Posted on 11/22/2013 7:47:20 AM PST by Kaslin
By 1968, Walter Lippmann, the dean of liberal columnists, had concluded that liberalism had reached the end of its tether.
In that liberal epoch, the 1960s, the Democratic Party had marched us into an endless war that was tearing America apart.
Lyndon Johnson's Great Society had produced four "long, hot summers" of racial riots and a national crime rate that had doubled in a decade. The young were alienated, the campuses aflame.
Lippmann endorsed Richard Nixon.
For forty years, no unabashed liberal would be elected president.
Jimmy Carter won one term by presenting himself as a born-again Christian from Georgia, a peanut farmer, Naval Academy graduate and nuclear engineer. Bill Clinton ran as a centrist.
So toxic had the term "liberal" become that liberals dropped it and had themselves rebaptized as "progressives."
Barack Obama, however, ran unapologetically as a man of the left. An opponent of the Iraq war, he had compiled a voting record to the left of Bernie Sanders, the socialist senator from Vermont.
And Obama proudly placed his signature achievement, Obamacare, right alongside, and in the tradition of, liberal giants FDR and LBJ.
This is the new progressivism of the 21st century, Obama was saying, and I the transformational figure who will usher in the post-Reagan era. Where Clinton failed, I will succeed.
But now that Obamacare is coming to be perceived as a political catastrophe, not only does it threaten Obama's place in history, it could invalidate, indeed, eviscerate the defining idea of the Democratic Party itself.
For Democrats are the Party of Government. They believe that government is more nobly motivated than a private sector that runs on self-interest and the profit motive, and that government can achieve goals private enterprise could never accomplish.
To liberals, government is us, the personification of the nation.
Social Security, Medicare, Medicare and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 are monuments to this belief. So, too, are the world wars fought and won under liberal presidents Woodrow Wilson and FDR.
It was 1968, the Tet Offensive, the assassinations, the urban riots, the campus anarchy, the smash-up of the Democratic Party in the streets of Chicago that caused the national recoil from liberalism that lasted for forty years.
Now consider what the rollout of Obamacare is doing, not only to this president and his administration, but also to the idea that government has the solution to America's problems.
Though they had as long as World War II to get it done, Obama's crowd could not even produce a working website. Now we learn the White House was alerted to the website problems in March but plunged ahead.
Obama's reputation for competence has been shredded, and, so, too, has his reputation for truthfulness.
With millions losing their health insurance because of Obamacare mandates, we learn that Obama and his team knew this was inevitable, even as they reassured us, "If you like your health care plan, you can keep your health care plan. Period."
The brutal truth: Our president got his legacy program passed by deceiving the American people in a giant swindle.
Not only have millions lost their health care plans, tens of millions more may lose theirs at year's end when they learn that their employer's health care plans also do not meet Obamacare mandates.
Hillarycare cost the Democrats the House in 1994. Obamacare, the love child of Hillarycare, could cost Democrats the Senate in 2014.
But what makes this a disaster not just for a party but a philosophy is that Obamacare is liberalism incarnate. It is premised on the idea that progressives, starting from scratch, can redesign a health care system, 16 percent of the economy, and make it more fair, more just and more efficient for us all.
Obamacare was an act of hubris by an administration of talking heads most of whom never ran anything in their lives. And what we are witnessing is the antithesis of what we were promised.
So confident were they in the wonks that wrote the bill that Nancy Pelosi could say, "We have to pass the bill so you can find out what is in it."
Seven weeks in, the website is not fixed. Millions have lost their health care plans. Quality hospitals are being cut out of the program as too costly. Individuals are being offered plans inferior to what they had in terms of benefits, but with far more costly premiums.
The crisis for Obama, his party, and his philosophy is that this is not only a nightly national story; it is a daily story in every state. And the anecdotes of debacles have been piling up, one upon another, for seven weeks. They do not cease, and there is no end in sight.
Nothing, it appears, will interrupt the litany of personal woes before Democrats, in panic, cut themselves loose of Obamacare and try to swim away from the Lusitania.
It will likely be a long time before another Democratic president dares again another such Great Leap Forward.
