In a recent article at the Wall Street Journal, columnist Daniel Henninger posed this question:
Surveying the fall in support for the governments of Barack Obama, New York City’s progressive Mayor Bill de Blasio and France’s Socialist President François Hollande, a diagnosis of the current crisis begins to emerge: The political left can win elections but it’s unable to govern.Once in office, the left stumbles from fiasco to fiasco. ObamaCare, enacted without a single vote from the opposition party, is an impossible labyrinth of endless complexity. Bill de Blasio’s war on charter schools degenerated into an unseemly attack on poor New York minority children. François Hollande’s first act in 2012, like a character in a medieval fable, was to order that more tax revenue be squeezed from the French turnips.Mr. Obama’s approval rating is about 43%, Mr. de Blasio’s has sunk to 45% after just two months in office, and Mr. Hollande hit the lowest approvals ever recorded in the modern French presidency. The left inevitably says their leaders failed them. The failure looks self-inflicted.
Mr. Henninger is a very smart man and although I’m probably not qualified to do so, I will attempt to answer his question.
The reason the left can’t govern is because the left has no interest in governance. The left is, was and always will be interested in only one thing; activism.
Obama is an activist president. The judges Obama has appointed to the United States Supreme Court are activist judges. The vast majority of media figures who support Obama and the Democratic Party are activist journalists. Obama’s base is made up almost entirely of activist voters.
It’s impossible to effectively govern a nation if you view it as fundamentally flawed. Leftists have won a number of elections in recent years but they can’t run the government while they’re holding protest signs against the country they were elected to serve.
Featured image via the Wall Street Journal.
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