The Fall of the Left—or the liberals
I’m not at all sure I agree with the premise of this piece by Rich Lowry (based on a book by Jim Piereson), which is that the Kennedy assassination marked a pivotal point, the beginning of the Left’s turn from an America-loving do-good liberalism to an America-bashing negativity.
Although Lowry briefly mentions the Vietnam War as another turning point for liberals in America, he glosses over its role. But I think Vietnam was actually so much more important that it makes the assassination’s role seem minuscule in comparison. After all, most of the US escalation in Vietnam was accomplished after the assassination, and was approved by a Democratic President (Johnson) with the acquiescence of a Democratic Congress. It was only much later on, when things appeared to be going poorly, that liberals bailed.
Lowry—or whoever gave his piece its title—refers to the Left and its fall. But his article, which uses the word “liberal” more often “Left,” seems to find the two terms interchangeable.
They’re not. As with all such terms, they are inexact and shifting, but that doesn’t mean they are identical. What’s the difference between them? One way I would put it is that “Left” means “to the left of ‘liberal.'”
“Liberal” used to refer to—as Lowry writes—a movement that was “comfortable with the use of American power abroad, unabashedly patriotic, and forward-looking.” Piereson characterizes it as having been “tough and realistic.” This was the liberalism of both Truman and Kennedy, who were not Leftists.
That sort of liberalism hasn’t ended among Democrats. But it’s certainly faded way into the background, to be replaced by the sort of thinking that used to be known as Leftist. Joe Lieberman is probably one of the last holdouts of the earlier liberal point of view, with Hillary Clinton is trying to position herself delicately (or indelicately—it requires something of a straddle) between the two movements (and Obama’s swinging pendulum represents his own awkward efforts to play both sides), whereas much of the Democratic leadership today is rather firmly planted on the other side of the Leftist line without actually going all the way (in the economic sense, that is) to the economic Leftism of socialism.
Bill Clinton, detested though he was by Conservatives, represented an attempt in the 90s to reverse this Leftist trend, although his focus was primarily domestic—which seemed appropriate in those naively optimistic post-Cold War days. His sincerity may be questioned—was he positioning himself that way because he saw it as popular in a post-Reagan world, or was he sincere in holding the views he espoused? But there’s no question he saw the sharp veer to the Left his party had taken as the reason Democrats had spent so many years in the Presidential wilderness.
The same dynamic is playing itself out for the coming (and coming and coming and coming, for what already seems like aeons) 2008 election. The Democrats have to answer to groups like the Kossacks, an influential part of what Byron York refers to, somewhat tongue-in-cheek, as The Vast Left-Wing Conspiracy. And, if Piereson is correct, that conspiracy had its genesis in the conspiracy theories that sprung up after Kennedy’s death.
Will the Left overplay its hand (ignoring the Law of Thirds), and doom itself to electoral defeat in 2008 despite the unpopularity of the present Bush administration? The old liberal wing of the Democratic Party—of which Lieberman is one of the few remaining adherents, hanging on by a feather—seems moribund at the moment. But events have a way of changing things in unpredictable ways. Hillary Clinton retains enough of the hawk (at least in her rhetoric) that if terrorism should successfully rear its ugly head again within the US while she is President, we may find that the old muscular liberalism comes back in play.
George Stephanopoulis’ book noted his own frustration when Bill would move rightward in response to Dick Morris’ poll results and triangulation advice. Stephanopoulis and Morris conducted a tug of war, with Clinton as the rope.
Separate:
the image of Hillary indelicately straddling…
I also disagree with the premise of Lowry’s piece. I believe a tsunami of leftside values was already on the way. Several things speeded its arrival, including: the misinterpreted assassination of Kennedy; the perceived “not worth fighting for” strategic value of the Vietnam war; and the “media as superstars who can change the world through journalism” meme which occurred after Watergate.
