Erick Erickson is a young lawyer and Republican campaign consultant who lives in Macon, Ga. I first became aware of Erickson in early 2006, when his Peach Pundit site was an invaluable source for inside information on the battle for the Georgia GOP nomination for lieutenant governor between Ralph Reed and Casey Cagle.

Since then, Erickson has become managing editor of the political blog Red State, where Saturday he warned fellow conservatives that liberals are developing an agenda:

[W]hile you and I are having our pity party and observing the Republican Party cracking up around a lack of ideas, there's life over at Mordor. They are mobilizing behind a set of ideas to entrench their power.

They want the "Employee Free Choice Act" to start growing unions again by denying free choice to employees. They want "clean election laws" to force taxpayers to fund Democratic candidates for office. . . .

The left has begun again to organize around socialist ideals. Bush hatred will no longer get them moving forward. They need new energy and they have these new ideas.

The link in Erickson's "Mordor" warning is to a post at Open Left by Democratic "netroots" strategist Chris Bowers, who says his goal is "reminding progressives that no matter what the major issues of the day might be in the short term, there are fundamental goals we must always seek in order to build a more progressive America long term."

This Open Left agenda has also been discussed by Dan Riehl, who calls it a "frightening vision," and by Brian Faughnan at the Influence Peddler, who writes:

As a conservative, this ought to scare you. . . .

Of these reforms, which ones do Democrats back because they're the right thing to do, and which do they support because they promise to cement the progressive hold on power? Does it call into question the legitimacy of a political movement to taint their agenda for the betterment of the human condition, by associating it with tightening the grip on the levers of power?

The bigger problem for Republicans is a persistent perception among the media elite that political success for Democrats is synonymous with "progress," while political success for Republicans is synonymous with "evil."

As far as the liberal media elite are concerned, it is conservative Republicans who represent the dark forces of Mordor.

To the elite, Chris Bowers is not a political partisan, but a heroic soldier in a humanitarian crusade for social justice. The biggest problem with this perception is that social justice is a "mirage," as Nobel Prize-winning economist Friedrich Hayek observed.

But when was the last time anybody heard Hayek mentioned by a prominent Republican politician? Oh, yeah -- it was him, wasn't it?

-- Robert Stacy McCain, assistant national editor, The Washington Times