Ledeen on the demise of Leftism

Or, perhaps more accurately, the Leftism we know. Ledeen at NRO.

For the most part, the Left only wins elections nowadays when their candidates run on their opponents’ platform (Clinton and Blair) or when panic overwhelms the political process (Zapatero and Schroeder). Under normal circumstances, leftists running as leftists rarely win, proving that their ideology — the ideology that dominated political and intellectual debate for most of the last century — is spent. When their ideas were in vogue, leftist advocates took electoral defeat in stride, as they were confident that their vision was far more popular — because far more accurate — than their opponents’ view of the world. History and logic were on their side. But no more. Incoherent rage and unbridled personal attacks on the winners are sure signs of a failed vision.

True enough, but he's on shaky ground here:

The success of America was thus a devastating blow to the Left. It wasn’t supposed to happen. And American success was particularly galling because it came at the expense of Europe itself, and of the embodiment of the Left’s most utopian dream: the Soviet Union. Even those Leftists who had been outspokenly critical of Stalin’s "excesses" could not forgive America for bringing down the Soviet Empire, and becoming the world’s hyperpower.

As Marx and Hegel would have understood, the first signs of hysterical anti-Americanism on the Left accompanied the presidency of Ronald Reagan. The resurgence of American economic power and the defeat of the Soviets exposed the failure of the Left to keep pace with the transformation of the world. The New York intellectual who proclaimed her astonishment at Reagan’s election by saying, "I don’t know a single person who voted for him," well described the dialectical process by which an entire set of ideas was passing into history.

Passing into history? Not so sure about that. I'm not lettin my guard down for one minute.

Incoherent rage and unbridled personal attacks on the winners are sure signs of a failed vision.

Something to remember then, when we're not in charge.