Karnick's piece, and I highly recommend reading it in full, is in equal measures insightful and depressing. It's full of great passages. This was one I liked that Ben did not cite:

Like the Tea Party movement, the “unprecedented level of activism and engagement among Americans” in opposition to Obamacare is evidence of a long-delayed recognition by much of the public that what’s wrong with progressivism is not the particular policies it espouses but its assumption that rule by elites is better than freedom of choice.

I don't quite share what I read as Karnick's optimism here that the broader public is now recognizing "what's wrong with progressivism" in a broad sense. Time will tell, however, and I certainly hope he's right. Yet quotes like this one in the wake of ObamaCare's passage, which has been at the top of Drudge all day, must certainly be disheartening to those who advocate a return to a culture that values individual freedom and liberty over a phony sense of "security" promised by the state.

"It's just going to be like Christmas," said DeCarlo Flythe, who lost health coverage for his family when he was laid off almost three years ago. "It's going to be great. You know, no worries (about) the bills. We are going to go ahead and pay our co-pay and be alright."

A large and unhealthy percentage of modern American society believes in Santa Claus after all — and that he hails not from the North Pole, but from Washington.

And this business of "wresting control of the public schools from the hands of the progressive myrmidons who have debauched it" is going to be a long hard struggle. More likely than not, it's too late. The decades-long control of academia by the left — from primary schools to the universities — would take generations to reverse. And can a new wave of defenders of traditional values, free-market capitalism, individual liberty and the Founders' constitutional order rise up to take its place when they are taught the doctrine of the left from Kindergarten to grad school?

Indeed, the answer is to not simply despair and give up. But look at the Hellfire that rained down from our dominant media elite culture on the Texas Board of Education when it tried to insert some ideological balance in the state's curriculum. From what I could tell, the Board did not go through excising all the pillars of liberal thought or erasing from history long-admired heroes to the progressive movement, but merely sought to add some ideological balance.

The New York Times — in a critical, almost sneering article — was nonetheless factually obligated to report that the Board made but "dozens of minor changes." For this tiny push-back at liberal doctrine, the Board has been assailed by the academic establishment and characterized by the left as Bible-thumping, racist, Creationist morons.

Such battles are necessary, but let's remember that it will be enormously difficult, loud and rhetorically bloody.