Day By Day

Monday, April 04, 2011

Things Fall Apart

The liberal-progressive synthesis that has dominated our political culture through most of the past century is rapidly disintegrating. Jonah Goldberg points out some of the most prominent instances:
For the last two years, the old ways of Washington have been crashing down like pillars of Mordor at the end of The Lord of the Rings.

Then-candidate Obama was himself fond of noting that the conventional wisdom — or “CW” — was that a black guy with a funny name could never be elected president.  
....

Coming into office during a wrenching financial crisis, the conventional wisdom was that the American people would rally around New Deal policies. At least that’s what liberal historians and political scientists said they should do.

The experts were wrong.
He discusses a number of other areas in which the 

The reason, of course, that the conventional expert opinion has regularly, and sometimes spectacularly, been wrong in its assumptions is that the political culture is changing. In hindsight you can see the harbingers -- the tax revolt, Perot, the success of anti-Washington candidates, etc. but intellectual habits die hard. It will take a real shock to the system to finally convince the political class that the old progressive nostrums no longer apply.

Now who is going to administer that shock.

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