The reason the left failed to pass healthcare reform is not because Brown won a given seat, or because Obama mishandles this issue or the other. It is not due to a tactical or even strategic error the Democrats made, but rather because the Democrats, fundamentally, do not understand what America is.
Democrats – or rather, the pseudo-intellectual leadership of that movement – believe that social issues are to be managed by a technocratic elite – that the education of children is the province of English Studies and Education majors, that the management of downright everything in society is the province of some kind of experts – and most specifically, that there exists a knowledge of how society should run possessed by the educated. They feel an intense hatred towards capitalism, for two basic reasons.
One, because under capitalism, in the consumerist system, individuals – not 'experts' – decide what to consume. Even things that these 'experts' think don't make sense. So people go and watch Spielberg and not Fellini. According to a socialist that's not a legitimate difference of taste, that's a personal failing of yours. People go and eat fast food and not health food. According to them, it means you're being 'irrational'.
Two, because most liberals aren't liberal and tolerant at all – except, of course, of a narrow range of things of which they are taught to be tolerant – African-Americans, for example, or gay people, or people of certain religions. Push a liberal outside this range – expose him to hunting or gun ownership, or even simply hunting, or any religion outside of his narrow acceptance list – and see how quickly he starts whining. There's a reason that leftists campaigned for Prohibition, and why Stalin put prostitutes in work camps, and why leftist feminists demanded a ban on pornography – because these people are as intolerant and hateful as the ”strawman conservatives” they like to paint, except they have intelligent-sounding excuses for it.
In those countries where these people have won, it was because the populace, by and large, accepted many of the cultural assumptions of the Left. In America, by a valiant effort, this was prevented. The liberals call this 'anti-intellectualism' – because after all, anybody who denies that intellectuals to run our lives hates intellectualism. But it remains a fact – though liberals may ignore it, and I myself, as a libertarian, am often frustrated by it – that America, by and large, is a center-right, perhaps even a conservative country in terms of the political values the population holds.
Throughout history, every society develops a political elite in some form. Conspiracists love to imagine this in the form of secret societies, but in fact the elite is more subtle in composition. It is composed of social classes – politicians, media corporations, intellectuals and public servants. When such people become detached in their goals and aspirations from everybody else, they may try to deceive themselves and try to tell themselves that it is not their fault, that the people are stupid, or whatever else. But such self-deception only serves to accelerate their self-destruction.
I don't know which political faction will be in charge of America in fifty years.
But it's not going to be the modern Left.
