AS THE UNTED STATES staggers toward the seventh year of Barack Obama's tenure in the White House, a growing disquiet permeates the ranks of the American left. After six years of the most liberal President since Jimmy Carter, the nation doesn't seem to be asking for a second helping. Even though the multiyear rollout of Obamacare was carefully crafted to put all the popular features up front, delaying less popular changes into the far future, the program remains unpopular. Trust in the fairness of government is pushing toward new lows in the polls, even though government is now in the hands of forward-lookin, progressive Democrats rather than antediluvian GOPers.
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Shell-shocked liberals are beginning to grasp some inconvenient truths. No gun massacre is horrible enough to change Americans' ideas about gun control. No UN Climate Report will get a climate treaty through the U.S. Senate. No combination of anecdotal and statistical evidence will persuade Americans to end their longtime practice of giving police officers extremely wide discretion in the use of force. No "name and shame" report, however graphic, from the Senate Intelligence Committee staff will change the minds of a consistent majority of Americans who tell pollsters they believe that torture is justifiable under at least some circumstances. No feminist campaign will convince enough voters that the presumption of innocence should not apply to those accused of rape.
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[The] Obama administration may represent "Peak Left" in American politics, and 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. 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.
(Walter Russell Mead, "Next Up in America: The Liberal Retreat," the-american-interest.com, December 19, 2014)
Mr. Mead is correct, if your horizon extends only to 2016, but he is wrong if you care about the decades and centuries to come. Leftist utopian experiments always fail and send shell-shocked laboratory subjects scurrying for the safety of normalcy, common sense, and leaders like Ronald Reagan or Margaret Thatcher. But the ratchet has done its work, moving the country sharply to the left. A little slippage is to be expected and does not seriously imperil the larger Progressive project. We have Obamacare now and we will have Obamacare tomorrow and every tomorrow after that. President Carter is today regarded as a failure, but this failed president left us with a federal education department that continues to waste money and do great mischief, and forever will. The paradox is that leftists always fail in the real world of affairs, but always win in the long game to which Mr. Obama has given a name: the fundamental transformation of America.
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