These are dark times for American liberalism. Health care reform is popularly reviled. Barack Obama’s reelection is in doubt. And as I write this, Democrats, under the aegis of debt-ceiling talks with Republicans, appear on the brink of ratifying a savage attack on the welfare state. It seems hard to remember now, but less than three years ago the 2008 election had liberals convinced that America was on the verge of a historic progressive revival. What went wrong?

In a mechanical sense, the economy — more precisely, the Little Depression we are now living through — is at the center of the trouble. But that same bad economy is what catapulted the Democrats into power in the first place, handing them control of both houses of Congress, the presidency, and a brief filibuster-proof Senate supermajority for the first time in thirty years.; liberal optimism, battered and bruised from Bush-era despondency, soared. What’s good for the goose is good for the gander: if the liberal fall can be blamed on a fickle business cycle, the original liberal rise, too, must be put down to an economic fluke.

Already one can glimpse the emergence of a liberal narrative of consolation, a sort of comforting theodicy for the politically dispossessed; a story that can explain the cruel whims of the political gods to suffering liberal humanity. If liberalism appears to wobble on the edge of failure, the fault may arise not from anything liberals have done or have failed to do, but if anything from their own moral blamelessness: Liberalism, in this narrative, is faltering because its enlightened political project has run into a wall of blind, irrational racism.