The Left Lashes Out

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Well yes, that’s what they do. As to why the amps have recently been dialed up to 12, in his latest G-File (the source of the headline above), Jonah Goldberg writes:

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Maybe you haven’t noticed, but Obama is kinda blowing it. His foreign-policy speech at West Point was a very highfalutin version of making a huge mistake and then saying, “I meant to do that.” Younger Millennials are already looking at the slightly older members of their cohort — the ones who voted for Obama when they were still in high school — and saying, “Uh, dude, what did you get us into?” The new progressive era liberals promised us is apparently sitting next to Godot on the bus. The New New Deal was the New Coke of New New Deals.

As a result, the Left is quietly giving up on waiting for Obama to deliver. They’re moving on to the blame game. When liberals screw up or can’t deliver, it’s not because there’s a problem with liberalism, it’s the system man, the system! We saw a preview of this early in Obama’s first term when the White House struggled to get its agenda through Congress. Suddenly, “Yes We Can!” became, in the words of Tony Podesta, No We Can’t because the American political system “sucks!”

It’s amazing how the recent spike in laments about “white supremacy” has coincided with the realization that there will be no big payoff from the Obama years. Maybe Obamacare will lead to socialized medicine, but you’ve gotta admit that so far it’s been pretty anti-climatic, like the day after getting your Christmas pony and finding out that not only is it kind of expensive and bitey, but it left a huge steaming pile on your favorite pillow. MSNBC barely covers the presidency from what I can tell these days, save as a news peg for why conservatives are racist evil morons.

Of course, some of the topic change is simply driven by a desire to talk about something that makes liberals feel good about themselves. When the real news is a downer, change the subject to something that isn’t. The political press has already moved on to Hillary. And the ideological Left wants to talk about hashtags, white supremacy, reparations for slavery, and really dumb stuff, like how half-Asian psychopathic murderers and surviving the Holocaust are best understood as proof white privilege is alive and well.

It’s no coincidence that Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century became such a sensation at this moment in American political life. It is (or claims to be) an indictment of the system. It goes deeper that any one (disappointing) president or party to explain why liberalism hasn’t succeeded and the answer to all of liberalism’s problems is more liberalism — and more power for liberals. The reaction, as much as the book itself, says the system itself is rigged (I spent pretty much all of May working on a very long essay on Piketty’s book for Commentary so I can’t get into all of it here).

In short, liberals are deeply bummed out at their own team’s failure to deliver on the “promise of America” and they are looking to assign blame anywhere but where it belongs. Because, ya see, they coulda been contenders.

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Read the whole thing.

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