all of these cases the establishment media conformed to the liberal narrative, inundating the airwaves and flooding the cyberverse with the liberal line. ... [Yet] the public still doesn’t seem to accept the liberal line or draw the inferences that liberals want it to draw. It’s becoming hard to avoid the conclusion that many Americans will continue to disagree with many liberal policy prescriptions no matter what.

Liberals believed the George W. Bush administration had discredited conservatism.

The foreign policy failures of the Bush years, they believe, should have killed conservative ideology about America’s role in the world, and the financial crisis, they are certain, should have driven a stake through the heart of conservative economic doctrine. Yet: Here we are, six years into the Age of Obama, and the Tea Party is alive and Occupy is dead. The Republicans swept the midterm elections ... The liberal rout at the level of state and local politics is even more alarming.

The response by some disillusioned liberals is "to turn on Obama."

But to blame Obama for the crisis of the liberal left is unpersuasive. ... It took the unique circumstances of two wars and a financial crash to open a path to the White House for Barack Obama; absent similar circumstances, successful candidates are likely to come from his right for the foreseeable future. ... America is unlikely to go farther to the left than it went in the wake of the Iraq War and the financial crash, and while that wasn’t anywhere near enough of a shift for left-leaning Democrats, the country has already moved on.