Poor Lefts Make A Right or So Where Is The Liberal Majority In Congress, Then?

It depends on what you mean by "the left".

But before we get into that, it is an objective fact that "the left" has not been doing it right or we would not be working on our sixth decade of being in the political wilderness after the high tide mark of 1964-65.   If, as we like to believe, our policies are so much better for the large majority of The People, it would have had to have taken some massively stupid mistakes on the part of leftists to have not sold them.  I think the key stupidity was buying into the sucker lines of the free-speech industry which favored our opponents, who just happened to own the largest, most influential organs of the media.  Allowing them the freedom to lie with impunity in 1964, in the name of "free speech" would have been enough to sink the left, but it was hardly the only rope we gave to them to hang us with.   The snobs of academia, regional elites, the entertainment industry, etc. did some of the rest of it but even those two aren't the full story of the hubris that sank the left.   If our basic ideas are so superior to those of our political opponents, benefiting the most people, it would have had to take our own massive folly to have kept it from being enacted.   Perhaps that is to be expected of any left which allows its leadership to be drawn from the academic elite instead of arising from those who are closer to the people whose approval we need to do anything. 

Now, if by "the left" you mean the real left which made of struggling for equality, justice - especially economic justice - preserving the biological basis of life, etc. then the fact that it has been out of any effective power for a half-century means that it's doing most things wrong.   Given that a majority of people in the United States would materially benefit from enacting the program of that left, the fact that we can't get a majority of voters to enthusiastically support it is about as reliable a message as reality can provide that what "the left" has been doing has been all wrong.   

I don't think the real left is wrong in its goals, it has been seriously wrong in its advocacy for some of the worst phony substitutes and pantomimes purported to be "left" which never would have produced anything like those goals - here or in their imaginary foreign paradises - but which discredited the real left. 

In trying to figure out what "the left" as generally discussed has been doing that prevents us from convincing an effective majority of voters to vote for us, a lot of that is the doing of "the left" but most of that left is not the left I talked about in the last paragraph.  It is the pseudo-liberal, libertarian "left" which has produced the policies and proclamations that a. undermine the possibility of defeating corporate oligarchy, things like deregulation of the media, allowing the media to lie with impunity, handing over the culture to pornographers.... b. insult and alienate blue collar people, people in different regions of the country for the gratification of the elites who are, actually, libertarians, not liberals when it comes right down to it.

The real left is the left with the program of traditional American style liberalism which is not the same in ends or in means as the libertarian entity that is sold as "liberalism."   American style liberalism is the liberalism which built up the success that libertarian style "liberalism" squandered.   The part of that done on behalf of white-collar, mostly script scribbling Communists and other such dolts over much of the last century was some of the most effective means of discrediting the real left that, in fact, happened.  You can substitute atheism for that today, as atheism was, actually, what most of them really cared and care about, in the end.  After the fad ends, as I think it already is, that will cost the real left unless it distances itself from it.  Hollywood, show biz, those people have cost the real left entirely more than they ever promised to deliver.  Some of the daffier parts of academia, as well. The real left will not be found or sold through those white collar cul de sacs.  It will have to come from the people who know that the first and foremost thing most people get is when someone insults them and condescends to them and ridicules them.  

Effective leaders of the left will have to understand the apparently shocking and little known fact that you can't get people to vote for and with you while you are insulting them.  That is something that far too much of the would-be leadership of the left can't see in the glare from their self proclaimed brilliance.  

It won't come from people who seek reality in the sciency sounding divination of George Lakoff  OR Steven Pinker or their ilk.  It most certainly won't come from people who believe in memes.   Memes are an invention of academic biological determinism which cannot but destroy real liberalism, in the end.   And they don't exit.

Update:   So, who am I supposed to believe a bunch of blog flies or the Agassiz Professor of Zoology, Professor of Biology, and Professor of Population Science?   

Sociobiology, the evolutionary theory of human nature, is both
determinist and reductionist in common with other aspects of biological
determinist thought. The reductionism of sociobiology lies
in the ontological priority it gives to the individual over society
and over the species as a whole. If people behave in a certain
way, say they are entrepreneurial, it is because each person, individually,
possesses an intrinsic property of entrepreneurship.
Individual entrepreneurs create an entrepreneurial society, not the
other way round. Moreover, the entrepreneurial tendency is coded
in the genes of which we are the ineluctable product. No matter
how hard we try we cannot escape the dictates of our genes. The
extreme determinism of biological human nature theory, together
with its mechanical reduction of social organization to the properties
of the DNA molecules possessed by individual human beings,
is epitomized by Richard Dawkins’ description of people in The
Selfish Gene as “lumbering robots” controlled by their genes “body
and mind.” The political implications of this determinism are that
nothing significant in human society can be changed. So, in specu- 
lating about the future of social relations between the sexes,
E. O. Wilson predicts that “the genetic bias is intense enough to
cause a substantial division of labor even in the most free and most
egalitarian of future societies. . . .Even with identical education and
equal access to all professions, men are likely to continue to play a

disproportionate role in political life, business and sciences.” 

Richard Lewontin: Biological Determinism:  Tanner Lecture on Human Values, 1982

For your information, Richard Dawkins invented memes to plug up one of the many massive holes in his biological determinism in The Selfish Gene.  Other than a few idiots like Daniel Dennett and Susan Blackmore, no one was too impressed with the idea and I don't think Dawkins talked about it much after a while.  He's made a sort of sub-career denying he's said things that he said even as he still says them.