Has the expected triumphant return of the Democrats turned into their defeat?

J.R. Dunn at American Thinker subjects the Democratic party to a blast furnace of condemnatory rhetoric showing it to be a stew of corruption and incompetence that has lost any claim as a governing party in this country. It is instead the party of James McGreevy, the New Jersey governor who hired his homosexual boyfriend to be the state’s homeland security advisor, and of Eliot Spitzer, the widely admired New York governor brought down by “a prostitution scheme too moronic for fiction,” and now of Spitzer’s successor David Paterson, who in his first days as governor admitted to trading jobs for sexual favors. Then there are the Clintons, Pelosi, Reid, and the rest, all culminating in the Democrats’ golden man Barack Obama whose pretense of leftist moral superiority has “now evaporated, thanks to … the news that he has for two decades belonged to what amounts to a racist cult.”

All this is true, and it’s bracing to see it all brought together. Analytically, however, the article is undeveloped. At the outset, Dunn breathlessly purports to explain how “2008 marks the end of liberalism as a governing force in the same way that 1968 marked the end of liberalism as a political doctrine.” He speaks of how the Democratic party was taken over in 1972 by the hard-core left, which commenced its successful Gramcian Long March through the institutions. You think that the article is going to tell what happened to this triumphant leftist ideology and its claim to a higher morality, how it gained and then lost the ability to govern. But, disappointingly, Dunn fails to demonstrate a causal link, or any connection at all, between the leftist morality and the corruption. For the most part, he doesn’t even discuss the morality, but only the corruption. So the article, at 1,800 words, for all its interest and timeliness, is but half-formed.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at March 27, 2008 09:27 AM | Send