I think the Left is in a very peculiar sort of crisis; the essence of which lies in the decline of their traditional means of influence. The key thing to grasp about the Town Hall events and to some extent the rise of alternative media is that it represents the emergence of a self-aware opposition to their traditional memes. The fall of the Berlin Wall represented the end of “external Communism”, but that was curiously interpreted as an affirmation of the social-democratic West. It was the EU, not the US that was psychologically going to inherit the post-Soviet World. The two Cold War enemies had killed each other, leaving the Third Way free to take possession of the new heaven and earth.

The first hint that this wasn’t going to be the case was 9/11 from which the “neo-cons” emerged. They emerged in large part because the Third Way couldn’t contemplate events like 9/11 except in terms of Western guilt. So we had the “neo-cons” who were, simply thought to be the rengade Left who, in their factionalism, had unwisely cast their lot with George W. Bush. The Left had not yet come to accept that the Masses could rise against them. Momentarily speaking, they still thought all their troubles came from Emmanuel Goldstein. And when they had discredited Bush, or at least helped him discredit himself, they thought they had the game in hand again.

But the unpopularity of Bush to some extent masked the real weakness of the Left. While still enormously powerful from a political, economic and cultural standpoint, their racket had become irremediably transparent and nowhere was this manifested more clearly than in the rejection of the mainstream media, which, last we checked, had a credibility about equal to that of used car salesmen. The loss of authority was irreversible and not even the election of Barack Obama could alter that.

Obama after Bush was therefore a “false dawn”. The evidence for this lies precisely in the unseemly haste of the Left and collaterally conveyed by the precipitous drop in Obama’s popularity. It turns out that there was nothing underneath him and therefore nothing underneath them. And they realize this, so theirs is not the behavior of those in comfortable authority; who have all the time in the world. Theirs is the attitude of people who fear this is their last chance; that the sands are running out. And they are right. The sands are running out on their traditional powers of persuasion and has made them desperate to find another. And I think what we are witnessing is an attempt to substitute economic and bureaucratic authority for the declining cultural authority they used to enjoy. The shrillness is the result of the fact that the old soothing whispers no longer work. To the question: “why does Obama keep doubling down?” the answer is ‘because he has no choice.’

This is not to say that the Left’s dominance of the academe and the cultural institutions is somehow at an end. It is not. But it is no longer invisible and it is being openly challenged. The problem that they face is that economic and bureaucratic control cannot be substituted for the old authority because it is resource limited. It is not information based, but resource and even coercion based. It needs ever larger amounts of government solutions to fix ever large government problems. Eventually the last bill in the wallet is extracted. And there is no more. It’s like a Ponzi scheme which must grow to the ends of the earth — and come to an abrupt stop.

What I am curious to discover is what happens when it runs out of lift. Because it will. Like Fannie and Freddie, it isn’t too big to fail. There’s no such thing. I think that one of the challenges of statecraft is to prepare for the Fall of the Inner Berlin Wall; what to do when the fantasy shatters. I think on the day after we’ll be confronted with many shattered institutions, completely bankrupted, mere Potemkin shells; out of money, out of ideas, and out of excuses. I am not optimistic about society’s ability to handle it because even conservatives, I think, will have difficulty anticipating the thoroughness of it and its probable shocking suddeness.