No. Just look at how liberals have reacted to the abject failures of the Great Society and Department of Education, they’ll just insist the failure is because it didn’t go far enough. Heck they already are, I know libs that are quite sure the reason OCare is failing is that it didn’t go all the way to single payer.
Sorry - I won’t even read the article.
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You should read it. This is Pat Buchanan. IMO, there are very few people with the wisdom and conservative intelligence of Patrick J. Buchanan.
Very few.
Of course we're all wondering, now that they've ruined the "progressive" label, what will they rebrand themselves with. "Moderate" doesn't really fit anymore. "Lefty" is too out there . . . Any suggestions?
No.
Only the death of the liberals will be.
The end game of a multi-generational conspiracy is coming into view. For a global government to be realized, the United States had to be collapsed and that couldn’t happen overnight. She had to be slowly corroded from the inside out and that’s exactly what’s happened. You’d have to be in deep denial not to look back and plainly see we haven’t got to where we are by accident. Things aren’t going to turn around because they aren’t meant to.
Just doing my part to ensure everyone has a cheery start to their week. :)
Obomacare is a massive, massive tax increase on the middle class during a massive, massive recession. We're not going to make it until 2016. The middle class was bled dry by this administration BEFORE they got their health insurance increase. There isn't enough ants left to support the grasshoppers, and the grasshoppers are now on a feeding frenzy, because everything their blackened little hearts ever wanted is being given to them for free, free, free!
You're suggesting an unemployed, impoverished middle class (the back bone of this economy) will be able to support the continuous massive, massive oboma spending for another 3 years, at a time when the Feds have been printing over 4 Billion a month for years just to keep the economy afloat before obomacare?
Do you really think the very few working class Americans who are left will be able to support this parasitic nation forever? You really think they'll be able to support a nation of welfare dependants for another 3 YEARS?
And why do you think this Marxist administration is plumping up Wall Street? After the collapse, the money will already be consolidated into one nice, neat little package. The confiscation will be a breeze.
Feel good liberalism is being replaced by iron fisted tyranny. All that is happening is that the mask is coming off.
They don't plan on giving us a choice.
Plus, we have steamrolled past just liberalism some time ago. We are well into leftism. Moving to authoritarianism. On the road to communism.
Sorry - read it and my opinion remains the same. When Hillary! tried as FLOTUS to usher in single payer, she was roundly spanked.
That was almost 20 years ago however. Since then, another generation of govt-indoctrinated, illogical-thinking useful idiots has come of age; a generation that knows very little about the historical roots of our republic. They are of the mindset that the society we have some how magically appeared from the dust of the prairies.
No, the “Republican brand” will not sell - the media will make sure of that. Obamacare will fail, but the masses will lap up the administrations excuse (carefully messaged by their msm lapdogs) that the reason for the failure was that the Tea Party sabotaged it - aided and abetted by the pubbies.
We are as it were, attached to another object by an inclined plane, wrapped helically around an axis.
(iow - we’re screwed)
Definitely not 'forever'. Prior to 1861, there were those who thought slavery would be with us 'forever'. My greatest fear is that the inevitable replay of 1861-1865 will be far worse.
Look at the British. Doesn’t bode well.
Before long only a small percentage of the citizens...err...tax paying or benefit receiving entities...will remember what it was like to be free.
And the Global Warming scam..
And multiculturalism......
All on their death bed....right...
It had better happen fast and happen hard, because the middle class is falling like pebbles into an endless pit.
BTW, Saul Alinkski, obomas mentor, referred to the middle class as the "enemy". Together, they had all the political capital and all the political power. That's why oboma is doing everything he can to destroy the middle class. Just look around you. You'll see with your own eyes all the proof you need.
Wishful thinking, and I hope it comes to pass, but Harry Reid just went nuclear in the senate. This means that Obama can appoint his lackeys at all levels of government and build his Chicago-style machine to steal the midterms. Must be vigilant!
As long as envy infects the hearts of men, people will covet their neighbors’ goods. Whether they prevail in a civil society is another matter.
Liberals the party of chumps.
Christ and God are the only ones that can kill pure evil
Correct only in that ACA will be another chink in the wall that brings the entire edifice down to a pile of rubble, from which we might just build America 2.0.
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