It’s either a brave or foolhardy writer who publishes a book entitled The Death of Liberalism only four months before America’s most left-wing president in history stands for re-election in a contest in which the bookmakers are giving odds for his victory at two-to-one. By the time most of you read this, the election will likely be over, and should Barack Obama have been reelected, this short but punchy polemic by Robert Tyrrell—the founder and editor of The American Spectator magazine—will certainly be held up by Leftists as an exemplar of premature right-wing triumphalism and hubris, all stemming from the “shellacking” that Obama received from the Tea Party in the midterm elections of 2010.

Tyrrell attempts to cover himself from such criticism by pointing out in his opening pages that it is “true liberalism: classical liberalism, or, as it is sometimes called, nineteen-century liberalism,” of which he is writing—the small-L liberalism that “stood for adherence to individual liberty, to tolerance, to reason and, for many of us, to empiricism.” This places it in exquisite counterpoise to the capital-L Liberalism of the modern Democratic party, which he accuses of having, “over the decades twisted all these values into absurdities.”

In this he is right, but it will not save him from having the title of this book thrown in his face should Obama win, not least because, as he himself argues, the capital-L Liberals have created what he calls a Kultursmog, which he defines as a “pollution