Early 2014 will be viewed historically as the period when most of the American left’s bubbles detached themselves completely from reality and wafted off to Unicornland.

Everyone, without exception, lives in a bubble, an area of individual consciousness made up of education, experience, and worldview.  These bubbles naturally differ due to intelligence, lifestyle, and endless other factors. An Einstein’s bubble may be nearly coterminous with the walls of the universe itself; an imbecile’s may consist of little more than regular meals, a warm place to sit, and the occasional kind word.

In the modern era it has become fashionable to create and fully upholster one’s own bubble out of the rag ends of various ideologies, fads, and daydreams. To in effect attempt to establish an individual reality, more often than not at odds with the world as it actually exists. Such efforts quickly come up against individual limitations, both intellectual and emotional, but that doesn’t seem to discourage people.

Nowhere has this impulse been greater than as involves politics, and nowhere has it been more fervent than on the left. Leftism is a hyperbubble in and of itself, consisting of nearly as many sub-bubbles as there are leftists (it has long been understood that leftism is essentially the politicization of petty personal grievances). Living in leftist bubbles -- whether feminist, racial, academic, communist, or what have you -- amounts to a way of life for millions of Americans.

But left-wing intellectual bubbles have been cold, desolate places since the Reagan era. With the catastrophe of the Great Society, the undeniable success of Reaganism, and at last the collapse of the USSR, leftist illusions were shattered, leaving little but blasted dreams and bitterness,  expressed as PC and related programs that amounted to little more than gestures of revenge.

Then came Obama, who brought it all back to life again.

All of it -- the dream of a green economy, the dream of universal pacifism, of a degraded and defeated United States, of a middle class subservient to its intellectual betters, of a universal nanny state, of the conviction that the leftist delusion is intertwined with the basic nature of reality itself. It became once more possible to believe in the coming socialist dawn that had motivated leftists since 1917.

This is the secret of Obama’s appeal, and the explanation of the long-pondered mystery of what he’s really up to, what his actual goal is. The truth is, there is no goal. Or rather, the goal, the plan, involves simply lighting up all those bereft and chilly bubbles abiding in major urban areas, college towns, and fringes along each coast. That is the ultimate goal, and there is nothing coherent or comprehensible beyond it. A fundamentally stupid man, one who time and again has demonstrated complete lack of understanding of the world as it exists, Obama is as enrapt with illusion as his followers. (Oh, I’ll grant him a kind of feral cleverness, but any con artist has that.)  Obama exists in his own bubble, in no way more valid than that of any other American leftist.

To examine a few examples, we’ll start with the military illusion -- namely, that it is U.S. power that causes all wars. This is derived quite simply from Marxist-Leninist theory: wars are a byproduct of “capitalism.” The U.S., as the premier “capitalist” state, is ipso facto, the cause of war. 

This is the primum mobile of the modern American left, the driver of such people as Michael Moore, Oliver Stone, and Medea Benjamin. There is a list that circulates throughout the left, consisting of the countries “invaded” by the U.S. in the 20th century. The list includes such nations as France, the Netherlands, Belgium, and the Philippines in 1944. The fact that most leftists have no idea what was going in 1944 is beside the point. Those countries were invaded, and the U.S. done it. End of story. The same is true of Grenada, Kuwait, and Iraq in later years.

So Obama’s debasing of the U.S. military was one of the most welcome elements of his ascension to office (long with the introduction of PC into the military, and enforcing feminist and racist dogma).   Iraq and Afghanistan have been abandoned, deployment of missile defenses in Central Europe was cancelled, Obama has devoted himself to “leading from behind,” with results more disastrous than any since the 60s. The oafish Chuck Hagel was appointed secretary of defense, announcing recently that the Army would be cut to pre-WW II level (in the midst of ongoing hostilities), the Tomahawk and Hellfire missiles -- the most successful guided missiles in the arsenal of any nation in history -- are to cease production, not to mention contemptuous cuts in military benefits that are somehow not matched by any similar cuts for public-sector unions.

The outcome has been exactly the opposite of left-wing expectations. Collapse of public order in Iraq is the most trivial result. Far more important is wholesale descent into chaos along the North African littoral, a revanchist Russia invading Georgia and Ukraine, still-vague threats from China, and an aggressive and defiant Shi’ite Iran completing its quest for nuclear weapons.