I compare 1] the (hopefully) oncoming arrival of liberal Western values to the Middle East to 2] the 1950s/1960s oncoming tsunami of leftside values to America[though I certainly make the distinction between existing liberal valued in 1950s America vs. the nonliberal values in the Middle East today]. Just as Vietnam and Watergate speeded the arrival of left side values in America, I hope our military interventions will help speed the arrival of liberal values in the Middle East.
Once again, I’m sort of straying the topic. Apologies…
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Had Kennedy lived, the Tonkin resolution would not have occurred, which means the left would find a toehold elsewhere. The goal is “religious;” the foundation unimportant.
But Johnson wouldn’t have been President had JFK not been assassinated, Neo. Instead of America being lead by its elected leader as it normally would have been in wars, they sort of had to make do with Johnson. It would be like if FDR fell dead a few weeks after Pearl harbor and Truman got into power. Things would be inherently different, Neo.
Vietnam may have still progressed as it did, but it might not have either.
You forgot Zell Miller, Neo. In 2004, he still felt as if he was a Democrat.
It’s hard to get muscular, Neo, when people are afraid of stretching the military. I mean muscles.
Ymarsakar:
It would be like if FDR fell dead a few weeks after Pearl harbor and Truman got into power. Things would be inherently different, Neo.
I’ll say. Truman wasn’t Vice President at the time of Pearl Harbor. Henry Wallace was VP then, and he was rather naive about Communism, to put it mildly.
Your basic premise was correct: Things would have been different, all right.
“Will the Left overplay its hand (ignoring the Law of Thirds), and doom itself to electoral defeat in 2008 despite the unpopularity of the present Bush administration? ”
Nope, it will at least take a democrat being elected to office.
There are three options for voters – Democrat, Republican, or third party.
Democrats have several things going for them. First, and foremost, for many people out there if all side are even then the democrats are the default choice. Secondly they have had a number of years since they were in charge so people can rationalize away much of what they do/say. What they have against them is that few really like their ideas – once elected they have to live by them. They do not really have anything against them yet have nothing really going for them with respect to getting elected yet they have a HUGE deficit against them based on their ideas.
Republicans tend to have the more popular ideas – the Contract with America dominated and still would. However they are rife with corruption (not that the Democrats are any better, but see above for why this is still a win in the Democrats column) and I see no way out of it other than a near complete overhaul of the party. At best the next republican candidate will limp along also (unless they just happen to be a *really* great president and I do not know if one can be that good).
Finally you have third parties. They may very well be able to take the Whitehouse (another Perot would win now with little trouble) but that will be a hard road as there will be *no* support in congress. Though they are in the best position they have been in decades, but it will be a longer term fight.
Hilary may very well take all – but then what? You see the approval ratings of congress going to record lows? You will also see the president doing the same thing. The Democrats will not self destruct for *at least* another four years and I somewhat dread what occurs after that.
Unfortunately this leave us with a congressional approval rating below 15% and a presidential approval rating below 25% and no where to go but down. If a third party could ever get it’s head out of it’s ass, or the republican voters finally realize that primaries are where we make changes then I do not know what is going to happen. The leftist understood what the republicans refuse too and have seemed to convince most liberals that they are correct so I see little hope for the democrats. Of course, not that I see much hope for the republicans either.
I’ve recently wondered how our current situation compared to the death of the other major parties like the Whigs. As is I’m sorta apprehensive what another decade or two of sub 20% approval ratings for both the president and congress coupled with 70%+ approval rating for the military will end up doing. I do not exactly expect a coup, more along the lines of a mini-revolution (for one thing I can not fathom our military doing anything other than reinstating the constitution) and 15-20 years is *more* than enough time for that to occur as a popular thing. This is especially true if the office of the president goes the way congress has.
Doesn’t your thought on Lowery’s semantic’s with ‘left’ and ‘Liberal’ also have to be weighed against the use of the terms by the left? Didn’t they call themselves ‘liberals’ until it was so sullied by them that it became perjorative, so they dropped it and took up ‘progressive’? I think he’s using the term ‘liberal’ as the political label it was used as, rather than the philosophy you so well describe. Unfortunately, it’s a philosophy that got it’s name stolen and made useless. Neither language nor ideologies are stagnant.
