Take the late, unlamented tobacco bill, the most passionate liberal cause of Clinton’s second term. But why should this qualify as a liberal bill except in the trivial sense that a coalition of self-identified "liberals" spawned the campaign to (in effect) outlaw the noxious weed? What is "liberal," for example, about a bill that would use the power of the state to crush an industry that is otherwise legal and whose customers voluntarily pay billions a year to purchase its product in full knowledge of its consequences and effects? What is liberal about a strategy that would achieve such social agendas by regulating what people can see and hear, and by imposing a regressive tax whose burdens would fall principally on working people and the poor?

But then what is liberal about liberals at all, anymore, except their attitudes towards drugs and sex?

What the obsolescence of the political language reveals, in fact, is the way in which the parties themselves have changed, and in the most profound sense. The opponents of the tobacco legislation—the "conservative" party in contemporary political discourse—is today, in practice, the party of liberal values (de-regulatory and individualistic) and social reform. It is Republicans who want to shrink the power of the federal bureaucracies and devolve it through the states to the people. It is the "liberal" party that is the faction of political reactionaries and puritan busybodies fighting tooth and nail to obstruct this process, and to reinstitute the kind of moral prohibitionism that was proven bankrupt more than a half a century ago.

The reactionary character of the "progressive" left in American politics extends well beyond the tobacco follies, moreover. In the area of so-called "civil rights" legislation, it is liberals who have turned back the clock to the segregationist era by instituting governmental race preferences. It is liberals who have promoted cultural separatism to the point that our most "progressive" and elite academic institutions have become the centers of segregated life right down to separate (but equal?) graduation ceremonies. It is "liberals" who are fighting a rear-guard action to defend these political anachronisms even after they have been declared unconstitutional by the courts and rejected by electoral majorities at the polls.

Nor is it only civil-rights issues that bring out the troglodytes and Neanderthals of the left. It is liberals and "progressives" who have had to be dragged over the bridge to the 21^st Century while clinging to a welfare leviathan that in thirty years has only deepened and broadened the ranks of the poor, while destroying the family and community supports minorities trapped in the inner city. It is liberals who, like deranged energizer bunnies, seem only able to repeat the past—the endless demands for taxes to fund systems that are obviously bankrupt, the digging-in-of-the-heels to resist reforms that would breakup the educational bureaucracies instead of continuing to fatten them on the backs of minorities and the poor whose children are the only ones still trapped in public school systems. It is liberals, the employers of immigrant servant labor, who fight to preserve bankrupt "bilingual" education programs that prevent their children from learning English, thereby unlocking the door to economic opportunity and the American dream.

By contrast it is increasingly apparent that the "conservative" and Republican opponents of liberalism are the new party of social reform. It is "conservatives" whose self-conceived mission is to return power that has been usurped by government to the American people and to chip away at a cultural and political status quo that has not worked, that the American public has already rejected, and whose misguided programs are most damaging to the poorest and most vulnerable among us.

Liberalism, now and for some time, has been having a hard time facing the social future. It is not for nothing that liberals were either promoters of, or at best ambiguous towards the monstrous socialist experiment that collapsed in ruins just a decade past. Even liberals who rejected the means of socialism, were willing to go along with the idea that social planning and re-distribution of wealth were noble and progressive ideals. And now that the Marxist moment has passed, brutally exposed as a wrong-headed and destructive social delusion, liberals are demonstrating that they are unable to replace these with better ideas.

Nor are just the ideas of liberalism backward-looking and bankrupt. The primary institutional bases of the left are the trade unions and the universities. The unions are a declining 19^th Century behemoth, pre-occupied these days with the "threat" of immigrant labor, with defending outmoded native industries against the competition of industrious foreigners, with retarding change in the private sector and with expanding feather-beds in the public. The liberal-arts divisions of American universities, whose closest analogue and antecedent is the medieval monastery, is the natural last refuge of the socialist left, a place where the catastrophe of Marxism may not register for another hundred years.

Beneath the surface, the tectonic plates of American politics have shifted. This event first registered on the political Richter scale in 1994 with the Republican victory in the mid-term congressional elections. At the time, the odd, oxymoronic term employed to describe what had happened was "the conservative revolution." It was a term for which Gingrich and his Republican radicals—such are the ironies of history—were made to pay a heavy political price by the liberal-left—a fact that only underscored the obsolescence of the political terminology. It is true that thanks to the effective and hypocritical attacks on Gingrich by liberal reactionaries in the Democratic Party and by the defenders of the ancien regime in the nation’s press, there was a temporary slowing of the progressive tide that the Contract with America had unloosed. Bill Clinton was re-elected in 1996. That was the superficial restoration. For it was only because of his surrender to Gingrich’s balanced budget and welfare reforms (and massive illegal campaign contributions from reactionary dictatorships overseas) that Clinton was able to survive at all. The simultaneous re-election of the Republican congressional majorities, the first time this had happened in 60 years! consolidated the underlying trend even more profoundly and established it as an epoch-making fact of American political life.

In the four years, since the Gingrich revolution, 357 Democratic elected officials have switched political parties, including the only Native American ever elected to the United States Senate. Just last month, the most prominent Puerto Rican political leader in New York City—an urban center that was once a stronghold of Democratic liberalism and is now the power base of a Republican reform mayor—Herman Badillo became a Republican too. For thirty years, Herman Badillo had been a party-line liberal Democrat, as congressman, borough president, and deputy mayor. But now he has had second thoughts. In a statement explaining his conversion, Badillo wrote:

"Many Democrats believe that some ethnic groups, such as Hispanics, should not be held to the same standards as others. This is a repellent and destructive concept, a self-fulfilling prophecy of failure. Fortunately, the ethnic groups hurt by these patronizing policies are beginning to understand that low standards mean low results—a realization that will move people in these groups to the GOP. Democrats don't see that this is happening, because they take their historic constituencies for granted. They believe that Hispanics will vote Democratic in the future because they voted Democratic in the past. In the Hispanic community, however, there is a real desire for change—the kind of change that Democratic policies cannot achieve. Indeed, Democratic policies harm minorities by permitting students to graduate from college without college-level skills, allowing crime to go unpunished and making welfare an absolute right regardless of one's ability to work."

It would be hard to summarize more succinctly what has been happening under the surface of American politics for the last two decades preparing the earthquake ahead. It has really been happening since the Goldwater campaign of 1964. This was the Sixties movement that launched modern "conservatism," which is only tenuously connected to conservatisms of the past, and not all to the kind of aristocratic Toryism of the European right. (Even the European godfather of American conservatism, Edmund Burke, was a political liberal who supported the American Revolution.)