Progressivists See the Writing on the Wall

And now we have the left's never-ending whine.

Kevin Drum in Mother Jones quotes Jared Bernstein from his blog at length, ending with this

Those of us who do care about [the progressive ideal] will not defeat those who strive to get rid of it all by becoming better tacticians. We will only find success when a majority of Americans agrees with us that government is something worth fighting for.

Drum agrees:

My biggest beef with Obama is the same one I had three years ago, namely that he's never really even tried to move public opinion in a specifically progressive direction. But that hardly even matters unless all the rest of us have laid the groundwork. And we haven't. Wonks, hacks, activists, all of us. We just haven't persuaded the public to support our vision of government. Until we do, the tea party tendency will always be more powerful than we are.

Of course, both Drum and Bernstein are on the right track, and are seeing the writing on the wall, but both miss the most important point.

Obama tried time and again to sell their progressivist vision.  He hit Keynes hard out of the box in 2009 with his $850B stimulus, seeking to prove but eventually disproving Keynes's notion that if you paid a man to dig a hole and another to follow immediately behind and fill it up, the consumer demand created would fool those with stuff on their shelves to trade it for refilled holes.

Then he began to pound FDR's Second Bill of Rights, jamming the right to the services of health care providers into Federal law.  Of course, Lincoln fought a war to defeat those who thought that a man could have a right to the services of another.

So never mind that current leftist wisdom.  Obama and his tingly-leg wonk and media hack army tried their best to sell progressivist thought -- never letting a crisis go to waste -- but the American people rose up, put on buckskin and war paint and went down to the harbor and threw the shopworn Big Lies of tyrannical socialism into the harbor of individual economic freedom.

The latest annual ideological assay of the American people from Gallup shows that the percentage of people self identifying as Conservative is higher than ever before.

Obama and his demon progressivist wonk/flacks can take credit for that sales job at least.