Posted on 11/21/2007 4:31:55 PM PST by forty_years
What's wrong with American liberalism? What happened to the self-assured, optimistic, and practical Democratic Party of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry Truman, and John F. Kennedy? Why has Joe Lieberman, their closest contemporary incarnation, been run out of the party? How did anti-Americanism infect schools, the media, and Hollywood? And whence comes the liberal rage that conservatives like Ann Coulter, Jeff Jacoby, Michelle Malkin, and the Media Research Center have extensively documented?
In a tour de force, James Piereson of the Manhattan Institute offers an historical explanation both novel and convincing. His book, Camelot and the Cultural Revolution: How the Assassination of John F. Kennedy Shattered American Liberalism (Encounter), traces liberalism's slide into anti-Americanism back to the seemingly minor fact that Lee Harvey Oswald was neither a segregationist nor a cold warrior but a communist.
Here's what Piereson argues:
During the roughly forty years preceding the Kennedy assassination on November 22, 1963, progressivism/liberalism was the reigning and nearly only public philosophy; Kennedy, a realistic centrist, came out of an effective tradition that aimed, and succeeded, in expanding democracy and the welfare state.
In contrast, Republicans like Dwight Eisenhower lacked an intellectual alternative to liberalism and so merely slowed it down. The conservative "remnant" led by William F. Buckley, Jr. had virtually no impact on policy. The radical right, embodied by the John Birch Society, spewed illogical and ineffectual fanaticism.
Kennedy's assassination profoundly affected liberalism, Piereson explains, because Oswald, a New Left-style communist, murdered Kennedy to protect Fidel Castro's rule in Cuba from the president who, during the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, brandished America's military card. Kennedy, in brief, died because he was so tough in the cold war. Liberals resisted this fact because it contradicted their belief system and, instead, presented Kennedy as a victim of the radical right and a martyr for liberal causes.
This political phantasm required two audacious steps. The first applied to Oswald:
With Oswald nearly deleted from the narrative, or even turned into a scapegoat, the ruling establishment – Johnson, Jacqueline Kennedy, J. Edgar Hoover, and many others – proceeded to take a second, astonishing step. They blamed the assassination not on Oswald the communist but on the American people, and the radical right in particular, accusing them of killing Kennedy for his being too soft in the cold war or too accommodating to civil rights for American blacks. Here are just four of the examples Piereson cites documenting that wild distortion:
In this "denial or disregard" of Oswald's motives and guilt, Piereson locates the rank origins of American liberalism's turn toward anti-American pessimism. "The reformist emphasis of American liberalism, which had been pragmatic and forward-looking, was overtaken by a spirit of national self-condemnation."
Viewing the United States as crass, violent, racist, and militarist shifted liberalism's focus from economics to cultural issues (racism, feminism, sexual freedom, gay rights). This change helped spawn the countercultural movement of the late 1960s; more lastingly, it fed a "residue of ambivalence" about the worth of traditional American institutions and the validity of deploying U.S. military power that 44 years later remains liberalism's general outlook.
Thus does Oswald's malign legacy live on in 2007, yet harming and perverting liberalism, still polluting the national debate.
http://netwmd.com/blog/2007/11/21/2103
Looks like Shooter 2.5, myself, and the several other right-thinkers on the assassination of JFK get to prosecute Oswald for the umpteenth time over Thanksgiving Day.
It gets worse, I was in my thirties before I found out that Bobby’s assassin, Sirhan Sirhan, was a Palestinian who hated him for his pro-Israel views and not a native of Planet Zorgon XV.
That recent fictionalized movie about his assassination—directed by Emilio Estevez—simply lays RFK’s murder at the feet of our violent culture.
perverting liberalism, I didn’t think it was possible for it to get any more perverted.
‘bout time we got a JFK thread. Tomorrow is the date. Today in other timezones.
rofl...
Liberals blame Bush for all the countries ills so logically I'm assuming that JFK was to blame for his own assasination (since he was the president who was representing the country circa 1963)
Exception: I was 7 when JFK was killed. I knew a mad man killed him... Thanks Dad (Joe... deceased 2004)
Basically a good article, except that Oswald was no “New Left-type” communist (hippie, counter-cultural); he was an Old Left Stalinist type. Former Rumanian intelligence operative Ion Mihai Pacepa says the KGB inspired and promulgated most of the disinformation which distracted people from the fact that communist agent Oswald killed Kennedy. He also claims that Oswald was a loose cannon not operating under KGB control at the time.
It was unlikely that Oswald fired the shots that killed Kennedy.
Kennedy was killed by men who were afraid of him, likley men in our own government, or from the New Orleans Mafia.
