“Liberals are so politically inert that I don’t waste much time criticizing them. The Democratic Party, to the extent that it’s liberal, wins nationally because the GOP is a basket case. The hard left, which knows that Democrats are about as neoliberal as the GOP, lives in a nonsense world in which puppet-wielding protesters shape policy, or would if only they built more and bigger puppets. I know some very well meaning, otherwise intelligent antiwar leftists who are nonetheless the most politically infantile people you will ever meet. Politics is just magic to them. (Some of this comes of drawing the wrong lessons from Alinsky and Gramsci—wrong lessons the activist right is now busy committing to memory.)”