REDUCED TO IRRITABLE MENTAL GESTURES?

Pajamas Media columnist Stacey Lennox sees people crying with their mouths full.  "Progressives Have Gotten a Lot of What They Want in 2021—So Why Are They Still So Miserable?"

There's nothing new in that observation.  Here's a recollection from college years.

These were precisely the years of affirmative action, environmental protection, no-fault divorce, and legal abortion becoming national policy. The U.S. wound up its work in Vietnam in such a way as to ensure Vietcong and Khmer Rouge victories. First Vice President Agnew, and then President Nixon, self-destructed. The Equal Rights Amendment appeared on its way to ratification. But what impressed me in those days was how unhappy the Movement (always pronounced Mewve-ment) people remained despite all that.

They hit the wall then, although nobody could have anticipated how refreshing the correction would be, and they're going to hit the wall again.  Along the way, though, some people are going nuts.  "First, those who identify as 'liberal' or 'very liberal' report having had a medical provider tell them they had a mental health condition at significantly higher rates."  Perhaps the stress of keeping track of all the crises whilst walking on eggs for fear of being the next to be denounced makes you nuts.  "There is a never-ending list of problems to solve on the march to some version of utopia, which is entirely at odds with human nature. A connected world makes it feel like the issues of racial tension, inequality, and a so-called 'climate emergency' are bearing down on us with frequency and at a terrifying speed. The corporate media, progressive leaders, universities, celebrities, and now even corporations amplify these messages."

Josh Hammer appears to concur, not without some glee.

The unfortunate reality is that, in our modern political and media ecosystem, a permanently aggrieved, outraged, victimized mentality pays well. For the charlatans and hucksters of "anti-racism" and "critical race theory," therefore, conceding that a development such as Chauvin's conviction might indicate that America's criminal justice system is not "systemically racist" is unconscionable. Indeed, an entire industry has been established to perpetuate this rotten myth. "A post-racial America would be an unmitigated disaster" for this industry, David Azerrad recently wrote for Newsweek. "Instead of charging $6,000 an hour lecturing corporate America on its white privilege, Robin DiAngelo would be selling plastic jewelry on the Home Shopping Network."

The experiments against reality that were so popular from the middle 1960s into the 1970s are still with us, and reality is still implacable.

The Democratic takeover of the White House and Senate, far from being a triumph, is an illustration of just how politically feeble the left has become. It has no leaders more appealing than a seventy-eight-year-old Joe Biden. Who will replace him? There is no second Obama. No youthful leader in the House or Senate stands out. The next-generation figures who have been most touted by the media, such as Beto O’Rourke—the man who was supposed to turn Texas blue—have proved to have little actual support. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is certainly popular with the left, but she and her brand of politics hardly seem prepared to repeat the ballot-box feats of Obama or Biden, both of whom won by concealing the radicalism of their party.

There are two currents at work, each of which will require separate, longer posts to elaborate. First, some of the mascots of today's intersectional coalitions are at odds with each other, and some will be transient in any event. Second, the Democrats own the urban unrest and the shuttered schools and the corona tyranny, and there have to be pragmatists working to exploit those things.