Hi –
Two things:
a) Liberalism died in the 1970s and was replaced by “progressivism” in the 1980s. Those who call themselves liberals today wouldn’t recognize “real” liberalism if it came up and bit them.
b) The question of the third party will be: who will be hurt? The party that sees more of its voters run away to join a third party will be the major loser, as happened to the Republicans when Clinton won, and as happened to the Democrats when Bush II won. In either case, if there hadn’t been a third-party candidate to siphon votes away, the party’s candidate would have won easily.
The only real way for a third party to succeed is to take away voters from both parties with the same proportion: if you could really put up a centrist party, one that appealed to both red-state Democrats and blue-state Republicans, then you’ve got a going proposition: otherwise, you’re just stealing from the one party or the other.
The best thing that could happen to the Republicans in 2008 is if a leftist party emerges to challenge the Democrats; the best thing that could happen to the Democrats is if a conservative rebellion splits the Republicans (and there is no leftist split!).
But the best thing that could happen for the country is for a centrist party to establish itself firmly in the middle, able to tell the left that is destroying the Democrats to take a flying leap, and able to tell the fundamentalist right, eager to enforce morality, to go get a few tattoos and come back more mellow. 🙂
John, I wonder at your complaint against the “fundamentalist right”, that it is “eager to enforce morality”. Am I to conclude you are immoral, or moral but advocating immorality? Am I to conclude that a society/culture of “good” is necessarily immoral?
Two more points:
“progressive”, as a term that non-communist or soft-communist leftists use to label themselves, goes back a lot further than the 1980’s — but it’s a question-begging term that no one should use in anything other than a heavily ironic sense, other than the self-congratulating lefties themselves, of course, who commonly suffer from irony-deficiency anyway.
And re: Tom’s puzzlement, it should be enough to point out that being unwilling to enforce morality is not the same as, and doesn’t imply, an advocacy of immorality. The gap between these is called freedom, Tom.
There’s little connection bewteen clasical liberalism and contemporary ‘liberalism’. The Progressive movement of late 19th, early 20th century America under the influence of John Dewey and others who believed that ‘science’ was to be the great principle of top-down social organization. The goals were a dreamy, utopian and purely materialistic approach to achieving ‘Democracy’ under a unified ‘general will’ shaped by an educational sytem controlled from above by a ‘properly’ informed elite, much like what expected at the time of the new Soviet experiment in planning and statism. Contemporary liberalism, like the soviet experiment, is at war with human nature which was cautiously acknowledged by liberalism as originally understood.
Many of the reforms promised by progressivism have been institutionalized within the adminstrative state and are almost beyond re-reform since the interests have become so great in it’s maintainence and self-preservation. The needs of the entrenched bureacracy have begun to trump the needs of the individual while the individual rather than the ‘collective’ was the primary concern of ‘classical liberalism’. The need for bureaucratic self-preservation have become so great within the context of vast contradictions between preserving the rights of the individual versus the interests of the state that plain meaning of language itself needed to be re-defined. Perceived injustices and inequalities find their remedies now through the aggrandizement of the state and limitations on liberty rather than on the real solution which, of course, is the expansion of ordered liberty and limitations on the state.
It’s true that leftism is bogged down in negativity and defeatism. That’s what makes leftist parties such great opposition parties.
When thrust into the position of leadership, leftist parties are awkward and prone to making large mistakes–witness Jimmy Carter. The thing that saved Bill Clinton was the 1994 election of a strong republican congress.
Now, if a leftist candidate is elected president along with a leftist congress, there won’t be anything for leftists to hide behind or blame. Opposition mentality of negativism won’t work. national malaise sets in.
Leftist media will be stuck. Who will they criticize? Who will they satirize? The only way to go for the left is further left. That way lies madness.
