Left Has Won (Whoever Wins)

After 4 decades, the conservative revolution launched by the likes of Goldwater and Buckley is not only washed up, Michael Lind writes in Salon, it  failed "completely, undeniably and irreversibly." The structure of 20th-century American liberalism is intact, if battered, he writes, and liberals should stop worrying so much. No matter who wins the election, “prospects for the moderate, reformist center left” are better now than in half a century.

The coming policy controversies will be fought within the Democratic party—and that’s even if the US has a Republican president. The right is “defeated … demoralized, dispersed and diminishing,” with the ascendancy of evangelical activism overstated and McCain forced to triangulate on climate change, health care and foreign policy. Don’t get too complacent, Lind tells the left, but by all means ... relax. (More conservatism stories.)