Excellent article. Having lived thru that era it rings true for me. Very profound.
As an aside, the "far right" referenced in this article would be of the Pat Buchanan variety. i.e. paleoconservative.
Posted on 05/18/2006 12:05:21 AM PDT by beckett
Liberalism entered the 1960’s as the vital force in American politics, riding a wave of accomplishment running from the Progressive era through the New Deal and beyond. A handsome young president, John F. Kennedy, had just been elected on the promise to extend the unfinished agenda of reform. Liberalism owned the future, as Orwell might have said. Yet by the end of the decade, liberal doctrine was in disarray, with some of its central assumptions broken by the experience of the immediately preceding years. It has yet to recover.
What happened? There is, of course, a litany of standard answers, from the political to the cultural to the psychological, each seeking to explain the great upheaval summed up in that all-purpose phrase, “the 60’s.” To some, the relevant factor was a long overdue reaction to the repressions and pieties of 1950’s conformism. To others, the watershed event was the escalating war in Vietnam, sparking an opposition movement that itself escalated into widespread disaffection from received political ideas and indeed from larger American purposes. Still others have pointed to the simmering racial tensions that would burst into the open in riots and looting, calling into question underlying assumptions about the course of integration if not the very possibility of social harmony.
(Excerpt) Read more at commentarymagazine.com ...
very interesting article, good find...
It is an interesting article. It seems to me that there is a definite break within the American liberal camp between JFK and the current crop of self-loathing relativists or absolutist-leftist as represented by John F. Kerry or Noam Chomsky. In fact the Australian Labor Party's mainstream faction seems to be the only significant centre-left force in the world left that still runs on the old-time American liberalism.
In Britain the Labour Party seems to be morphing into the Chomskyite kind with good dose of class-struggle socialism added into the mix, while the European social democrats are following the Swedish/Finnish Socialists' example of following the Chomskyite/Lange (NZ)/Palme (Sweden) brand of anti-American added into the social welfareism.
Interesting, but some over-intellectualizing on the role of JFK. America simply wasn't as polarized between liberals and conservatives during that time period as the piece suggests. The critical factor surrounding Kennedy's death turned out not to be his actual assassination, but the governement's subsequent decision to seal a great portion of the Warren Commission's findings. This act undermined the blind faith the people had had in their government leaders, and from then on our government would never be trusted.
This looks like a good read so I am saving it for later.
A Castro-loving anti-American commie punk killed JFK, and an anti-semitic anti-American Arab puke kill RFK. And in both cases, the MSM blamed "the violent streak in American society".
Belated news flash for the MSM: Oswald and Sirhan were not representatives of American society.
There! Fixed it! One traitorous bastard disgrace to the proud Marines is as bad as another.
Actually, seeing that Kennedy was the one who lead us into Vietnam, and that MacNamera was his Sec. Def. before he was Johnson's, it seems a stretch to think that the late 60's would have gone very differently with Kennedy at the helm instead of Johnson.
In my more cynical moods, the adulation heaped on JFK makes me think of the line in Casablanca in which Rick comments, "Yesterday they were just two German clerks, now, they're the honored dead."
Bump forlater
bump for later
looks like a good one, will read later
Nor were McVeigh and Nichols...
But bubba was able to turn that into a successful re-election.
What happened?
The times of the Gentiles [2000 years] was fullfilled and Israel retook Jerusalem.
Everything else was|is a sideshow.
For those who do not know...no explanation will suffice...
Yep.
On the other hand, I think of JFK more in terms of FDR than of Bubba.
Like them or not, FDR and JFK drove events, Clintoon merely used them for cover.
I've also noticed that conspiracy lefties blame conservatives for RFK's death as well despite the fact that Sirhan Sirhan was Palestinian.
I have long argued that the worst thing that happened to the US in my lifetime (since the mid-1950s) was Kennedy's defeat of Nixon in 1960. If Kennedy hadn't been assassinated, I believe, then the trauma that it caused would not have devolved into the rage and then cynical alienation from America's moral core that -- since that time -- has been tearing our country apart.
Excellent article. Having lived thru that era it rings true for me. Very profound.
As an aside, the "far right" referenced in this article would be of the Pat Buchanan variety. i.e. paleoconservative.
Bump for later
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