Why political movements die

I've long maintained that the liberal movement in America fell victim to a combination of its own wild success (minority rights) and clear failure (socialist economics). Now here's Fareed Zakaria with a similar autopsy of the conservative movement. He writes:

Conservatism grew powerful in the 1970s and 1980s because it proposed solutions appropriate to the problems of the age—a time when socialism was still a serious economic idea, when marginal tax rates reached 70 percent, and when the government regulated the price of oil and natural gas, interest rates on checking accounts and the number of television channels. The culture seemed under attack by a radical fringe. It was an age of stagflation and crime at home, as well as defeat and retreat abroad. Into this landscape came Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, bearing a set of ideas about how to fix the world. Over the next three decades, most of their policies were tried. Many worked. Others didn't, but in any event, time passed and the world changed profoundly. Today, as Frum writes, "after three decades of tax cutting, most Americans no longer pay very much income tax." Inflation has been tamed, the economy does not seem overregulated to most, and crime is not at the forefront of people's consciousness. The culture has proved robust, and has in fact been enriched and broadened by its diversity. Abroad, the cold war is won and America sits atop an increasingly capitalist world. Whatever our problems, an even bigger military and more unilateralism are not seen as the solution.

Today's world has a different set of problems. A robust economy has not lifted the median wages of Americans by much. Most workers are insecure about health care, and most corporations are unnerved by its rising costs. Globalization is seen as a threat, bringing fierce competition from dozens of countries. The danger of Islamic militancy remains real and lasting, but few Americans believe they understand the phenomenon or know how best to combat it. They see our addiction to oil and the degradation of the environment as real dangers to a stable and successful future...In this context, conservative slogans sound weirdly anachronistic, like watching an old TV show from ... well, from the 1970s. [emphasis mine]

Exactly right. Movements arise in response to the problems of their time. Then they build momentum and become establishments - people become vested in the power structure, and the movement is unable to adapt to address the issues of the next age. And then a new movement arises to displace it, and so on.

There's a big important lesson in this for liberals: A new liberal majority will not be built by fighting the battles of the past. The pendulum is not going to "swing back" to the liberalism of the 1960s, or that of the 1900s. We need entirely new stuff.

To our credit, I think we're coming up with a bit of new stuff, or at least new issues to address. Economic insecurity and oil dependence have emerged as big themes. But we need more. We need a coherent approach to foreign policy (I believe we should focus on "building national prestige"). We need a new message about the role of the state in society (I think we should concentrate on public investment). There's a lot of work still to be done in building the new liberalism.