Why the liberals have been left behind

The Brits weigh in with analysis of the liberal left. Seems they had the same problem.

Democracy is suitable only for the enlightened - which is to say for people who accept the assumptions of the Guardian/BBC world view. If you cannot produce the right result in an election - even after you have been told very clearly by everybody from Robert Redford to Michael Moore what to think - then you are beneath contempt, and we are licensed by the household gods of liberal ideology to call you names. (On Radio 4's News Quiz last week, Jeremy Hardy described Bush and his followers as "stupid, crazy, ignorant, bellicose Christian fundamentalists". Presumably, by BBC logic, this does not constitute bigotry but wit.)

There are lots of reasons why the liberal intelligentsia in the United States has so spectacularly fallen out of touch with the true democratic will of the country. Part of this is geographic - the electoral map with its huge mass of red states, fringed with blue bits hanging on for dear life at the edges, was clear enough. But the picture was far more complex than that map reflected: the real story is one of break-away Hispanic and black voters who went conservative on the social issues that John Kerry's campaign had thought to be a strong card with minorities. The truth in America, and in Britain, is that the Left-liberal axis has lost its way: it has failed to notice that its "liberalism" has become an off-putting orthodoxy with which most people do not identify. Government ministers have been pretty quick off the mark in noticing this: that is why David Blunkett is assigned the task of making anti-liberal noises. The Tories, alas, have yet to get the message. They still seem to think it is up-to-the-minute, state-of-the- art politics to talk like a sociology lecturer from the 1970s.

In the United States, liberalism has not only overplayed its hand but it has tried to attach the spirit of the 1960s civil rights movement to causes that the great majority see as inappropriate. Everybody that the orthodoxy adopts becomes an honorary southern American black: persecuted, exploited and downtrodden. Gays, however wealthy, successful and influential they are, must be portrayed as social victims whose lives are made hell because their unions are denied absolute legal equivalence with heterosexuals. It is quite true, as everybody is saying, that in Britain, gay marriage is not the explosive issue that it is in America, where Biblical authority has much more sway. (But the Westminster obsession with gay issues such as the age of consent certainly is out of tune with most people's sense of political priorities.)