It’s no coincidence that the invasion of Crimea followed only two days after the Hagel’s announcement of deeper military cuts. More recently we have seen the brazen and repeated buzzing of an American warship in international waters. Eastern Ukraine may well have been seized by the time you read this. Such incidents will occur at least once a month or more often from now until Obama leaves office. He can’t do anything about them because he has stripped the country of necessary assets. (e.g., only a single carrier battle group is now on call. The rest are either committed or on “stretched” refitting -- that is, beached to save money.) Furthermore, any attempted ripostes on his part would inevitably fail, because not a single one of his advisors -- Valerie Jarrett, John Kerry, Susan Rice, Hagel, Samantha Power, and go on as long as you like, is capable of any strategic insight or grasp of complex planning. Benghazi revealed as much.

Obama has unleashed the hounds of hell across vast swaths of the globe. And what is the left-wing response? There isn’t one. There isn’t one because none of this is happening. Not a single element of it has penetrated into the bubbles.

Another leftist delusion is that Republicans are constantly out to put in place what is termed a “surveillance state,” with the citizenry under constant observation and the government operating in total secrecy, beyond control by democratic institutions. Recall the squealing about the Bush administration’s very limited attempts to track terrorists though foreign phone calls and financial transactions. The revelations of the Mephistophelian Edward Snowden (“he that wills forever evil, and does forever good”) have exposed precisely such a surveillance state, with not a single Republican on deck. Obama has decreed operations orders of magnitude larger than any yet seen, directed at American citizens, fully in defiance of the 4th Amendment and two centuries of government practice.

Now we have Dianne Feinstein complaining about CIA surveillance of Congress on her way to the shuffleboard court. The IRS harassing individuals and organizations that just happen to oppose the government while challenging Congress to do anything about it. Eric Holder insulting Congressmen to their faces. Even leftists ranging from Glenn Greenwald to Jonathan Turley have expressed serious alarm.

But the left as a whole? It still hasn’t penetrated

ObamaCare speaks for itself, with Kathleen Sebelius let go just as the program achieved “success” by eking out , at the last minute, just over the number required to keep itself going. Now as the system collapses in much the same fashion as an over-massive star transforming itself into a black hole, Kathleen can be blamed for everything -- the failed website, lack of planning, the upcoming spate of deaths, and letting O down. But she’s lucky -- in other times and other nations she would be picked up late at night in an unmarked, unnumbered car and driven off into oblivion. Here she simply has to go back to Kansas.

On to “climate change.” The major impetus behind the warming hoax has been to justify government control more far-reaching than any in history, overseeing every last aspect of life down to how many squares of toilet paper are allowed.  Which is why we have the UN, John Kerry, and Obama himself doubling down on the warming fantasy even as the country emerges from the coldest winter since records were first kept, with temperatures in the 20s persisting even into the third week of April. Much has been made concerning Geoffrey Parker’s Global Crisis, a book detailing the effects of climate change in the 17th century, without any mention that the book deals with global cooling. We appear to be headed into another such epoch. What this means is interesting times as marginal nations go to wall and the current international modus vivendi collapses under the impact of failing crops, less food, and waves of starving refugees stumbling across entire continents. But billions will be spent and prizes handed out for another half-century to maintain the warming illusion, while absolutely nothing is done to prepare for universal cooling.

The best way to undermine leftism is to let it operate for awhile. Expose the country at large to the nightmare realities of life under a Lyndon Johnson, a Jimmy Carter, or an Obama, and you will inoculate the citizenry for a generation to come.

This is occurring. We are seeing the utter collapse of the leftism program as it exists in the U.S., a collapse merely intensified and sped up by the fact that the Messiah has cut every corner and broken every rule of American governance. His abuse of pen and phone have so far produced only chaos. There is no reason to believe the next two years will be any different.

And all those bubbles?  They’ll begin to dim and cool down once again. The inhabitants -- the millions of true-believing Birkenstock wearers across the country -- will attempt to keep their spirits up with tales of betrayal and racism, but it won’t last. Eventually they will reach the same state they were in before Obama ever appeared. There they will remain, because the one thing Obama will have done is reinforce the legend of a leftist rebirth. These people will now never emerge into a real America. Instead they will wait for the appearance of a true messiah, sleeping until Der Tag in the same manner as Charlemagne or Barbarossa.

As for conservatives, this means opportunity -- if they can overcome their own fantasies and delusions, fortunately not as universal and all-consuming as those of the left. But that will wait for another time.