Another View of Liberal Strategy

In a recent post, I discussed how well liberals can see why the conservative position has been successful while, at the same time, not having a cluse about why their own position has grown so weak. Again, the principle is that you cannot see your own position clearly without mirroring yourself in outsider's eyes. Here is another article about the state of the "liberal project" (as liberals like to call it) by Paul Starr also of The American Prospect. In reading it, I was struck how weird it was that the same magazine would publish within a week two articles that were virtually identical in theme, message, tone, and misconceptions. As someone who would like to see the Democrat party return as a positive force in politics, this inbred thinking is very depressing. In discussing the founding of the magazine as a fountainhead of liberal thought, the author hits the nail on the head:
No doubt it takes an extravagant self-regard for a group of writers, especially for a small magazine, to imagine that they can influence the course of politics and intellectual debate.
This "extravagant self-regard" is the foundation of modern liberalism. It is why liberalism has distanced itself from the regular folks. Indeed, these people see themselves as the solution to the problems of liberalism when they are really the cause of those problems. The author sees the source of those problems elsewhere. Discussing the loss of Congress, the presidency, and more state governments:
Beneath those losses are historic changes, including the reaction against the equal-rights revolutions on behalf of blacks, women, and gays, the decline of the unions, and the integration of conservative churches into the Republican Party.
The root cause of these trends was the "liberal project" itself. The "equality" movement, which regular folks supported, became a "special rights" movement, which most people could not support. The "decline of the unions" came from unions putting their host industries out of business and then moving primarily to the public sector. The conservative religious moved to the Republican Party because the Democrat Party became the champion of of legalized drug use, sexual "liberation" (promiscuity), and the prohibition of the expression of traditional moral values in the public square. Liberal elitists cannot confront these underlying causes. Instead they see power arising from power itself, not the desires of the common folks for a certain type of civil society:
For decades Democrats used the advantages of incumbency to offset Republican business support; now the Republicans have both, and a party system that was roughly balanced has passed a tipping point.
In other words, Democratic power came from holding political office and Republican from the support of business interests. However "holding office" comes from doing things that regular folks see in their best interests. The author recognizes this:
Some say the Democrats need only the courage of their convictions to tap a deep well of progressive sentiment, but if there is a latent national majority for that kind of pure and unadulterated liberal politics, it has kept itself well hidden for a long time.
The author then goes on to admit that liberalism is founded on political power, that the liberal elite doesn't really understand why it no longer has that power, but that they do have to earn it back by winning over regular folks:
The central aims of American liberalism remain what they have always been: to realize the ideals of liberty and equality in a prosperous and secure nation. But the project is different for a liberalism cut off from power. Whatever the cause of liberals’ loss of public confidence, they have to earn it back by showing how liberal ideas make sense for America.
The article then goes on to propose that liberals can get back into power by courting younger voters by offering them the benefits of government redistributing wealth in their direction rather than just redistributing wealth to the old. The idea that the regular folks might not like the whole idea of having elites choose the winners and losers in society never occurs to them.