Is Leftism Exhausted?

“All This Has Happened Before …and will happen again,” Sonny Bunch writes at the Washington Free Beacon, noting how the left has always loved itself a good circular firing squad:

What the angry left of today has in common with the angry left of yesteryear is a lot of rage and little cohesion. There’s not an actual program being pursued, no series of demands. There’s just vitriol and angst wrapped up in vaguely leftist sloganeering. They eat their own because it’s easier. This is basic human psychology: When you attack an outsider, he’s just as likely to give you the finger and tell you to get bent as he is to listen to your grievances. But when you attack one of your own—when you scream at someone who has professed a desire to be your ally, when you harp on and on how they have failed to hew to your orthodoxies—it is easier to cow them into submission and convince them to beg forgiveness for their heresies. Left-on-left spats in social media are common because these are fights the radicals can win. And it’s always more psychically pleasing to win a fight than lose one.

More on this later, perhaps. I’ve got to run: I’m late for my RINO hunt. There are some cocktail parties in Georgetown that need cleaning out.

Heh. At NRO, Jonah Goldberg adds that “the cultural Left has disengaged from mainstream political arguments, preferring instead the comforts of identity-politics argy-bargy. You judge political movements not by their manifestos but by where they put their passion. And on the left these days, the only things that arouse passion are arguments about race and gender,” which for the left also involves devouring your own, yet another sign that leftism is exhausted, as Jonah writes. Fortunately, as George Lucas would say, there is a New Hope on the horizon:

For instance, the feminist agitprop drama The Vagina Monologues is now under fire from the left because it is not inclusive of men who believe they are women. Patricia Arquette was criticized from the right for her Oscar-acceptance rant about women’s wage equality, but the criticism paled in comparison to the bile from the left, which flayed her for leaving out the plight of the transgendered and other members of the Coalition of the Oppressed.

Such critiques may seem like a cutting-edge fight for the future among the protagonists, but looked at from the political center, it suggests political exhaustion. At least old-fashioned Marxists talked about the economy. Of course liberalism isn’t dead; it’s just resting. But it certainly could use an exciting, charismatic savior to breathe new life and fresh thinking into its ranks.

Thank goodness Hillary Clinton is waiting in the wings.

Which will be fascinating to watch: vote for me to relive the glory days of the 1990s, even though I’m running on policies that are an extension of Obama’s, and totally repudiate all of my husband’s, except for Hillarycare, which is what led to him losing Congress in 1994, which helped usher in the glory days of the 1990s.

Not to mention the possibility of lots of really cheap Scott Walker versus Hillary’s walker jokes. Perhaps a looming fear of that sort of reverse Alinsky-style ridicule is one part of the subtext of the media’s coordinate hits on him over the past few weeks?