By J-Dub

In my last post, I made a comment about my belief that liberalism in this country is dying. That illicited a TurtleBoy commenter to disagree with me. His argument was reasoned and plausible, but what he really illustrated is that I did not fully explain my meaning in that statement.

In my last post, I made a comment about my belief that liberalism in this country is dying. That illicited a TurtleBoy commenter to disagree with me. His argument was reasoned and plausible, but what he really illustrated is that I did not fully explain my meaning in that statement.

First, let’s review what I said in a discussion of the current “outrage” in America…statues.

That noise you hear is the death rattles of the New American Left. That’s why you see this “statue” nonsense spreading to things well beyond the scope of the Confederacy. In Chicago, leftie politicians are after monuments to George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. In Philadelphia, there’s now noise about removing a statue of former mayor Frank Rizzo…whose tenure was 100 years after the Civil War. Not to mention, there’s now even talk for you people in MassKorea about renaming Yawkey Way because the Red Sox were the last team with a black player.

Now, allow me to define what I call the “New American Left.” The NAL is the product of the radical liberalism borne of American college campuses in the 1960’s. It’s roots lie in the nobility of the Civil Rights movement, but once it achieved it’s objective with large-scale governmental reforms like the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts, it began going sideways. This is why the the unifying themes which drove the Civil Rights movement morphed into the divisionist mentality found in the Vietnam war protests and the Neo-leftist fascism of the original “Free Speech” movement at the University of California.

That also illustrates why I think this movement is dying; it was never sustainable. The college kids of the 1960’s carried the torch of the NAL for the last half-century, but now those kids named Clinton, Pelosi, and Sanders are septagenarians, and their hijacking of the Democratic Party and it’s subsequent hyper-leftward movement means it really has no one to whom to pass that torch.
There is a strange irony in that fact, as since the Civil Rights Act was passed, the primary goal of the New American Left has been to ensure the survival of the New American Left. They did an exceptionally lousy job of that despite the fact they had every advantage; the NAL expanded the role of the federal government in local school districts, the aforementioned college campuses became de facto indoctrination factories, and they achieved a distinct shift in societal mores over the last fifty years.

That begs the question…what happened?

The explanation starts with an even stranger bit of irony in the fact the best demonstration NAL was in critical health was the election of Barack Obama. From the moment Al Gore lost the 2000 presidential election, Hilary Clinton became the face of the New American Left. Since that time, it was the worst-kept secret in the history of worst-kept secrets that a Hilary presidential campaign in 2008 was pre-destined.

The ducks were all in a row. Clinton had won election to the Senate to give her political gravitas. George W. Bush was not terribly popular due to a failing economy and a host of other reasons, and the best the Republicans could offer as competition was John “The Manchurian Candidate” McCain. Another Clinton presidency looked to be a tangibly-real possibility.

That was until a virtual political unknown hi-jacked the Democratic Party, pulled into the left lane, and blew past Clinton like she was tied to a post. The election of Barack Obama was a graduate-level course in “political judo;” he leveraged the social stratification and affirmative action mind-set of the New American Left against itself. Face it, Obama won the White House on a recipe of playing the race card against the very people who printed it.

Flash the clock forward to 2016. Once again, the New American Left had a death-grip on the Democratic Party, and the the track has been laid to carry the Clinton train to the White House. The only problem was there were now two guys using the Obama “party hi-jack” model to get to the White House. The reason Donald Trump didn’t run as a Democrat is because he knew having given money to the Clintons in the past there was a political machine in place to ensure Hilary’s ascendance to the White House. Just ask Bernie Sanders.

Think about it. Both Trump and Sanders were laughed at when they announced their respective candidacies and they both made the presidential “Final Four.” I’m on record from a podcast recorded in April 2016 as predicting a Trump win, and one of the reason why I said that was I knew no matter how successful Sanders’ campaign was, there was no way Clinton was going to be denied a shot at the general election again. In a Trump-Clinton race, I was putting my money on Trump because he was using to perfection the “Obama hi-jack” model; he played to the inherent weakness of the Republican party. In exactly the same way Obama exploited the Democrats’ pandering to race against itself, Trump catered to the Republicans’ complete lack of understanding the frustration of it’s usual voter base.

Here’s where it comes “full circle.” Trump won the election because the socio-economic middle of this country…the every-day people who go to work, pay their taxes and just want a decent place to raise their families…are tired of being blamed for everything and want leadership who will stand up for them.

That’s why the New American Left is dying. Even if it’s message weren’t dead; it’s been trounced by political outsiders in succesive election cycles because it has been rejected by people tired of this country being governed by the fringes.

There’s only one problem. While the New American Left is on it’s deathbed, I’m afraid it’s going to be replaced by a dystopian combination of Neo-fascism and anarchy. That’s why the majority of “outrages” we see in this country today are largely manufactured. If you doubt that, please explain to me how tearing down statues will tangibly effect the quality of life for anybody you would like to consider “oppresed.”

This is happening because the young people the New Amercian Left could have handed it’s torch to found out very quickly what the NAL was all about when the Bernie Sanders campaign was crushed in front of their very eyes. Look at Antifa and try to tell me isn’t made up of a lot of pissed-off former Sanders supporters. Look at these “peaceful protests” and try to tell me they don’t look like a bunch of “particiaption trophy” kids having a militant temper tantrum because they didn’t get their way in an election.

What it all comes down to is whether or not Antifa-style Neo-fascism becomes the heir apparent to the dying New American Left, both sides are still linked by a need to return to having any real political power in this country. That means they have a common need to keep the spotlight off some serious problems in this country which in many ways are the legacy of fifty years of failed liberal ideas. That’s why we are worried about statues.

Two decades ago, Hilary Clinton decried the “politics of personal destruction.” Her legacy, and that of the New American Left may now be little more than the politics of distraction.

Email J-Dub at dubsism@yahoo.com, and follow @Dubsism on Twitter, or on his Pinterest, Tumblr, Instagram, Snapchat, and Facebook pages.