If two leftists, one a prominent comedian-turned-cavalier and the other a Chicago columnist, are publicly revealing doubt in their world view, we can be sure millions more — political devotees and true-'til-death, FDR/JFK Democrats alike — are doing the same. President Bush's victory was strong enough a domestic repudiation of leftism that relativism's soft bigotry in matters of polity overseas, its assertion that culture restricts governance, is simply unsustainable in the wake of the Iraqi people's stunning success. Absent applicable principles against a president bursting with them, the left has spent the last five years playing contrarian, throwing caution, logic and taste to the wind.
It's a lucky leftist who has the sense to at least consider divesting his identity from an ideological loser. The resemblance of leftism's internal logic and dictated behavior to that of typical adolescence is uncanny. The Western left flourishes in privilege and ensconces itself in a routine of impugning, heckling and disrupting the very forces that provide it privilege (and the means to impugn, heckle and disrupt). Leftism unfurled is an endless replay of teen rebellion; America and the Anglosphere as Mom and Dad, capitalism as the summer job you're forced to take. The military as those mean, lazy cops. It's so easy: Pick your 7-inch B-side anthem about the world hating you, you hating the world, you hating the world and yourself, and go. (Where else but teen angst-rock and leftism does one find so much self-loathing?) Choose a problem and blame those with the most responsibility yet the least culpability. Adopt the vague desire that you want to be somewhere else, telling everyone around you, but instead of leaving, stay home — cozy, free to complain and massage your non-falsifiable propositions. Until 2001, you were always lucky enough that no one put you in your place, since they figured you had time to grow the hell up.
Time ran out nearly four years ago.
ONE REASON FOR BEING UNEQUIVOCAL: Some people don't appreciate the first free election of their lives begrudged "a kind of legitimacy," and they're exactly right not to.
UNLIKELY REFLECTION: When even the morally confused, irritating Chris Matthews, talking with Don Imus about the Democratic Party, wonders "if they're grown ups," we can be certain we're talking about the same thing.