Will Marshall and Peter Ross Range…two articles that irritate.

SNIP..”The pledge is the brainchild of the Campaign for America’s Future, a union-backed organization that is to Social Security and Medicare what the Inquisition was to medieval Christiandom. Its latter-day Torquemadas enforce New Deal-Great Society orthodoxy and ferret out heresy with religious zeal.

Their goal is simple: to preserve Social Security and Medicare as nearly as possible in their original 1935 and 1965 incarnations. And with the Pledge they encouraged Democrats to make this profoundly conservative, even reactionary, stance the centerpiece of their midterm election campaign.

Don’t believe all the post-election blather about Democrats losing because they had no message. In fact, party leaders could not have been more consistent or coherent, declaring over and over again that the election would be “a referendum on Social Security.” Egged on by pollsters and consultants, Democrats lambasted their GOP opponents for scheming to privatize the system. …”

“Listen to the numbers: Among these liberal faithful, only 1 percent are black compared to 22 percent in the rest of the party. Of those polled, 79 percent have college educations; in the Democratic Party, only 25 percent have college degrees. In this activist community, 29 percent have annual family incomes above $100,000; that’s nearly three times the percentage among Democrats as a whole. Fully 38 percent of the activists say they have no connection to organized religion, and don’t go to church. In the Democratic Party, that figure is only 10 percent.

I know these people. These are my people. I am, for all cultural and demographic purposes, one of them: white, well-educated, secular, a heavy news consumer, regular NPR listener, reader of political magazines, constantly online — the list goes on and on. The Pew poll is, in fact, a perfect description of the liberal ghetto, a kind of prosperous intellectual’s nirvana concentrated on the bluest flecks of the political map, in places like Madison and Chapel Hill (where I grew up) and Chevy Chase (where I live now).

In a former life, I was one of these people politically, too. For decades, I cast wistful looks at Europe, where the educated elites have been able, seemingly forever, to run things pretty much to their liking. (The death penalty, for example, is outlawed in France because the intelligentsia hates it; polls show that the general public favors it.) Not so in America, and that’s the challenge of life in the liberal ghetto.

By living to a large extent in a world of academic isolation and activist enclaves (41 percent have post-graduate degrees), the liberal wing is often alienated from many traditional Democratic constituencies — even the minorities that liberals have always claimed to work so hard for. It’s painfully ironic for an old civil rights liberal like me to note that the presence of more blacks in the Pew sample would have made it much more conservative, especially on issues like gay rights and church attendance.”

“Indeed, because of the good old days, the liberal wing’s instinct is to try to take over the party — to force its agenda on the other parts of the Democratic coalition — as we were able to do in the civil rights era. We did it again in 1972, nominating a presidential candidate who was the clear choice of liberal activists — and was rejected by voters in 49 states in the general election. ”