While the Left was totally decimated among intelligent observers in the last century, the power and influence of the Left is described by me as a ‘tsunami’ today.
This is a bizarre state of affairs for a social direction that I consider a dead-end.
How do I reconcile this obvious contradiction?
To me the key is that most people’s brains become hard boiled by age 23. Thus the current media world, academia and East Coast elite were diehard Lefties in the late 1970’s and 1980’s and they are in dominant positions today with their 23 year-old views of the world. They never saw or understood the failure of the USSR, Mao’s China, India and the Scandinavian socialist experiments.
Moreover, these people moved to the locales that suited their politics: cities. There they have formed an echo chamber of their cohorts and a political base that has disproportionate power
They also missed the rise of the whole new intellectual world of modern commerce advocates including Charles Krauthammer, Jonathan Israel, Thomas Sowell, Irving Kristol, Gertrude Himmelfarb, Yoram Hazony, David Hazony, Matt Ridley, Deirdre McCloskey, Dennis Prager, Rush Limbaugh, Michael Medved and many others.
Since these troglodytes are teaching a new generation, it is hard to know when this intellectual dead-end becomes a political dead-end.