The left has grown stagnant and boring

The left has grown stagnant and boring http://t.co/cE6U2nZWIz pic.twitter.com/0g34BQgns0

— Rare (@Rare) April 10, 2015

Ever wonder why we here at Rare spend so much time criticizing conservatives? One of the reasons is that, while the right is brimming with ideas that are worth engaging, the left has gotten stale.

I address this liberal stagnation in ◼ my latest essay at the American Spectator:

The Obama era should have been a high watermark for American liberalism. Democrats in 2009 not only laid claim to the House, the filibuster-proof Senate, and the White House, but did so during an economic recession in which jobs vanished, wages shrank, and Wall Street was held in nearly universal contempt. Deregulation was out and stimulus was in. The table was better set for progressive ideas than at any time since the Great Depression.

Early on, liberals made three calculations that cost them dearly....

And that gets to the grand irony here. Liberals spent years sneering that Republicans were the party of no, out of ideas, deathly, dying, dead. This spurred conservatives and engendered a Great Awakening on the right the likes of which hasn’t been seen since the Contract with America. It was liberalism that went bankrupt, with little internal dialectic and nothing to show but hatred, economic stagnation, and the same hoary tax-and-spend policies it’s been trying for decades.

That lack of originality is painfully evident at the state level. In Rhode Island, the governor is looking to enact a “Taylor Swift” tax on vacation homes worth more than $1 million. In California, legislators are mulling over cigarette and sales tax increases. This mad impulse towards profligacy is having predictable consequences. Of the top ten job-creating states in 2014, according to Gallup, seven were under total Republican control (it would be eight if Nebraska didn’t have a nonpartisan legislature). Of the ten states that created the fewest jobs, only one was under total Republican control and four were under total Democratic control.

These side-by-side economic comparisons—brought to you by federalism, another great conservative idea—have created a personnel shortage in the Democratic Party as voters toss out failed liberal governors. Consider that the Democrats’ presidential frontrunner for 2016 is Hillary Clinton, who’s been on camera without interruption since 1992 yet hasn’t held elected office since 2009. Consider too that her only potential challengers are a one-term senator from Massachusetts and a former governor from Maryland whose protégé was thrashed at the ballot box last year KEEP READING.