Who's winning and losing?

Hey, Conservatives! Are You Winning or Losing? (Click on this link to read the original post)

Ed Kilgore - March 11, 2014, 6:00 AM EDT14924
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Progressives have had a lot of sport recently contrasting conservative attacks on Barack Obama as a vicious law-breaking tyrant in domestic affairs with their simultaneous attacks on him as a weak, trembling figure on the world scene. How could Vladimir Putin fail to notice that Obama has struck so much fear into the hearts of his enemies at home, who are cowering in their homes awaiting assaults from IRS agents and affianced gay people? Hard to say.
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But conservative self-contradiction about Obama's spine reflects a much broader and deeper ambivalence about whether they are winning or losing the great battle for America's culture and political system.
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We have certainly come a long way from the '70s, when Nixon and Agnew boasted of support from a "Silent Majority," or the '80s, when a "Moral Majority" helped Ronald Reagan win two consecutive landslides and also "win" (with an assist from Pope John Paul II) the Cold War. You could argue that conservative self-confidence persisted into the 1990s, when Bill Clinton was accused of winning by "stealing our ideas," and the long economic boom was credited by the Right to Reagan's policies. And the "our side's winning" claim definitely persisted through 2004, when the Iraq "victory" was often treated as a huge transition point in U.S. and world politics and Karl Rove dreamed of a permanent GOP majority.
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Since then, however, conservative self-confidence has regularly alternated or even coincided with defeatism and paranoia. There's always been an undertone of cultural despair in the post-Moral Majority Christian Right, where the legalized-abortion "regime" that has prevailed since Roe v. Wade occasionally tempts conservatives to compare the U.S. to Nazi Germany or the antebellum South. And even in times of conservative political ascendancy, claims that the Judiciary or academic elites were thwarting the achievement of conservative policy goals have been very common.