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American left-wingers aren’t doing much better

American left-wingers aren’t doing much better. Four years after Hillary Clinton defied all predictions and lost to the least qualified, and possibly most offensive, person ever to occupy the Oval Office, Democrats look entirely capable of doing so again. Seven potential candidates were on stage for the most recent Democratic party nomination debate, and if any of them has lit a fire under American voters, it’s not obvious.

What’s odd is that progressives keep losing ground to opponents from a movement many consider to be in a state of crisis. When Andrew Scheer announced he’d give up the Conservative leadership it was accompanied by complaints he wasn’t much of a conservative anyway, unless conservatism means an ability to attract angry white males from rural and Western ridings. Boris Johnson, the lucky beneficiary of Corbyn’s deficiencies, was deemed wholly unsatisfactory by many in his own party — a buffoonish, unreliable, untrustworthy U.K. version of Donald Trump. And no one would consider Trump an authentic representative of conservatism or anything else, other than a deep, abiding passion for himself.

So how do people who identify themselves with a term that reflects their sense of moral superiority manage to keep losing ground to people like Trump, Johnson and Scheer (who, after all, beat Justin Trudeau’s Liberals in the popular vote)?

Photo by Kirsty Wigglesworth/Pool via Reuters

It could be that others don’t hold them in as high regard as they do themselves. It gets grating being preached at by people convinced they’re not only smarter, but better than others. Hillary Clinton typified liberal conceit when she dismissed Trump supporters as “a basket of deplorables.” She could have let voters form their own opinion of her opponent’s many conspicuous flaws, but couldn’t resist the opportunity to strut her magnificence over ordinary Americans and such lesser folk, many of whom don’t own homes on Martha’s Vineyard. Similarly, Corbyn’s efforts to convince voters of the virtue of socialist values fared poorly coming from a man named anti-Semite of the year by the Simon Wiesenthal Center.