FOR THE LEFT, IT’S ALWAYS TIME FOR A NEW NEW DEAL: The day after the Democrats’ debate, I mentioned the irony of Hillary promoting a “New, New Deal” on Time-Warner-CNN-HBO’s “news” channel when its print division ran this cover immediately after their presidential candidate was elected in 2008:

But like a jukebox that can only play one song, the left seems incapable of anything other than New New Deals — in his latest G-File, Jonah Goldberg writes that for self-described “Progressives,” it’s “New Deals for as Far as the Eye Can See:”

You can explain all day how the New Deal prolonged the Great Depression and they won’t care. They’re like our new canine visitor Pippa, who apparently thinks every moment is the best moment for a New Throw of the tennis ball.. After 9/11 Chuck Schumer raced to the pages of the Washington Post to explain that terrorism requires a new New Deal. After Katrina, liberals said “Aha! This proves we need a new New Deal.” Thomas Friedman has a shortcut macro on his keyboard that allows him to vomit up a column arguing that pretty much everything (but especially climate change!) requires, nay demands, a new New Deal.

They don’t always use the phrase “new New Deal.” Often, they use the hackneyed language of the “moral equivalent of war” instead (see this latest installment at The Atlantic of this ancient trope). But, as I’ve written 8 trillion times, that’s the same frickin’ argument.

The real appeal of the New Deal wasn’t its alleged success, it’s that the New Deal is synonymous with a time when progressives had nearly unfettered political power to do what they wanted. Liberals don’t really worship the New Deal, they worship themselves. The New Deal is just a talisman in their undying faith in their own ability to guide society and make decisions for others better than people can make for themselves.

And, at a fundamental level, the desire for an unending string of New Deals going on forever, is indistinguishable from socialism. Liberals used to be honest about this point, as when Arthur Schlesinger let slip in the pages of Partisan Review that “There seems no inherent obstacle to the gradual advance of socialism in the United States through a series of New Deals.”

It’s all just so exhausting. And I guess what I resent most of all is the fact that I will spend the rest of my life arguing with people who not only think that their faith in progressivism and the State is smart and modern, but that their opponents are the ones who are stuck in the past. And in the process, they’ll keep making the country worse, with every failure providing the latest evidence that now, now, is the time for a new New Deal.

And concurrently, for the left, it’s always time for more gun control — but in past election years, Democrats were always better at lying about this particular goal, given how radioactive the topic is. This past week though, Hillary completely dropped the mask, and as Jazz Shaw writes at Hot Air today, Hillary’s gun confiscation proposal is going to backfire in a big way.

Unlike Kerry’s last minute “can aaah git meh a huntin’ license here” shtick in 2004, and Obama lying four years later that “I am not going to take your guns away,”  voters in 2016 can’t say they haven’t been given ample warning that Democrats plan to “take things away from you on behalf of the common good,” to coin a totalitarian phrase.