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American conservative tensions, however, are as mild palpitations compared to the troubles of moribund liberals. Liberals had completely dominated American politics in the post-second world war era, to the point of stifling all sensible debate. Their domination of the culture was so complete that it inspired in me a sociological joke. The liberals had created in the place of a vibrant, intellectually alive culture, a kultursmog, a culture polluted by their own dreary values and bugaboos.
White liberals existed uneasily with increasingly demanding black militants. There arose the Revd Jesse Jackson and shortly thereafter the Revd Al Sharpton, two hucksters who are still around today. The trades unions coexisted uneasily with the environmentalists and the consumerists, and others who were simple luddites. There were pacifists attempting to prevail on liberal proponents of some vestige of realpolitik. There were the charlatans of different varieties of identity politics. There were even more trivial activists. All called themselves liberals.
American socialists and other fantasticos had given up their third party dreams and quietly slipped into the liberal camp and the Democratic party. Sean Wilentz, the successor to the great liberal historian Arthur Schlesinger Jnr, has called it a fragmentation. I call it a crack-up. In any event, it left the liberals depleted.
The numbers make my case. Today, roughly 42 per cent of the American electorate claim to be conservative. Roughly 35 per cent claim to be independent — and most of the independents, alarmed about President Obama’s metastasising debt, voted with the conservatives in their 2010 rout of the Democratic party. Their concern will persist into November’s elections and beyond. Only around 20 per cent of the electorate claim to be liberals. Their influence is magnified by their control of the kultursmog, but that is rapidly attenuating due to the rise of Fox News, talk radio, the internet, and the media organs of the growing conservative movement. Today, the liberals’ numbers are probably overshadowed by the number of birdwatchers in America. I predict they will go the way of the American Prohibition Party. (And I shall drink to that!)
Conservatives today boast of their conservatism on the campaign trail. Liberals, by contrast, must claim to be ‘moderates’ and call conservatives extreme. This year, everyone in the race for the Republican nomination was protesting that he or she was the real conservative — even Mitt Romney, the eventual winner.
As for President Obama, he claims to represent the American mainstream, but refers to Republicans in terms lifted from the hoary past. He called Congressman Paul Ryan, the powerful chairman of the House budget committee, and his like-minded Republicans ‘thinly veiled social Darwinists’, a term reeking of some provincial university lecture hall, possibly the University of Chicago where he taught. Not since days of yore has the epithet been used. What next? Will he call Republican foreign policy a return to Manifest Destiny? His bizarre removal of Winston Churchill’s bust from the White House suggests that he might. Presidential candidate Romney has already touched a liberal nerve by identifying Obama as a candidate who is out of touch. He should remind voters of Obama’s quaint epithets, too.
President Obama must be worried. The economy, which we were told was on the mend, is faltering again. And while Romney may have had trouble winning the nomination, in terms of conservatives and independents versus liberals and Democrats, the numbers are with him. My prediction is that the Republican nominee will come out of the Republican convention in August with a full head of steam. Boosted by years of growing conservative strength and aided by the independents’ concern for Obama’s huge deficits and slow growth, he will barrel through the autumn and on to victory in November. Obama will soon be back in Blue Island, Illinois, creating his presidential museum. As for liberalism, it is dead. It will be replaced by the left’s cronyism, which has never been favoured by the majority of Americans.
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