Courtney wonders whether the currently paralyzed liberal mass in America will eventually move towards the radical leftists, or the libertarian hawks.
I say: neither. The greatest mass of committed liberals (those who elected Bill Clinton, for example) is made up of baby boomers who are too set in their ways to ever escape into this dimension I affectionately call "reality". They will continue to cling to whatever scraps of power they can get ahold of, but their tenure as a mainstream ideology is finished.
The future of liberalism belongs to the largely libertarian youth. They don't really identify with the Republicans (too conservative on [some] social issues) or the Democrats (too economically socialist) and they're waiting in the wings, ready to come into their own over the next couple of decades.
The baby boomers will have their last hurrah as beneficiaries of the all-powerful AARP and then die. They will not go gently into that good night, and they will struggle vainly to drag the rest of us down with them. But they won't ever change. Vietnam is their eternal yesterday, and the USSR will always be their vision of a slightly-flawed paradise.
