Charles Krauthammer describes Democrats as the "avatars of reactionary liberalism, desperately trying to hang on to the gains of their glory years" -- by which, I can only assume, Krauthammer means when America's middle class thrived and before the New and Newer and Newest Rights launched their thundering assaults against it.
In a way, Krauthammer is perversely correct. Liberalism today is in a sense reactionary; that is, it harks back to a distant and promising if not perceptible Golden Age -- a time when workers organized against impersonal profiteering by the few, the elderly attained a decent standard of living and accessible health care, educational opportunities opened for the poor, civil and human rights were on the march, and average but upwardly mobile Americans not unreasonably anticipated an even more prosperous future for their young.
All in all, not a bad accomplishment. Yet liberalism has waned as huge swaths of Americans' preferred, for want of a better word, ideology. The reasons for that shift are many and complex and not the thrust of this brief post -- the thrust of which is, rather, an observation about Krauthammer's very unintended thrust.
Which is to say, one could intelligently argue that modern liberalism -- in its attempts to preserve the fading past, to conserve past progress, to cherish the once-honorable and once-honored, to advocate only gradual change and to continue embracing accepted change as the societal good -- is the new and de facto conservatism.
That other "conservatism" today is but the radically, regressively "progressive" party (as Krauthammer toys with the term), in that it's indeed herding us with ever-progressive force into an ultimately inescapable pit of middle-class desolation, socioeconomic immobility, cultural stagnation and the crassest of Huxleyan dystopias.
For the betterment of their electoral chances in this nominally conservative environment, I can even envision the day when liberal pols finally take it upon themselves to declare their political values for what they've so rapidly become: a species of old-school conservatism.
How about it, Charles? Willing to switch labels?