My thought is the liberals make the high-minded public face of the left and lose power to the outright leftists the more their movement gains power. Today, the leftists are dominating the Democrat party and we see the dismaying specter of a real although crypto communist put in charge of our affairs. As they have gained dominant political power in Washington and cultural power throughout society such as we see illustrated on campuses, liberals increasingly abandon the high ideals which they had advocated to gain power in the first place.
If we consider the historical instances of the left gaining power, the French revolution, the Spanish Civil War, fascism, Nazism, Russian and Chinese communism, we see the pattern played out over and over again. Always, individual rights, especially freedom of expression, must give way to a more important utopian goal, a collective goal in which the individual is minimized and one "enlightened" set of values is discarded for the new. The left as distinguished from liberals whom they themselves often despise as dupes, are never in doubt about the endgame.
I suppose we might equate those leftists (read Barack Obama for example) with elitists here in America and in Europe and with the apparatchiks of the Soviet Union.
