GOP or not, ML King was not as radical as most of today’s left-wing.
Come to think of it, JFK was not GOP either, but, if he had not been murdered and had kept his policies as they were back in the 50s and 60s, he would be more like a republican today than a ‘leftist’ or democrat.
“GOP or not, ML King was not as radical as most of today’s left-wing.”
No, he wasn’t.
This article meandered all over and was unfocused.
What is Chronicles?
You’re correct. That circumstance is a blend of 1960s Democrats being replaced by leftwing radicals and of neoconservatives convincing many of today’s Republicans that the liberalism of the 1960s is conservative. The latter being one of the points that Gottfried is making.
Well, that’s Gottfried’s point, or one of them. A topic that he’s visited frequently over the years, and a concept that long predates his exposition.
He’s not wrong, but if “conservatism” is to be understood as a political ideology, it’s not much of a critique, either, if one accepts Buckley’s “Standing athwart history yelling “stop!”” gag line as a definition.
It seems to me that Gottfried is leaving the putt short in this piece, in a couple of ways. First, in the past, he hasn’t been shy about providing greater clarity about what he would consider a more robust conservatism to be (and not only in contract to the utopian ideological version sold by the neocons). That, and he’s uncharacteristically coy about just who those “younger generation of independent voices” might be.