THe kicker is that even expert miliary riflemen ( which Oswald was not) could not fire the shots in rapid succession with accuracy required, with the firearm used by Oswald. Only with the greatest difficulty could an expert rifleman duplicate Oswalds alleged shooting pattern. I am talking the best we have, champions.
So as far as I am concerned Oswald could not have done it, he was the patsy, the screen for others who have gotten cleanly away.
So this book is a lot of liberal punk bunk. Liberalism died when Neville Chamberlain waived a paper stating " Peace In our Time." The Kennedy years were simply a last death spasm of it. Piereson has in his writing taken a dead social movement ( liberalism) and attempted to breath new life into it, which is the purpose of his work. In truth liberalism is a Utopian philosophy which prevents people from coping with things as they are. It is a curse upon America.
Liberals want heaven NOW , and can't wait until they die. For that reason the try to create heaven on earth, a blasphemy in the face of God.According to them we humans need to be able to act without consequences to our actions. In essence that is liberalism.We should screw without having children, use drugs without penalty , kill without capital punishment, ad infinitum.
No, liberalism was dead the day it was born. Kennedy had little to do with it, except to give us one more reason as to why it should end as quickly as possible. His personal conduct outside of his marriage is only one manifestation of why that is so, among many others in his presidency.
No liberal has done lasting good, they only APPEAR to do it, and they work very, very hard on appearances, but not on the substance of doing good. True good can only happen when no thank you or acknowledgement for it is expected. That is hardly a liberal talking point, as you all may have noticed.
Piereson is full of himself, and his work is simply a bald attempt at the redefinition of history. He overates Kennedy, who if anything was a sordid, needy, tragic figure who managed to do a few things right when he acted conservatively. Most of what he did ended quite badly.
I wonder if it is possible that Oswald was also a ‘double agent’, like the one associated with Waco and the first attack on the WTC, and possibly OKC?
Yes, the two terrible Kennedy assassinations were carried out by (1) communist (though NOT “new leftist”) Lee Harvey Oswald, who was carrying out his own version of neo-Stalinist activism even if he was not under KGB operational control; (2) Palestinian fanatic Sirhan Sirhan, who murdered Bobby Kennedy for his sympathy toward Israel.
How ironic that liberals were able to misuse these assassinations, not to wage war against communists and anti-Israel fanatics, but to support the lurch leftward of the Demagogic Party.
As for the New Left, I believe that David Horowitz looks at the 1956 Khrushchev revelations of the Stalin horrors; American Communists (and many, many "Uncle Joe" admirers) became disillusioned with the Soviet system as well as ours. The red-diaper babies and other youths turned more toward Mao and to anarchy. "Bring it all down, man."
As I recall Professor Huntington's book, Who Are We?, there also, after decades of trying, was the emergence of the deconstructionists among our "intellectuals."
Traditional, patriotic Democrats were run out of the Democratic Party as the above mentioned Rats took over.
We average Joes and Janes were all kind of caught flat-footed. The men we respected were leading us "down the path" nightly on that fantastic new invention, TV; they were mostly journalists from The War. We trusted them.
Yep, of course a proto-Nazi (who subscribes to Worker and requested Gus Hall to act in his legal defense) is going to take a shot at Major General Edwin A. Walker. Sheesh.
‘Cept I’m STILL not convinced that Oswald did it - at least not all by himself..
Didn't Mrs. Kennedy refuse to change clothes that day by saying "Let them see what they've done?"
One could interpret this as an assumption that plotters had killed Kennedy. However, he had enemies, everyone knew that. Some organized. Some rather loud.
bump
It’s probably because you don’t understand ballistics. There are a lot of police and military who have learned to move their trigger finger toward the rear but they have no idea what happens after that.
Who else was he an agent for, by that theory? Read what Ion Mihai Pacepa said. Oswald was a diehard Marxist. He had inside information which, when supplied to the Soviets, allowed them to shoot down the U-2 piloted by Gary Powers. He nearly killed anti-Communist U.S. general Edwin Walker. Pacepa claims he was not acting under Soviet orders when he shot Kennedy, but who knows; maybe he was, but that would just be too explosive for them to admit. Certainly the KGB was very capable of spinning out the disinformation campaign which deflected attention toward the Mafia, the extreme right, etc.
I was really hoping I could get past the date without dealing with the 11-22 Truthers again.
By the way, I had fun on the eleventh this month. The 9-11 truthers were at Dealy Plaza again. They blamed the CIA and Hunt. The nutcase accused me of being either CIA or FBI. I’m surprised the guy can walk upright.
You present a flawless analysis of “old” and “new” liberalism. Thanks
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