In one short
essay at National Review Online Victor Davis Hanson summarizes the complete failure of liberalism both here and abroad. After examining the economic crisis in Europe, precipitated by three generations of leftist policy, he turns his attention to the U.S.:
Here in the United States, we await the imposition of Obamacare, despite the fact that the public does not want it, the nation cannot afford it, politicians regret it, and companies seek exemption from it. Our current pace of $1.6 trillion annual deficits, for all the talk of Keynesian gymnastics, is unsustainable — and even acknowledged as such by those who are most responsible for the latest round of fiscal irresponsibility.
As we near 50 million Americans on food stamps, another year of 9-plus percent unemployment, and the third $1 trillion–plus budget deficit, even statists are beginning to see that statism does not work — a fact brought home not just by the disaster in Greece, but also by the growing divide between a successful red-state paradigm and California-like blue-state doldrums. What saves the United States for now is only the fact that, unlike California, it can print money — plus the fact that there is no red-state version of America to flee to.
On the immigration front, there will still be some quibbling, but the liberal argument for open borders has been lost, both here and in Europe. The United States simply cannot afford any longer the $50 billion that flows to Latin America each year in remittances, coupled with multibillion-dollar costs for providing social services to seek parity for illegal aliens, in addition to vast new outlays in education and criminal justice.
California elites swear that a multimillion-person community of illegal aliens has nothing to do with our near-bottom ranking in public-school math and science scores, but privately even the most die-hard unionist teachers confess that it does. When Los Angeles has more resident Mexican nationals than do most cities in Mexico, and when the liberal paradigm of the salad bowl in lieu of the melting pot is into its fifth decade, then it is logical, not aberrant, that tens of thousands in the Rose Bowl would not merely cheer a Mexican soccer team over a home-team American one (understandable, though regrettable, garden-variety ethnic chauvinism), but trump that by booing even the mention of the United States.
Hanson goes on to describe the failure of liberal foreign policy, education policy, and the fact that many of the most influential liberals don't really believe their own rhetoric:
We live in an age in which advocates do not believe in their own advocacy: A “planet is doomed” Al Gore refuses to fly economy; a statist John Kerry won’t pay taxes on his yacht unless he is caught; an anti-war Barack Obama won’t honor the War Powers Act he once deified; and the liberal congressional and media establishment will not put their children in the D.C. schools that are the reification of their own ideology.
In short, the generation that came of age in the 1960s succeeded in bringing to life the Frankenstein’s monster it designed in its own image — but suddenly it seems terrified of the very thing it created.
Hanson pretty much swishes a three pointer in this column. Like the government functionaries in totalitarian countries whose leader has died but who seek to hide his demise from the people, statism is everywhere in various stages of senescence despite its acolytes' sunny insistence that it's really in ruddy good health.