Liberal: The Left Needs a New Playbook

“Despite ample opportunity to advance their cause, the left’s 21st century project has failed and failed badly,” argues The Liberal Patriot’s Ruy Teixeira.

Yes, “left parties, including the Democratic Party, have succeeded in building strong bases among the educated and professional classes,” thereby capturing “cultural production.”

But this prompted these parties, once “suspicious of uncontrolled immigration,” to welcome it. And that “has been a massive failure,” alienating the old working-class base.

Rather than centering “economic growth,” the 21st century left promotes “fighting climate change, reducing inequality, procedural justice, and protecting immigrants and identity groups,” while also embracing “techno-pessimism.”

The left “has squandered enormous political capital on a 21st project that has largely failed.” After 25 years, it’s “time to try something new.”

Libertarian: Education Dept. Should Close

Team Trump is “moving forward” on “shutting down the Department of Education,” announcing last week that its “core functions would be handed off to other agencies,” cheers Robby Soave at The Hill.

This “really spooks liberal Democrats, even though it’s far less radical an idea than they are willing to admit,” since “the Constitution does not grant the federal government any power to regulate education.”

Plus, “the department doesn’t employ any teachers, or manage any classrooms, or interact with students in any direct ways.”

It does “oversee grant money” for K-12, but “only about 10 percent” of what those schools receive.

It also runs “the student loan program,” which “needs to be scrapped anyway,” since we “have ample evidence that subsidizing student loans at the federal level is causing runaway tuition inflation.”

Conservative: Zoh’s Base Wants Campus Chaos

Zohran Mamdani “pledged to address ‘repression’ on campus,” citing professors fired “for the crime of expressing solidarity with the fight for Palestinian human rights,” observes Stu Smith at City Journal.

Now, “militant faculty unions” are “plotting” to pressure him “to reinstate four fired City University of New York professors.”

As mayor, “Mamdani will have no formal authority over CUNY’s hiring and firing decisions,” but still have major leverage.

“If Mamdani allows CUNY to rehire these professors, it could mean the return of the Student Intifada of spring 2024.”

The mayor -elect must ask himself if he plans to “spend political capital to reinstate professors who have become symbols of a deeply polarizing cause” or risk “alienating” the activists who “crowned him their champion.”

Iconoclast: Epstein Obsessives Channel QAnon

Though “confronted” by “giant issues,” “America’s political class” has “decided to obsess” over Jeffrey Epstein, fumes The New York Times’ David Brooks, largely because “it pays to focus on topics that are salacious, are easy to understand and allow you to offer self-confident opinions with no actual knowledge.”

The “QAnon mentality,” assuming “the American elite is totally evil and that American institutions are totally corrupt,” has infected political culture and left it “awash in distrust, cynicism, catastrophizing lies and conspiracymongering.”

Even supposedly enlightened Democrats like Rep. Ro Khanna now babble about the “Epstein class” of “rich and powerful men” who “abuse” young girls.

“Say what you will about our financial, educational, nonprofit and political elites, but they are not mass rapists.”

Terror beat: CAIR’s ‘Bucks’ for College Hamasniks

“The shocking barbarity of the Hamas-led Palestinian attacks on Israeli civilians” on Oct. 7, 2023 stirred the Council on American-Islamic Relations to drop “its mainstream, moderate façade,” thunders Commentary’s Seth Mandel, and embrace “grotesque, indefensible stuff” that led the Biden adminstration to condemn “the terror supporters.”

Now Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has designated CAIR, “an unindicted coconspirator in a 2007 terrorism-financing case, as a terrorist organization.”

New research reveals that “CAIR has been subsidizing pro-Hamas violence on campus,” while California CAIR affiliates “raised more than $100,000 in donations for campus radicals,” including “$20,000 in loans and scholarships to 20 student protestors from the ‘Champions of Justice Fund.’”

— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board