there was a time when to be a liberal in the Democratic party did not mean pro-abortion, pro-gay rights but meant pro-defense, tough against the Soviets on foreign policy, pro-middle class, compassionate but not condescending; pro-union yes; pro-entitlement but not squishy soft: in short the Harry Truman-Hubert Humphrey-John F. Kennedy-Scoop Jackson approach. When did this change? The LBJ years? McGovern campaign of `72? I’ll give mine and ask you to give yours.
Mine: An article in the nation’s best conservative magazine, Commentary, started me thinking. The more I think about it, the more I agree with James Piereson, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. As an old codger who remembers the dawn of the FDR years, my view is that liberalism softened into hippie-dom happened in reaction to a definite occurrence in history. It was the assassination of Kennedy. As Piereson writes (in this month’s issue of the publication of the American Jewish Committee): “As many observers have noted, Kennedy’s death seemed somehow to give new energy to the more extreme impulses of the Left, as not only left-wing ideas but revolutionary leftist leaders—Marx, Lenin, Mao, Ho Chi Minh and Castro among them—came in the aftermath to enjoy a greater vogue in the United States than at any other time in our history.”
Mine: An article in the nation’s best conservative magazine, Commentary, started me thinking. The more I think about it, the more I agree with James Piereson, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. As an old codger who remembers the dawn of the FDR years, my view is that liberalism softened into hippie-dom happened in reaction to a definite occurrence in history. It was the assassination of Kennedy. As Piereson writes (in this month’s issue of the publication of the American Jewish Committee): “As many observers have noted, Kennedy’s death seemed somehow to give new energy to the more extreme impulses of the Left, as not only left-wing ideas but revolutionary leftist leaders—Marx, Lenin, Mao, Ho Chi Minh and Castro among them—came in the aftermath to enjoy a greater vogue in the United States than at any other time in our history.”
Piereson continues: “It is one of the ironies of the era that many young people who in 1963 reacted with profound grief to Kennedy’s death would, just a few years later, come to champion a version of the left-wing doctrines that motivated his assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald.” If you don’t agree, comment. If you do, tell me what it was about mid-century liberalism that allowed it to be knocked so badly off-balance by a single blow?
I contend that it was the 60's counter culture culminating with the concert "Woodstock" that changed the East Coast liberals and through them the Democratic party. At first people were appalled that these "Hippies" were on the streets on drugs fighting against middle America's values. Then Woodstock happened, they saw hundreds of thousands of kids, their kids, leaving their college dorms and joining this anti-middleamerican crowd, broadcast on the networks and the East coast elite had to stick up for their kids! How could the protesters be wrong? They came from the cream of the crop, they were the elites children, children from Ivy League schools the future leaders of the country. If the kids were wrong, their families had to have some shortcomings and that was not possible.
ReplyDeleteThe east coast elites were in charge of the media from magazines to network television they shaped the culture. Spoiled rotten children, protesting against the war, against the government being anti-establishment was all part of the counter culture. All of the sudden the protesters were giving a serious point of view as opposed to just spoiled kids. When they saw that the counter culture was their children all of the sudden it became acceptable to protest and burn their draft cards. The media and the Democratic parties changed almost overnight. In the Democratic convention of 1968 there was still a fight going on in the party by 1972 the infighting was over, Jessie Jackson was representing the Democratic party at the convention not Mayor Daley and the party has stayed in the hands of the counter culture.
Tom, I think you're half right on this one, so I'll agree with you halfway. That is, it WAS the Kennedy assassination that began the process of changing the Democrats from the Cold Warriors abroad/welfare statists at home to just plain wimps everywhere -- but it was the assassination of ROBERT Kennedy, not John, that began the Long March.
ReplyDeleteConsider: Even after November 1963, the Democrats nominated for President LBJ (in 1964) and HHH (in 1968) -- the last two committed Cold War Liberals to serve in either of the nation's two highest offices.
It was at the Democratic National Convention of 1968, right here in Chicago, that the house came tumbling down, scant weeks after Bobby Kennedy's assassination in Los Angeles, where he had just won the California primary -- and with it, likely, the Democratic nomination.
We've all seen the footage of Chicago cops busting heads in Grant Park. We've all seen the footage of Mayor Daley, from the floor, screaming obscenities at Sen. Abe Ribicoff, at the podium. And we all know how the national Democratic Party leaders swore in the aftermath, "never again."
What far fewer are aware of, though -- and I'd bet that a lot of the readers of your blog are among the relatively few who DO know, Tom -- is that it was from the ruins of the 1968 Democratic National Convention that our entire presidential nominating process was f'ed up.
Right up to and through 1968, presidential candidates were nominated in the proverbial smoke-filled back rooms. Primary elections to choose delegates to the national conventions weren't important -- Hubert Humphrey won the 1968 Democratic nomination without winning a SINGLE state primary election, and Richard Nixon didn't even win the most votes cast by GOP voters in primaries across the country. (That honor went to California Governor Ronald Reagan, who ran as a favorite son in the CA GOP primary unopposed -- and in doing so, won 1.6 million GOP primary votes, in a year when Richard Nixon won a total of 1.5 million GOP primary votes in all the other state primaries combined.)
But after the brutal 1968 Democratic convention, the DNC established the McGovern-Frasier Commission, to recommend changes to the rules governing the selection of delegates to the national convention. Those rules were adopted in 1970, just in time for them to govern the 1972 nominating process.
Out were the old-line, established pols, the guys who -- while not necessarily practicing democracy as we know it -- knew how to pick candidates who could a) get elected and b) do at least a reasonable job once in office. In were the new party activists, the special interest groups, the single issue groups -- in other words, the left-most of the influences on the national Democratic Party.
Their next two nominees were South Dakota Senator George McGovern, who lost 49 states on a bring-them-home-now platform, and Jimmy Carter, who famously opined at Notre Dame that we as a nation were "over our inordinate fear of communism" -- leaving us to wonder if he still had even an ORDINATE fear of communism. The poor citizens of Afghanistan, Ethiopia, Nicaragua, Mozambique, Angola, Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam (each of whose nations fell to Soviet-backed communists between 1975-79) wondered, too.
It's the decline of labor. I remember George Meany sitting out 1972 and joking he wished Norman Thomas were still around. Labor knew the pulse of the American worker but once we changed to a service economoy and labor declined, the pary was left with the left-intellectuals...
ReplyDelete