Liberals were a sorry spectacle this month, when they were forced to bare their teeth on the Planned Parenthood/Komen caper.  A real hegemonic ruling class at the peak of its power doesn't need to make threats.  Its natives don't even think about getting restless.

That, after all, is why liberals invented political correctness.  Every American pretends to sneer at political correctness, but every American knows better than to say anything politically incorrect, else he'll find the local liberal enforcer paying a visit, and everyone in America knows what the PC enforcer can do to you.  She can brand you with the liberal mark of Cain -- racist, sexist, homophobe -- and that could pitch you out of college or out of a job.  Political correctness, or Chicago politics, or any other protection racket works best when Mr. Big never has to send the thugs around to make explicit the crude intimidation of "nice little column you got there..."

But once the Raj's local District Officer gets afraid and tells Superintendent Ronald Merrick order a police lathi (or Indian police baton) charge, well, then the end of the empire is just a matter of time.

And that's where liberals are today after the lathi charge on Komen and the fake retreat on the Catholic health insurance blunder.  American women who don't want liberals legislating a culture of death over their families should know what's what.  Faithful Catholics who continue to vote for Democrats have to ask themselves: what was the point of "Dagger John" Hughes, first Catholic Archbishop of New York, teaching the WASPs the time of day a century and a half ago?  What was the point of building the Catholic school system to which the nuns devoted their lives, if today's Catholics just knuckle under to a new era of anti-Catholic bigotry?

And for what are people supporting the Democrats?  It's not as if they will have much loot to hand out -- not after the government's finances go Greek on us.

Even here in India (where I'm vacationing for three weeks) liberals are worrying about the future of government programs.  Sunil Khilnani writes in the Times of India about the problem of delivering policies over government's "last mile."  India's capital throbs with great ideas and policies, he writes, but nothing seems to change.

The core problem, in domain after domain of social policy, lies in the inability to bridge that last mile -- to translate intention, law and resources into outcomes that improve individual opportunities.  Take for instance the case of primary education. We have fine legislation in place that establishes a right to basic education. 

And yet, as we know from a series of recent reports, the gains across India's school-bound young in literacy and numeracy are shockingly poor and depressing. It's that last mile -- delivering the actual classroom lessons that improve learning and the capacity to learn -- which is the weakest link.

Now, Khilnani is a good, faithful liberal teaching at King's College in London, and there's a charming naiveté in his faith in "intention, law and resources."  

But if you want to deliver any service over the "last mile," you need a system that succeeds or fails on how it actually delivers to real citizens at the other end of that last mile.  In politics, the last mile is not the delivery of literacy and numeracy to schoolchildren, or even "reproductive health" to at-risk women; it is getting that last one percent to win the next election or buying the last vote to pass a bill. 

When he was running for president, Barack Obama used to talk a lot about his "faith tradition."  Well, I have a faith tradition, too.  It is called American exceptionalism, and I'll put it up against the president's faith tradition any day.  My faith tradition says that when America needed someone to clean up the Revolutionary War debts and put the national economy on a sound footing, it got Alexander Hamilton.  When it needed a president to end the suppurating wound of slavery, it got Abraham Lincoln.  When it needed a president to show liberals that their politics and their economics stank, it got Ronald Reagan.

Back in 1860, the South gagged on Lincoln the way that the rest of the nation gagged on the stench of gangrene from America's Original Sin.  In the 1980s liberals were the real amiable dunces who wouldn't read the verdict on Keynesianism and government dependency.  So now liberals are going to have to learn the hard way.  Just like the South did between 1860 and 1960.

Baring their teeth to the breast cancer folks and faking out the liberal Catholics ain't gonna save them.  When America needed a president to show that liberalism was past its sell-by date, it got Barack Obama.

Christopher Chantrill is a frequent contributor to American Thinker.  See his usgovernmentspending.com and also usgovernmentdebt.us.  At americanmanifesto.org he is blogging and writing An American Manifesto: Life After Liberalism.