The Left's Nervous Breakdown

Obama has failed, and his supporters are turning to nihilism.

From the Wall Street Journal:

Obama adviser David Plouffe is downcast, ABC News reports: "Plouffe said today on 'Good Morning America' that it would be 'a tragedy' if the bill fails to pass." HotAir.com's Howard Portnoy notes that the tragic view of Obama's presidency is catching on among liberal commentators:

Why are so many columnists beginning to refer to his presidency using the past tense? It's worth noting that these references are not by conservative bloggers engaging in wishful thinking. Rather, they are emanating from the liberal commentariat.

Portnoy's examples include Ezra Klein's interminable Stimulus Sr. apologia in the Washington Post, titled "Could This Time Have Been Different?" as well as Drew Westen's much-ridiculed New York Times op-ed, "What Happened to Obama?" and a blog post by Mother Jones's Kevin Drum describing Klein's piece, which "looks back at the Obama administration's response to the Great Recession and explains why it wasn't enough."

Portnoy observes: "What I believe is happening is that the left is reading the handwriting on the wall and resigning itself to the harsh reality [that] the man they trusted to 'fundamentally transform America' is on the verge of being unelected."

We'd go a step further. Not only does Obama's re-election look to be in serious jeopardy, but his presidency has been an almost unmitigated disaster for progressive liberalism, nearly every tenet of which has been revealed to be untenable either practically, politically or both.

Stimulus Sr. discredited Keynesian demand-side economics--the notion that the way to produce employment and growth is through massive government spending. The real tragedy is that even after blowing hundreds of billions of dollars, Obama and many other Democrats failed to learn the lesson.

That is one way to understand why so much of the liberal establishment is rallying behind Krugman's Army, as the "Occupy Wall Street" protests are known. Everything they believe in has failed, so they are turning nihilistic.

Sometimes the nihilism is good-naturedly goofy. The Washington Post's Eugene Robinson: "Occupy Wall Street and its kindred protests around the country are inept, incoherent and hopelessly quixotic. God, I love 'em. I love every little thing about these gloriously amateurish sit-ins." Vaginal monologist Eve Ensler, at the Puffington Host: "What is happening cannot be defined. It is happening. It is a happening."

But there are menacing themes and tactics too. "We may, at long last, be seeing the rise of a popular movement that, unlike the Tea Party, is angry at the right people," wrote former Enron adviser Paul Krugman last week. Krugman's New York Times colleague David Brooks notes that Adbusters, the magazine credited with the idea of the protests, was "previously best known for the 2004 essay, 'Why Won't Anyone Say They Are Jewish?'--an investigative report that identified some of the most influential Jews in America and their nefarious grip on policy." The demonization of "bankers," "plutocrats" and "the 1%" echoes age-old anti-Semitic tropes.

Read the whole thing.

Ace of Spades has another take on it:

I don't think that's quite right.

Let us begin with the assumption that the Democratic Party has long been a stealth socialist party. Whereas in Europe socialists are forthright about identifying themselves as such, socialists (and communists) have long posed in America as simply favoring additional "fairness" in the system.

They pursued an incrementalist agenda, one new "fairness" fix built on the last. Over the course of 60 years, it sure would look like a fundamental transformation of the nation into full-blown socialism, but (apart from FDR's massive changes to the capitalist system during the Depression) it was done bit-by-bit.
They adhered to the lesson of the old wives' tale: A frog will leap out of a pot if tossed into boiling water, but if the temperature is raised little by little, he won't notice, and won't leap out. He'll wind up just as cooked as in the first scenario, but he won't fight his fate. (I'm told this is perfect bullshit but this isn't about the science of frog-cooking.)

But for this model to work, the incremental changes must be successful or, rather, perceived as successful, or at least not harmful.

To enact a revolution in this slow-motion way, you need to be able to point back at recent "successes" in the expansion of government and say, "Well, that didn't kill the economy, so we can be reasonably confident this next innovation won't, either."

Obama's spectacular, can't-bear-to-watch failure has scotched that model. Socialism-by-incrementalist-steps is largely dead at the moment. Even Republicans -- long derided as scaredy-cats who would, when offered a Democratic plan to increase spending on a program by $50 billion, counter-offer the "conservative" sum of $30 billion -- are no longer all that afraid to simply say "No."

So with the incrementalist model no longer viable, I think the left is panicking, and beginning to agitate for revolution in one big gulp. The equivalent of turning the water up to boiling immediately, and hoping that if the water is hot enough the frog will be cooked too fast to save itself.

What else do they have? Consider this is pretty standard behavior. A team that's behind by 21 points begins throwing a lot of low-probability bombs to the endzone, doesn't it? A weary and punched-up boxer begins throwing wild haymakers praying that one good punch will land.