WASHINGTON — This column over the years has been interested in liberalism in a special way, as a coroner is interested in a corpse in a special way. Specifically, I have been interested in the pathologies that laid the patient low. What precisely has been the cause of death?

The coroner asks what made a robust fellow a corpse. Was it a remorseless cancer or a tragic accident? Was it Huntington’s disease or something else, possibly, simple alcoholism? In the case of the liberal, the cause of death was almost certainly a massive overindulgence. Simply stated, the liberals attempted too much. They even attempted to solve problems that were not conventionally understood as problems. After all, there were no plausible solutions, for instance, for the elimination poverty, which in America amounts to relative deprivation, not destitution. How can we solve a citizen’s relative deprivation?