Kevin Drum, in a smart post on how conservatism now bears a resemblance to liberalism of the late ’70s:

The great liberal wave that lasted from the 30s through the 70s was fundamentally based on three things: middle class wage growth, the construction of a social safety net, and the individual rights revolution. Its other pathologies aside, liberalism’s big problem by the end of the 70s was that it had essentially won most of these battles. Not all of them. No movement ever wins all its battles. But once you win two-thirds of them, it’s hard to sustain the kind of momentum it takes to win the rest.

Conservatives are in the same boat today, except worse. Modern movement conservatism was also fundamentally based on three things: low taxes, anti-communism, and social traditionalism. (”Small government” was never more than a fig leaf.) Today communism is gone (and Islamofascism has failed to rally the troops in the same way), taxes literally can’t be lowered any more, and sex-and-gender fundamentalism has become an albatross that’s rapidly producing a generation of young voters more repelled by conservatism than any generation since World War II. Even in the late 70s, there were plenty of traditionally liberal goals still to be fought for. Not enough to build a winning coalition around, but still something. Modern conservatives don’t even have that. The culture war is pretty much all they have left, and its clock has run out.

The pendulum always swings, and while it’s unquestionably swinging away from conservativsm, the question is what it’s swinging towards. The basic assumption seems to be that the new liberalism will somehow be the same as the old liberalism - that we’ll just haul out FDR, dust him off, and there you go. But Obama belies that, I think. Hard to put a finger just yet on what the new liberalism represents, but it will be different - just as its candidate is different than what came before.