Liberals, progressives, fantasy peddlers … whatever you want to call today’s DC Democrats the ‘socialist’ meme is beginning to stick and stick hard. Socialists, as their name implies, love to tell everyone else how to live their lives. The left forgot America is not progressive or liberal by nature, and so when the DC Democrats went on their left wing binge this past year they sowed the seeds of their own political destruction.

The stories are coming out everywhere. Here is an excellent historical perspective that notes the long term pendulum swing between the founding fathers’ view of the individual writ large with a small government, versus the FDR progressives’ large government model, and how they both fold into today’s anti-government political climate. A sampling (H/T RCP):

The Progressives argued that economic freedoms were unimportant because ordinary people, lacking property, didn’t really have much economic freedom anyway. As such, property rights must be subordinated to human rights. It was better to guarantee people education, healthcare, food, housing—the domestic programs that Franklin Roosevelt advanced as victory in World War II neared in 1944 and 1945. Economic growth was a secondary concern at best. Roosevelt seems to have believed, as many Americans did at the time, that the era of economic growth was over and that the postwar years would see a return to economic depression. In any case, he was clearly focused on economic redistribution rather than growth.

…

Today we have a presidential administration and a congressional leadership which consciously seeks to expand the size and scope of government in the tradition set out by the Progressives and New Dealers. They came to power assuming that in times of economic distress Americans would be more amenable to or supportive of big government programs. This was a lesson they absorbed directly or secondhand from the great New Deal historians Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and James McGregor Burns, and from Franklin Roosevelt himself.

…

The Obama Democrats today believe they have progressed toward the goals Roosevelt outlined for domestic policy in his last year as president, and are puzzled by the adverse public reaction to their programs. But the America we live in is a very different country from the America the Progressives and New Dealers knew and, in part, because of the impact of some of the public policies set in place by the New Dealers and their opponents.

Then there is this very similar article by Jonah Goldberg:

This misplaced griping stems not from Obama’s failure to “think big” but from a misreading of the political climate: Liberals thought they’d be popular.

The American people supported the New Deal and pro-FDR politicians for years. This time around, Americans aren’t turning to government. Rather, they’ve grown only more disgusted with the public sector. Trust in government is near its historic low. Obama’s support among self-identified independents is at an all-time low and doesn’t appear to have hit bottom yet, while the “intensity” among Republican voters continues to surge.

Indeed, conservatives outnumber liberals by more than 2 to 1 (42 percent to 20 percent), according to Gallup. If that trend continues just a bit more, an absolute majority of Americans may soon call themselves conservatives.

All those liberal pundits who prophesized an Obama-led “new New Deal” must feel foolish as they don their life preservers and head to higher ground in anticipation of the electoral tsunami heading their way in November.

Obama had a vision – his vision. All that nonsense talk about coming together, tearing down partisan barriers and rebuilding America was cover for him to dictate his vision to us – with the clear expectation we would sit back and marvel at his creation. Marvel we do, at the inanity of it all.

The fact is most liberals suffer from severe Walter Mitty delusions. They believe they were put on this Earth to save humanity and nature from … humanity. In their warped, self-centered view America is inherently evil, not the best humanity has ever achieved. In fact it could be argued we are the best nature ever produced – what other species has the ability to migrate off planet? We dominate all life forms. Yes, we need to be incredibly responsible given this role, but we have achieved a hell of a lot.

Liberals are the half full crowd. They look at a KKK racist and tarnish all whites based on the worst among us – no matter how small a minority racist actually represent. The rest of us admire Collin Powell, Bill Cosby, Stevie Wonder, Martin Luther King, our neighbors, our work colleagues, etc and wonder when will the claims of racism end? We look to the best and see hope, they look to the worst and see ghosts of days gone past.

The left is failing. Just check out this article on the Green self-destruction (RCP has been on a roll this week):

The global process is in an even deeper hole. The greens, it is increasingly clear, bet the ranch on the Copenhagen process. That horrible meltdown, perhaps the biggest and most chaotic public embarrassment in the history of multilateral summits, turned climate change from global poster boy to global pariah. The green activists who advised their bosses to go to that summit and make large public commitments about global warming are in the doghouse now. Success is sometimes the most cruel and definitive form of failure: the Copenhagen Summit was exactly that kind of success for the climate change movement. They got all the world leaders together, got every television camera on the planet to focus in — and let everybody see just how confused and utopian their plans really were.

