Reliving the Bad Old Days

John Hinderaker at Powerline offers the following theory. This old dog concurs.

I do think there is an opening here for a charismatic leader to drive the country to the left. The jury is still out on whether Barack Obama is such a leader. Why this opening should exist now is an interesting question. I think the answer is that we now have a generation of Americans who haven't learned about liberalism the hard way.

There was never a time when Americans decided that liberalism didn't sound good. Nor was there a time when a majority of Americans read Friedman, Hayek and Buckley and became intellectual conservatives. What did happen was that Americans voted for liberal policies that sounded good, and had to live with the bitter consequences: the pathologies that were spawned by the Great Society, declining cities, spiraling crime rates, high unemployment, inflation, economic decline, confiscatory tax rates, weakness abroad, and all the rest. For around 25 years, that bitter experience inoculated most voters against a return to liberalism.

But we now have a generation of voters who didn't undergo that experience, and to whom liberalism once again sounds pretty good. There are no doubt some older voters whose memories have faded, too. So, consistent with the maxim that those who do not remember history are condemned to repeat it, we may have to suffer through another bout of liberalism to re-learn the lessons of the past.