Jonah Goldberg noticed something during the Democratic presidential debate:

But of course Hillary Clinton won the debate! Her opponents were like Mohammed, Jagdish, Sidney, and Clayton from Animal House. It was like a line-up at the station house where all the other suspects are cops in uniform, except for Hillary. …

I’m being unkind to Jim Webb, who was kind of fascinating and awesome. He seemed almost like a different species than [Lincoln] Chafee. I loved Webb’s last line about his real enemy being the guy who threw a grenade at him in Vietnam for all the reasons David French gives here. (Still, I keep using my Ron Burgundy voice to say, “Jim killed a guy!”) Webb’s a great reminder that serious men once found a home in the Democratic party.

But he has no chance of getting the nomination. None of them do, really — with the possible exception of Bernie Sanders. But Sanders is like Colonel Nicholson in Bridge on the River Kwai; he’s sticking to a principle in spite of what is actually required of him. At some point he’s going to look over his shoulder at the Clinton locomotive barreling down the tracks and say, “My God, what have I done?”

That said, for what it’s worth, I don’t think Sanders meant to give a gift to Hillary on the e-mail controversy by saying he was “sick and tired of hearing about [her] damn e-mails.” I’m told that on the stump he blames Clinton for her poor judgment, which made the scandal possible. He may have just flubbed the line. Or it may have been smart politics, as I wrote here and here:

That’s one reason why Sanders wasn’t as foolish as some think for his “gift” on the e-mail scandal. Many Democrats now reflexively take the view that if Republicans or Fox News think something is bad, then it must be an illegitimate issue. Lending even rhetorical aid and comfort to the enemy is counted as “unprogressive” even on issues that progressives should be horrified by. The Clinton Foundation’s incestuous cronyism should horrify the Elizabeth Warren wing of the Democratic party. But saying so would be seen as using “right-wing talking points” so they stay mum on the issue. The same people who freaked out over the leaking of Valerie Plame’s identity should properly want Clinton indicted for what she did with her e-mail. But if the Republicans think so too, it must not be so.

Clinton did well. She’s had a lot of experience in these things. But to the extent she shined, it was because the competition was so pathetic. Put me out on the basketball court with a bunch of second graders and I will go Dikembe Mutombo on their asses. Boom! “Not in my house, Timmy!” I’d be like Billy Madison playing dodgeball.

And then there’s the substance. I guess a more meaningful cause for my resentment is that the debate was a joyless ass ache of a reminder of what liberalism really is. Bernie Sanders thinks you can pay for an 18 trillion dollar expansion of the welfare state — to make it align with a Denmark that doesn’t actually exist — simply by taxing “the billionaire class.” There are 536 billionaires in America. Even if you confiscated everything they had — which, by the way, would surely destroy the American economy by triggering the greatest round of capital flight in human history and amount to government seizure of countless businesses — it wouldn’t come close to covering the tab of Sanders’s proposals.

But saying stupid things about economics is why God put socialists on this planet. Sanders has to say such things because that is what socialists do. It’s Aesopian: The scorpion must sting the frog; water must seek its level; Anthony Weiner must text junk pics; and socialists must pretend that they have serious ideas.

What really bothered me was Hillary Clinton’s “We need a new New Deal” line. Ever since I started working on Liberal Fascism, I’ve had a heightened sensitivity to this liberal obsession. I can’t count how many times I’ve written about it. Here’s what I wrote in 2008:

The New Deal is 75 years young this month.

A host of commentators have invoked the current mortgage credit crisis as justification for a sweeping intrusion of the government into the economy, not just into the credit markets. American Prospect editor Harold Myerson says, “Bring on the new New Deal.”

For all this talk of newness, you might be surprised at how old the idea is. Liberals were calling for a “new New Deal” when the first New Deal was barely out of diapers. That’s one reason FDR launched a “second New Deal” from 1935-1937. In 1944, he attempted to jump-start a third New Deal with his “second Bill of Rights.”

Let’s set aside Harry Truman’s “Fair Deal,” JFK’s “New Frontier,” LBJ’s “Great Society” and Bill Clinton’s “New Covenant.” I’m sure Jimmy Carter had something like this, too; I just try to avoid paying any attention to the man.

Even the New Deal wasn’t as new as many claimed (as I argue in my book, Liberal Fascism). FDR himself sold the New Deal as a continuation of the war socialism of the Wilson administration, in which FDR had served. For example, the Tennessee Valley Authority, the signature public-works project of the New Deal, had its roots in a World War I power project. (As FDR explained when he formally asked Congress to create the thing, “This power development of war days leads logically to national planning.”)

If the CNN moderators had been doing their job, you might expect someone to ask Hillary Clinton why, after seven years of Barack Obama(!), we still need a new New Deal. I mean, does anyone remember this?

The depressing answer is that for progressives — and please forgive the all caps — IT IS ALWAYS TIME FOR A NEW NEW DEAL.

You can explain all day how the New Deal prolonged the Great Depression and they won’t care. They’re like our new canine visitor Pippa, who apparently thinks every moment is the best moment for a New Throw of the tennis ball. After 9/11 Chuck Schumer raced to the pages of the Washington Post to explain that terrorism requires a new New Deal. After Katrina, liberals said “Aha! This proves we need a new New Deal.” Thomas Friedman has a shortcut macro on his keyboard that allows him to vomit up a column arguing that pretty much everything (but especially climate change!) requires, nay demands, a new New Deal.

They don’t always use the phrase “new New Deal.” Often, they use the hackneyed language of the “moral equivalent of war” instead (see this latest installment at The Atlantic of this ancient trope). But, as I’ve written 8 trillion times, that’s the same frickin’ argument.

The real appeal of the New Deal wasn’t its alleged success, it’s that the New Deal is synonymous with a time when progressives had nearly unfettered political power to do what they wanted. Liberals don’t really worship the New Deal, they worship themselves. The New Deal is just a talisman in their undying faith in their own ability to guide society and make decisions for others better than people can make for themselves.

And, at a fundamental level, the desire for an unending string of New Deals going on forever, is indistinguishable from socialism. Liberals used to be honest about this point, as when Arthur Schlesinger let slip in the pages of Partisan Review that “There seems no inherent obstacle to the gradual advance of socialism in the United States through a series of New Deals.”

It’s all just so exhausting. And I guess what I resent most of all is the fact that I will spend the rest of my life arguing with people who not only think that their faith in progressivism and the State is smart and modern, but that their opponents are the ones who are stuck in the past. And in the process, they’ll keep making the country worse, with every failure providing the latest evidence that now, now, is the time for a new New Deal.