The short answer to the question in the headline is yes. Yes, they are. How Liberals got there from their 60’s roots is the subject of an article in the Wall StreetJournal by Shelby Steele titled The Exhaustion of American Liberalism. He is a bit kinder in his pronouncement, but we see connecting lines in his thesis to the foundation and expansions of the disconnected political class explored in other works like Angelo Codevilla’s Ruling Class v. Country Class and The Flight 93 Election by Publius Decius Mus.
We are speaking of people with little or no connection to any reality outside the political worldview they have constructed for themselves and the future it pretends. A class whose vitriolic intolerance for anyone who objects to being ruled in this way has taken on a cartoon-like madness.
“The recent flurry of marches, demonstrations and even riots, along with the Democratic Party’s spiteful reaction to the Trump presidency, exposes what modern liberalism has become: a politics shrouded in pathos. Unlike the civil-rights movement of the 1950s and ’60s, when protesters wore their Sunday best and carried themselves with heroic dignity, today’s liberal marches are marked by incoherence and downright lunacy—hats designed to evoke sexual organs, poems that scream in anger yet have no point to make, and an hysterical anti-Americanism.
He goes on to explain that white guilt is the bugbear of being compared to “America’s old bigotries.”
To be stigmatized as a fellow traveler with any of these bigotries is to be utterly stripped of moral authority and made into a pariah. The terror of this, of having “no name in the street” as the Bible puts it, pressures whites to act guiltily even when they feel no actual guilt. White guilt is a mock guilt, a pretense of real guilt, a shallow etiquette of empathy, pity and regret. It is also the heart and soul of contemporary liberalism. This liberalism is the politics given to us by white guilt, and it shares white guilt’s central corruption. It is not real liberalism, in the classic sense. It is a mock liberalism. Freedom is not its raison d’être; moral authority is.
Mr. Steele makes a great many potent observations in this piece, not the least of which is,
Let’s stipulate that, given our history, this liberalism is understandable. But American liberalism never acknowledged that it was about white esteem rather than minority accomplishment. Four thousand shootings in Chicago last year, and the mayor announces that his will be a sanctuary city. This is moral esteem over reality; the self-congratulation of idealism. Liberalism is exhausted because it has become a corruption.
Shelby Steele is the author of the Book, White Guilt.
Mr. Steele speaking with Tucker Carlson about this article.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c2-uFbQjBpg