I don’t believe this for a minute that at some point the left was ever exalted. This does not mean that the right was ever pure, either; but in the left you find the lowest and most repugnant philosophies imaginable.
You can find parallels in the philosophy of the left all the way from Ralph Waldo Emerson to Dave Foreman of Earth First!, who also proposed similar ideas for replacing civilization with isolated villages of ignorant peasants, if in a much cruder form.
Parallels between the idealization of nature by Henry David Thoreau and today’s eco nuts.
And you see parallels between the Civil War era apologist for slavery George Fitzhugh, and today’s self-proclaimed “elites” of the left, who still can’t get it through their head that most people shouldn’t be treated as herd animals.
No, I do not see the national socialism of FDR as any indicator of exaltation, any more than by his flawed economic policies, the depression was extended for years.
Perhaps Harry S. Truman came closest, because even though he began as a tool of big city machine politics, he never studied nor understood the philosophies of the left, and was far more realistic.
JFK really never did amount to much in his brief two years in office, other than duplicity in the Bay of Pigs invasion and a less than effective embargo of Cuba. His legacy is sustained only by his cult of personality, what the left hoped he would deliver, but never did.
As for the rest, Ann Coulter really should have written several more volumes to her book Liberal Treachery. She could do a re-write of J. Evetts Haley’s book, A Texan Looks At Lyndon (LBJ), which would fill one volume by itself.
I remember that book and I remember Bobby Baker, Billie Sol Estes, et al.
I especially remember the death, in June 1961, of Henry Marshall. We all knew it was B.S. that he killed himself. Though none of us had connections with him or the Department of Agriculture; but we did know about Billie Sol and Lyndon.
They always say to find the guilty look for the one with the most to gain by the crime (JFK assassination) -- I've always turned it a little and ask who had the most to lose if there were no crime? That'd be LBJ. He was on the road to prison and RFK would be happy to drive the bus taking him there.
It's been decades but I believe that book described how LBJ built his telecasting and broadcasting empire -- he used his Washington influence to steal the licenses.
J. Edgar Hoover in his Masters of Deceit also sought to disassociate Thoreau and Walt Whitman from Communist claims on them by pointing out that they were "radcial individualists."
The thing is, state socialism seems the rage for "radical individualists"--except in socialist states, that is.