Going Out on a Limb

The 2004 election will at last quell the resentment of the Left over the 2000 election. Paradoxically, this will happen because John Kerry will lose.

Kerry's defeat will not enrage the liberal wing of the Democratic Party because they will have spent their rage--as they have nearly done already. They will not claim that Bush stole the election, because he will win by a substantial margin. They will not be stupified by the ignorance and gullibility of the American people, because they will recognize, if only privately, the colossal falsehood at the heart of the Kerry campaign. And they will not wage a rearguard action against the election results because they will see that in the campaign they deployed cavalry against repeating rifles, a phalanx against longbows: the establishment media stuck out their chins for Kerry and were cold-cocked in the undercard fight with the Internet samizdat.

For that reason, among others, the election of 2004 will sound the death knell of the Left as it exists today. The "short century" of our time will be seen as the period from 1968 to 9/11. In November, the Left will belatedly accept that this century is over--something most Americans already intuit.

The soul of post-modern liberalism will survive, of course. And will most likely continue to make its home in the Democratic Party, which will take the next step in its long, weird descent from Jeffersonianism to slavery to libertine statism. But it will not be same.

This is only a prediction. "The future," Churchill observed, "is imminent, though obscure." What is not obscure is that the country cannot exist indefinitely half red and half blue. One way or another, the deadlock must break. Whether it will break the right way is not certain. But the signs look promising.