It’s been a truly frightening experience watching the disintegration of the left over these last few years. Right before our eyes, the old “New Left” coalition of academia, the media, the intelligentsia, and the pulpit has dissolved into a ranting, raving, raging bunch of paranoid lunatics whose hyperbolic rhetorical flourishes regarding culture and politics are rapidly condemning its adherents to social oblivion.

It’s one thing to use rhetorical excesses and exaggerations to score political points. It’s quite another to actually believe and try and justify language that on any other planet where intelligent life exists would land the interlocutor in a windowless room with padded walls.

Think about it for a second. Do so many on the left really believe that George Bush can be compared to a man who gassed 6 million human beings, deliberately started a war that killed 80 million more, and brought a nightmare of oppression and murder to most of the rest of the inhabitants of Europe? After all, these are people who proudly claim to be members of a “Reality Based Community.”

The answer is yes, they really do believe that George Bush can be compared to Hitler. A large segment of them also believe, despite mountains of evidence to the contrary, that the 2004 election was stolen by the President and the Republican party. Many of them are convinced that the electronic voting machines – the very same machines they lobbied for following the 2000 election debacle – were hacked by the President’s corporate allies and vote totals showing a Kerry victory were altered to give the President the election.

Is it a sign of desperation? Has the hard left, never really in the mainstream but nevertheless extraordinarily influential, been marginalized in our political debates to the point where lashing out with surreal analogies and apocalyptic warnings of impending doom is the only way it can get attention?

We make fun here of some of the truly batty things said by such luminaries as Noam Chomsky, Ramsey Clark, Ted Kennedy, and the various toadies and hangers-on that inhabit the fevered environs of Moveon and the Democratic Underground. In truth, however, these bloviations are symptomatic of something much more serious.

They represent a loss of faith – faith in the ultimate victory of ones ideas, faith in the correctness of ones perceptions or worldview, and perhaps even a loss of faith in the country that has nurtured them.

The left has always approached things with a mildly attractive, wide-eyed innocence, as if the world were new and the ideas that sprang forth from their fertile minds could shape mankind in a way that would eliminate “injustice” from which all other evils – poverty, racism, war, and now, of course, terrorism – flowed. And while many of their proscriptions against racism and especially poverty have turned into a nightmare of bureaucratic oppression, there was still the hope that these things could be fixed with a little tinkering. Much like their European brethren who are still not apologizing for 50 years of support of murderous communist regimes because they believe that communism can still work with the “right people” running things, our domestic left believes in the illusory notion that government can solve problems that have plagued the planet since the time of Adam with the right combination of laws and regulations.

While not necessarily delusional – no one disputes that improvements in the lot of the poor and justice for minorities who’ve been discriminated against can’t be accomplished – the worldview espoused by the left has always been tinged with a sense of unreality. It’s as if human nature itself can be improved upon with a little societal fiddling. Hence, the belief that “conflict resolution” and “multicultural studies” for children can somehow rip out the hard wiring in the human brain and replace it with the software of love. A noble undertaking for certain, but one doomed to failure by the exigencies of the nurturing process. If children could be kept in school 24 hours a day such an experiment would have a chance of success. But since children spend twice as much time with their peers and parents as they do with teachers and school administrators, any fundamental change in human behavior is sabotaged by the influence of others.

So after nearly 40 years of intellectual dominance, the left is seeing its previously unchallenged ideas and ideals ripped to shreds by both the intrusion of reality and the attack of the right. It’s hard to tell which has been more devastating. One could argue that 9/11 exploded so many leftist myths about the world that they have yet to recover any kind of equilibrium and instead, have retreated into name calling and apocalyptic warnings of disaster (not for the United States, but for the rest of the world if US power remains unchecked!). Similarly, with the rise of the new media, previously untouched bastions of liberalism such as the mainstream press and even academia have felt the sting of criticism and the embarrassment of having patently false assumptions explode in their faces.

Lately, an effort has begun to reverse this trend. There’s a move afoot to emulate the rise of the right over the last quarter century by funding think tanks, encouraging “progressive” scholarship, recruiting attractive, articulate candidates for office at all levels of government, and generally sowing the seeds that will hopefully start bearing fruit in the near future. With George Soros behind this activity you can be sure it will be well funded.

But is it, in one of the more overused words of my youth, “relevant?”

It could be, if the left embraces the idea that the defense of the United States during this time of war is the “Ur” issue with the American people. They can whine all they want to about how the President has turned the issue to his political advantage but the fact remains that the President didn’t make national defense such an overarching issue with the American people, Osama Bin Laden did. And the fact that the left is in full throated denial of that singular reality is why the American people are paying less and less attention to them and why their candidates are not taken seriously for high office.

It remains to be seen also whether or not the left can jettison some of the more unsavory characters who inhabit the outer reaches of the fever swamp of conspiracy theories and childish notions of theocratic regimes and Hitlerian nightmares. The right, of course, has its own problems with charlatans and self-appointed holy men and this may prove to be a political problem in the future. But when the left applauded Michael Moore’s portrayal of the terrorist beheaders in Iraq as the moral and actual equivalent of the American revolutionary minutemen, the American people stopped listening and began to laugh.

There’s no doubt that liberals have a long, hard road to travel before they achieve any relevance in the national debate. It remains to be seen whether “tweaking” their message to include soothing words to people of faith and a new found hard headedness in foreign policy will be enough to overcome a constant case of foot in mouth disease that takes them on ever increasing flights of hyperbole and rhetorical nonsense that the American people have already judged to be extreme and just plain wrong.

UPDATE

Van Helsing and I were on the same wavelength this morning:

Many grown adults who continue to cling to the adolescent ideology of the Left need to lean on irony. But even if they can look you in the face and tell you that 9/11 was about the “haves and have-nots” without smirking, there’s not much chance they’ll give up their Club Med vacations for stints at terrorist training camps, if only because deep down most of them know that their point of view is a fashion accessory, and if The New Yorker changed its editorial policy, their professed beliefs would quickly follow suit.

But teenagers don’t have the balance and perspective that comes with accepting yourself as a total fraud. When they adopt a pose, they are likely to think it’s real. So when you force-feed the young a constant diet of anti-American propaganda — as our media and schools do — the troubles and confusion that often accompany the adolescent years can result in a very dangerous sociopathology that might last into adulthood with disastrous results.

He then documents the strange case of one Adam Gadahn, American moonbat turned jiahdist. Read the whole thing. It’s an eye opener.

Also, check out this excellent post from The New Editor about “The Sandbox Left.”

Cross Posted at Blogger News Network