THE LEFT IS TIRED OF PERSUASION

[WestVirginiaRebel]

Breitbart:

“Is Liberalism Exhausted?” Jonah Goldberg wondered recently at National Review, surveying a movement that seems to have run out of intellectual gas after six years of dragging Barack Obama uphill. Goldberg takes the recent round of firings and program cancellations at MSNBC as a milestone:

MSNBC had thought it could mimic Fox News’s success from the left. The problem is that it never understood what Fox News is. MSNBC’s execs saw it through the prism of their own ideological bias and so ended up offering a left-wing caricature of a caricature. Contrary to myth, Fox (where I am a contributor) is in fact an actual news network, albeit with prime-time opinion shows. Meanwhile, a study by Pew found that MSNBC was 85 percent opinion.

 

The more salient point is that there’s such a small appetite for that opinion. As Josh Kraushaar of National Journal recently observed, Barack Obama has successfully moved his party to the left but has failed utterly to bring the rest of the country with him. In 2012, James Stimson, arguably America’s leading expert on U.S. public opinion, found that the country was more conservative than at any time since 1952.

 

 

This might seem counterintuitive, given that Obama was reelected that year, but there’s an obvious explanation. Barack Obama has a singular skill: getting Barack Obama elected. In all the elections since 2008, he has shown a remarkable inability to get anyone else elected, or to move public opinion in his favor. (Obamacare, for instance, remains stubbornly unpopular.) Measured in terms of statehouses, state legislatures, and House and Senate seats, the GOP is stronger today than any point since the 1920s. If you still think Obama has generous coattails, ask Rahm Emanuel for a second opinion.

 

All true, but to quote Obama’s presumptive successor on the Democrat ticket in 2016: “What difference, at this point, does it make?”

 

It’s true that liberalism doesn’t have anything exciting and new to offer – even its plans for the Internet are drawn from 1930s telephone legislation – but the only thing the Left is really tired of is selling its ideas to skeptics. It’s largely given up on that effort in exchange for the use of force to impose its ideals. A good deal of this compulsion happens automatically, as the State grows relentlessly larger, and the sphere of private action correspondingly dwindles.

 

The difficultly of making major decisions without the approval of government grows steadily greater, with only tepid resistance from the Republican establishment. The Beltway bubble has become an impenetrable force field. Josh Kraushaar’s point about how Obama has moved the Democrats to the left, but shifted American opinion to the right, is intriguing.

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When in doubt, be thugs.