“The Liberals have shown they’re only capable of coming up with old ideas, tired ideas and bad ideas,” says a cynical friend, and on the evidence, he’s right. As the Western world is buffeted by economic storms, rising inequality and unsustainable entitlements, the Liberals are preparing to debate such urgent matters as legalizing marijuana, bringing back the Wheat Board, expanding hate-propaganda laws to include gender hatred, and abolishing the monarchy (a task that’s almost constitutionally impossible).
These ideas – so slight, so silly and so distracting – are a sign of intellectual exhaustion. Even Liberals know that, if they want to reconnect with the “soul” of Canada, as one party stalwart put it, they’ll have to come up with something better.Yeah, it's a real beeyotch when you discover that your only big idea--fore'er enlarging government and its free-wheeling, spendaholic ways--is no longer sustainable, and that it's back to the drawing board so as to come up with another more salable paradigm.
But maybe you can’t blame them too much. The progressive left is floundering everywhere. Their best ideas are used up. The postwar institutions they worked so successfully to build are in big trouble. And they have no idea what to do about it...
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