Live by the hype, die by the hype

Mona Charen has posted a thoughtful article on NRO about how backward-looking the agenda of the US "progressives" has been since their messiah was elected, as symbolized by the Time magazine cover - one of about two dozen - that showed him as Franklin Roosevelt, jaunty cigarette (horrors!) holder and all.

When you consider the Obama ascendancy as a case of pent-up liberal Democratic demand, things come into better focus. How else to explain why a Democratic government would push through a new trillion-dollar health-care entitlement when large majorities of the electorate have signaled near-panic over growing government debt? How else to explain the $800 billion stimulus (whose funds went largely to public-sector union workers) and the obese budgets? “This is our time,” Obama intoned in 2008, “This is our moment.”

If this had been 1980 or 1990 or even 2000, the Democrats might not have suffered the backlash they are now enduring from the electorate. But they chose to indulge their spending spree just when Americans were sobering up about past overspending in their private lives. The recession was a smack across the head reminding people that those jumbo mortgages and home-equity loans were mistakes — that eventually the bills come due.

Over here, the "progressives" continue to be characterised by what George Orwell long ago described as the "British leftist's mechanical snigger", with the Bitchy Boys Club sneering at Sarah Palin and now Christine O'Donnell - well, they are women (ugh!) as well as conservative - so regularly that you'd have thought somebody in the USA might give a damn what they think.

If there is a widespread popular recognition that the fiscal incontinence of the Brown regime mirrored personal attitudes to spending and debt, it is getting no attention from the mainstream media at all. I very much doubt if you could gather even a small crowd in Britain, let alone a mass popular movement, animated by outrage at statist profligacy. That would involve looking in the mirror and actually seeing what it reflects, and the British are as eisoptrophobic as vampires.