Some 45 years ago, one of the era’s great wits and finest writers, the Englishman, Malcolm Muggeridge, wrote about the “Great Liberal Death Wish.” He saw the Death Wish at work everywhere. In the liberals’ appeasement of the Soviets, he saw it. In liberals’ extravagant extension of the welfare state, he saw it. For a certitude, he was right. The liberals of the day died off and were replaced by Margaret Thatcher in Britain and by Ronald Reagan in America. Not much was heard of them for years until Tony Blair and Bill Clinton came along, and both men’s liberalism was greatly truncated.

The Liberal Death Wish was Muggeridge’s true insight. By the 1980s, the Death Wish had only killed off the liberals. The rest of us escaped. The West managed to overcome the liberals’ instrumentalities of death. In the Cold War, President Ronald Reagan’s military buildup, contrary to those who said it was reckless and dangerous, managed to practically bankrupt the Soviet Union. The liberals had many a good laugh at his Star Wars project, but the Soviet generals were not laughing. They saw Star Wars as another futile expenditure on their road to ruin. As far as domestic policy goes, Western prosperity — in America goaded by tax cuts — allowed us to continue the extravagance of the welfare state, though just barely. The excessive costs of the project continued. Nicholas Eberstadt, in a thoughtful essay for The Weekly Standard, calculates that from the Great Society on, we have spent $1 trillion on anti-poverty programs. Yet, the poverty level is about where it was in 1966.