David Goldman writes Why Liberals Don’t Care About Consequences in Pajama Media:

Excerpt:

Why don’t liberals seem to notice the catastrophic consequences of their policies, and why to they imagine imminent horrors where none exist? If you corner a liberal and point to a disaster that followed upon his policy, at very most he will say–with a tear in the eye and a quivering upper lip–”We did the right thing.”

It’s all about having done the right thing according to the dogma of the ersatz liberal religion. Liberalism has nothing whatsoever to do with policy and its real-world consequences. Instead of finding one’s salvation on the path of traditional religions, liberals look for salvation in a set of right opinions–on race, the environment, income distribution, gender, or whatever. Last month I called attention to Joseph Bottum’s new book An Anxious Age,which I reviewed at the American Interest. Jody argues that modern liberalism is the old Mainline Protestantism, and especially the old Social Gospel, turned into a secular cult. I wrote:

Today’s American liberalism, it is often remarked, amounts to a secular religion: it has its own sacred texts and taboos, Crusades and Inquisitions. The political correctness that undergirds it, meanwhile, can be traced back to the past century’s liberal Protestantism. Conservatives, of course, routinely scoff that liberals’ ersatz religion is inferior to the genuine article.

Mona Charen adds in The National Review, The Abandoned Poor:

The great advantage of being a liberal/progressive in America is that you are always judged on your intentions (or stated intentions) and not on results. While the pundits are swooning for Piketty and Warren, may we have even a moment’s pause to consider how well Obama’s brand of progressivism has done for the poor and middle class?

Poverty has increased under Mr. Obama’s watch. It ticked up during the recession, which is to be expected and was obviously not a result of Obama’s policies. But after the recession ended, and after the first much-vaunted “recovery summer” (2010) and then the second (2011), poverty continued to climb. The poverty rate has now been stuck at 15 percent for three consecutive years. This is a 50-year high. Enrollment in the food-stamp program (SNAP) has increased by 39 percent.

So there are more Americans living in poverty under President Obama than under his predecessor. If he were a Republican, this reality would be widely acknowledged. It’s better to be a Democrat.

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