The Liberal Retreat

From Walter Russell Mead writing at the American Interest:

The Obama administration may represent “Peak Left” in American politics.

... as the United States staggers toward the seventh year of Barack Obama’s tenure in the White House, a growing disquiet permeates the ranks of the American left.

After six years of the most liberal President since Jimmy Carter, the nation doesn’t seem to be asking for a second helping.

Even though the multiyear roll-out of Obamacare was carefully crafted to put all the popular features up front, delaying less popular changes into the far future, the program remains unpopular.

Trust in the fairness and competence of government is pushing toward new lows in the polls, even though the government is now in the hands of forward-looking, progressive Democrats...

Here we are, six years into the Age of Obama, and the Tea Party is alive and Occupy is dead.

The Republicans swept the midterm elections both nationally and at the state level—and Hillary Clinton appears more interested in conciliating Wall Street than in fighting it, and more interested in building bridges to conservative foreign policy thinkers than in continuing the Obama foreign policy.

(And with even Jimmy Carter lambasting Obama’s Middle East policy as too weak, and the President committing to new troop deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan, it’s not clear that even President Obama wants to stay the course.)

The liberal rout at the level of state and local politics is even more alarming.

A wave of Republican Governors in blue Midwestern states (Walker in Wisconsin, Snyder in Michigan, plus the Dem-crushing Kasich in purple Ohio) and large GOP gains in state legislatures across the country point to a widespread reaction against liberal ideas, and lend credence to the idea that, even accounting for the GOP-skewed electorate in off-year elections, the country as a whole is drifting to the right...

But to blame Obama for the crisis of the liberal left is unpersuasive.  

It was the liberal left who fell hardest for him, who praised him to the skies and who stuck with him longer than anybody else...

In that sense the Obama administration may represent “Peak Left” in American politics, and what we are getting from the left these days is a mix of bewilderment and anger as it realizes that this is as good as it gets.

America is unlikely to go farther to the left than it went in the wake of the Iraq War and the financial crash, and while that wasn’t anywhere near enough of a shift for left-leaning Democrats, the country has already moved on.
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Link: http://www.the-american-interest.com/2014/12/19/next-up-in-america-the-liberal-retreat/