Each great essayist has a quip about the two-party system. I. F. Stone wrote that it appears “like those magic black and white squares which look like a staircase at one moment and a checkerboard the next. Sometimes the two parties seem very distinct and sometimes they seem very much alike.” Gore Vidal put it more bluntly, arguing that the US is the only country in the world with one party of property and two right wings. Present frustrations, perhaps, are better invoked by Christopher Hitchens’ remark that the system only represents two cheeks of the same derriere.

Yet folk wisdom on the left suggests that it is easier to oppose the status quo with a Democrat rather then a Republican in power. It often seems impossible to imagine anything left of the Democratic Party when the majority of opposition seamlessly flows into anti-Republican rancour, as the “anti-war” movement aptly demonstrates. However, history also provides the opposite example. Franklin Roosevelt had Alf Landon; Lyndon Johnson had Barry Goldwater; today, Obama has . . . the Tea Party? Lesser-evil-ism has its distinctive place in American politics, yet with all the conservative saber-rattling, each was defeated by a landslide. The Tea Party appears no different.

Still the Left never fails to paint a hysterical image during Democratic presidencies. Reading some of the left-wing press (if it is even fair to describe it as such) you would think the Tea Party is some kind of fascist insurrection. The idea is as laughable as the image of Obama as a Keynan Socialist. But putting matters of subtlety aside, what this theatrical 1930s-style political drama seems to demonstrate is just how thoroughgoing the demobilized political atmosphere within the Left (as well as the Right) actually is. Each is groping in the dark for a conflict that has long since passed.