In another stunning article we see how the left has taken control of reigns of government and simply run amok, grabbing more and more from the public till to the point they have bankrupt our largest and most prosperous state.

In California, a more politically conservative environment at the time, public employees remained without negotiating power through most of the sixties, though they could join labor associations. In 1968, however, the state legislature passed the Meyers-Milias-Brown Act, extending bargaining rights to local government workers. Teachers and other state employees won the same rights in the seventies.

These legislative victories happened at a time of surging prosperity. California’s aerospace industry, fueled by the Cold War, was booming; investments in water supply and infrastructure nourished the state’s agribusiness; cheaper air travel and a famously temperate climate burnished tourism.

…

The swelling government payroll made many California taxpayers uneasy, eventually encouraging the 1978 passage of Proposition 13 (see page 30), the famous initiative that capped property-tax hikes and sought to slow the growth of local governments, which feed on property taxes. Government workers rightly saw Prop. 13 as a threat. “We’re not going to just lie back and take it,” a California labor leader told the Washington Post after the vote, adding that Prop. 13 had made the union “more militant.” The next several years proved him right. In 1980 alone, unionized employees of California local governments went on strike 40 times, even though doing so was illegal. And once the Supreme Court of California sanctioned state and local workers’ right to strike in 1985—something that their counterparts in most other states still lack—the unions quickly mastered confrontational techniques like the “rolling strike,” in which groups of workers walk off jobs at unannounced times, and the “blue flu,” in which public-safety workers call in sick en masse.

…

Consider the California Teachers Association. Much of the CTA’s clout derives from the fact that, like all government unions, it can help elect the very politicians who negotiate and approve its members’ salaries and benefits. Soon after Proposition 13 became law, the union launched a coordinated statewide effort to support friendly candidates in school-board races, in which turnout is frequently low and special interests can have a disproportionate influence. In often bitter campaigns, union-backed candidates began sweeping out independent board members. By 1987, even conservative-leaning Orange County saw 83 percent of board seats up for grabs going to union-backed candidates. The resulting change in school-board composition made the boards close allies of the CTA.

…

Unsurprisingly, the union-backed school boards often used the extra cash to fatten teachers’ salaries—one reason that California’s teachers are the country’s highest-paid, even though the state’s total spending per student is only slightly higher than the national average. “The problem is that there is no organized constituency for parents and students in California,” says Lanny Ebenstein, a former member of the Santa Barbara Board of Education and an economics professor at the University of California at Santa Barbara. “No one says to a board of education, ‘We want more of that money to go for classrooms, for equipment.’ ”

It is a long and depressing read – but worth the time. At the beginning of the Industrial Age it was corporate barons who collected inordinate power and literally abused the masses. As we enter the 21st century it is the government-controlling special interests who have become the evil brokers of power and hardship.

The pendulum of humanity’s evolution continues to swing. Governments were oppressive during the time of this nation’s founding. Then mega-corporations took over that roll 100 years in. Now the bane of the average American is a cancerous form of government again, which intervenes into every nook and cranny of our lives. A government that dictates how much we can earn, what we can buy, how much house or car we should be allowed – even what health care we can have. It is a government debating why people should have independent modes of transportation, what we should be allowed to eat, how much energy (or carbon) we should be allowed to use during our lives.

The new force in America is not social conservatism nor the liberal nanny-state. It is the libertarian core of America that comes through the Tea Party and the growing independent movement. We don’t want anyone telling us we must follow their example. We don’t want any one group forcing us into choices we don’t agree with using the threat of government. We don’t want a uniform, one-size-fits-all, government mandated religion (atheist or otherwise), education system, personal relationship model, business approach, savings approach, health care system, dietary mandate, parenting rules, scientific theories, etc, etc, etc.

Both the left and right talk a lot about cherishing diversity – but they don’t show much indication they understand what it means. We need to dismantle at least half of government and give the money and decision power back to the best and brightest – the American people. Any candidate running on that general theme is a shoe-in this fall. The time of big anything is over.