Why shouldn't they become the reactionaries? Liberalism formerly implied a pragmatic and open approach toward the goal of increasing liberty as a good in and of itself. It has become,under the influence of progressive/materialism, an ideology of open theft and fraud. The accumulation of power in the hands of a self-described elite who feel entitled to rule in order to continue their experiments on the rest of us is just too damned hard to give away. Their program is ab almost complete failure although they belive that tinkering around the edges without admitting their mistakes and, heaven forbid, LEARNING from them will solve the problems. Ideological commitments,usually formed when young and searching for answers, is tough to overcome. The emotional investment was just too much even in light of hard, cold facts. The distrust of individuals and the deification of what is believed to be a disintersted state is a facet of the progressive psychology that is beyond my understanding. A very strange bunch.

Once you've demonized Bush and his supporters as the nearest thing to Hilter on this plant, it's tough for the left to do anything but reflexively oppose anything he's for, based on the ideas that anything he supports has to be bad, and he and his fellow Republicans can't be allowed to have any successes.

Sept. 11 was enough of a shock to the system to shut many of those people down -- for a while. But the most resilliant demonizers, like Michael Moore, shook off the news within days and were able to start politicizing the issue, and as the memories of the attacks faded, others on the left returned to their former ways. If you can look at the hole at the World Trade Center and see Bush as the cause of the world's problems, there's no way you're going to look at any Social Security reform plan he backs and do anything but try and kill it in the cradle.

The Democrats seem well on the way to being as irrelevant to public discourse as the Congressional GOP was from the election of FDR to Gingrich's Contract with America. Keep in mind that many of the dinosaurs of the GOP like Bob Dole, Bob Michel and Old Bush viscerally hated Gingrich.

I can't stop reacting when someone abuses the term "progressive" by attaching it to pinkoes. No. No. No. No. There is nothing progressive about these people, unless one is thick enough to imagine that all change is progress.

Leftists are counter-progressive. often explicitly so. Get inside their stuff. They almost alway wax nostalgic about some prior position, way back when, before the bourgiousie, or the Christians or the partiarchate, or the White men or somebody messed everything up

Scratch a Marxist-Leninist and you find an oblastnik, scratch a feminist, an Earth-Mother worshipper from past ages undreamed-of--it goes on and on.

Actually progress itself is a Jewish idea, grafted into the West via the Jewish sect of the Christians. Almost all the people claiming to be for "progress" are looking for progress back to the past.

"Actually progress itself is a Jewish idea"

Is that so? Perhaps you could give us a citation to a Biblical or Talmudic text.