Tom –
First, I don’t complain about the fundamentalist right: I merely say things the way they are. These are the folks that want to enact laws to fit their moral precepts, and the consequences be damned (of course, the left wants to do the same thing, but the difference is in degree…).
Second, you are jumping to conclusions, none of which were stated in what I said: trying to enforce morality through laws is penultimately doomed to failure, as when the law is an ass, it will be ignored. Moral laws are not the same as laws of morality, and Sally is absolutely, 100% correct: the choice not to use the power of the state to enforce a very specific morality is not the same as being immoral, but rather underscores how important it is that laws regarding morality be as few as possible: trying to legislate morality always results in the laws being ignored and the undermining of legal authority. That is plain and simple stupidity: if your population doesn’t believe that a given morality is to be enforced, then they will ignore those laws. Anyone believing that you can force behavior change by making it against the law is, at the end of the day, deluded: you can make laws against abortions, but that will not stop abortions.
Only moral persuasion can stop them. But try and legislate laws forcing people to behave in a certain manner, and that legislator will make a fool out of himself as those unpersuaded will ignore the law. If you can’t win in the realm of public opinion, then making that behavior that you don’t want to see illegal and punishable by law is foolish at best and totalitarian at worst.
Sorry John, I have never bought all that “legislating morality” crap. Laws are not enacted to persuade you to think in a certain way, they are enacted to prohibit behavior.
I could care less whether you think murder is okay(immoral) or wrong (moral), but acting on your beliefs is what matters.
To echo Lee in a paraphrase: “you can make laws against murder, but that will not stop murder.”
What laws DO is specify that the gov’t should use force to punish those who violate the law, such violation being an action and the punishment occurring after the fact.
Laws against abortion in Poland have hugely reduced the abortion rate — not to 0, but much less than in surrounding EU states.
Before liberal became perjorative, it was prefaced by welfare — the “welfare liberals” that Nixon was against. The dead end that (welfare liberals =) leftists have is the idea of group rights, and victimology. The poor as “victims” of the rich, rather than as lazy or stupid or having bad habits (like promiscuous sex resulting in more babies and more abortions).
If the less fortunate are victims, than “social justice” allows, perhaps even requires, punishment of the more fortunate. Every time you hear Dems talk against the Bush tax cuts, you hear the desire to punish the rich. The evil of Envy, the desire to destroy another’s success, is at the heart of Leftism.
Although it is often mixed with the White Man’s Burden, wanting to help the inferior classes, while verbally denying that they are inferior.
Neo, neither you nor Rich talk enough about Welfare Liberals, but Rich is more nearly correct with describing a new Left that has a
“darker philosophy obsessed with America’s sins”.
In fact, this is part of the anti-capitalist anti-Globalization movement, obessed with the West’s sins, especially America and Israel.
Similarly, looking at Durban and a global perspective:
“Their agenda took on a punitive edge, focused on compensating victim groups and expiating the country’s [West’s] guilt.”
The American Left / Dems are an echo of the European rabid anti-Americanism.
The only way a new Rep Pres has a chance at winning in 2008 is if … the Dems win Congress in 2006 and really mess up. Hmm. [Is Karl Rove a genius or what?]
But Neo, I think YOU are more correct than Pierson about Vietnam being the “sin” that boomer-leftists are really against, along with racism, rather than the murder of Kennedy.
My Lai, bombing in Cambodia, Pentagon Papers; then the Watergate cover-up — the gov’t lies to the people! wasn’t the Warren Commission lying? (so why do Leftists want so much more gov’t? because they lie to themselves!)
gcotharn wrote:
“Separate:
the image of Hillary indelicately straddling…”
And what about “Obama’s swinging pendulum….”
But I guess like Freud said, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar…
😉
StormFront’s more reasonable than Daily Kos. Which is interesting given how the Left always brings up StormFront as an example of fundamentalism Rightism or something.
Thanks for the correction, Rick.
What did Freud say about Fruit Loops like you, Unknown Baby?