EXTREMISM: The Democrats Turn Left.

During the 2012 election, Barack Obama memorably attacked the Republicans’ rightward shift, saying that Ronald Reagan could not win a modern Republican presidential nomination. That may be true, but it’s also true that Bill Clinton could not win a modern Democratic presidential nomination—as evidenced by the fact that Hillary Clinton has had to renounce the majority of her husband’s positions in order to be competitive.

This left-populist resurgence comes even as the nation might be poised to drift rightward, for two reasons. The big challenge—and opportunity—facing America today is the decline of the postwar welfare and managerial state beginning in the 1970s (what we call the “blue model”). The Democratic party’s orthodox response to this trend is to try to shore up what’s left of that model, and rebuild some of what’s been lost. But as Walter Russell Mead has documented at length, the blue decline traces, at least in part, to economic and demographic factors like globalization, technological change, and the aging of the population that simply can’t be put back in the genie’s bottle.

And it’s not clear that the majority of the American public wants policies aimed at reviving the blue model anyway.

But none of the alternatives offer sufficient opportunities for graft.