The Kennedy assassination and the liberal breakdown

James Piereson has just written a short and penetrating book on the aftereffects of the Kennedy years and Kennedy's assassination on American liberalism, Camelot and the Cultural Revolution: How the Assassination of John F. Kennedy Shattered American Liberalism. Liberals and liberalism clearly suffered a nervous breakdown in the years after 1965. Piereson argues persuasively that the Kennedy administration and especially his death had a decisive negative effect on liberalism, which has never really recovered from that period.

The factual core of his argument is accepting, as all educated persons open to reason do, that the assassin Oswald acted alone, motivated by his far-left political beliefs. Piereson marshalls the evidence to this effect and notes the lack of counterevidence, especially to support the wide range of conspiracy theories that substitute for simply accepting the facts. But while Oswald acted alone, he did not think alone. He was a convinced Marxist, of the emerging "new" Left type, incensed by the Kennedy administrations attempts to eliminate Castro and his regime. He had defected to Russia in 1959, returned with his Russian wife in 1962, then attempted to meet Cuban diplomats and agents in Mexico City a couple months prior to the assassination. There's no evidence that Oswald was a "sleeper agent" programmed by the Soviets, and little evidence in that direction in connection with the Cubans. But there's also little question about his motives. The available evidence runs to thousands of pages of police and FBI files, scraps of declassified KGB files, plus Oswald's writings and publicly-stated beliefs. Part of the reason for the lack of a wider-ranging official investigation was simple embarrassment over the FBI and Secret Service's having missed such an obvious danger.

At the time of Kennedy's death, liberals were obsessed with a vague entity called the "radical right" and starting their long mental night of disconnection from reality. As Piereson goes to great pains to explain, especially to readers under 50 who were not present or old enough to understand the events first-hand, liberals continued to be obsessed with the "radical right" even after Kennedy's assassination. Little could be done to persuade the liberal elite, the media, academics and clerics, et al., to pay attention to the facts. Here was the origin of all the conspiracy theories about the assassination: a refusal to accept the obvious and a replacement of facts by preconceived "narrative." It was a failure of the respectable establishment itself; the wackos then cashed in on the establishment's own abandonment of reason and capitulation to fantasy. This is the moment when the media began to float free of facts and liberalism started to come unhinged. "Narrative" buried plain truth. Conservatives, on the other hand, had little difficulty accepting the bare facts and, as a matter of disposition, did not have the naive belief in automatic upward progress that most liberals shared at that time. They were shocked, but not surprised, by the assassination.

While Johnson was able to turn Kennedy's memory into a remarkable legislative accomplishments in 1964 and 1965 (the Civil Rights Bill, Medicare, Medicaid, and the Voting Rights Bill), liberals had by that point become dissatisfied with the old-style liberalism of the Progressive and New Deal eras and its programmatic basis. Kennedy had inadvertently awakened a yearning for something else entirely: a liberalism of style and ultimately a cultural radicalism, converting politics from bread and butter self-interest into obsessions about identity: the personal as political. Some even saw it at the time: Kennedy's own aristocratic air; the wealth and glamor of Jackie and their children; and America's burgeoning culture of celebrity, about to become pervasive with the rise of television, which itself made Kennedy's election in 1960 possible. Johnson won what was at that time the largest landslide in American history in 1964, but this victory proved ephemeral. Within a few years, liberalism was under fatal assault, not from without, but from within, as radical children rebelled against liberal parents.

Liberalism proved more fragile than expected, in contrast with standard liberal beliefs at the time. In less than 15 years, it went from an optimistic, hopeful, and forward-looking movement to a guilt-ridden and backward-looking movement of punishment and decline. I might discreetly add that the "new" punitive liberalism serves the class interests of the cultural elite. But the public at large are its designated victims, which is why it can't be directly sold to them. Instead, it has to be imposed by the courts and screamed in everyone's ears by the media and academia. This explains why the Boomers, radical children of the Greatest Generation, didn't look to conventional politics as their vehicle, unlike their parents and grandparents. Instead, they fomented the rise of "para-politics": the media, activist groups, and the courts. With these, they could reshape politics, not by voting or running for office, but by seizing the cultural megaphone and beating the drum of fake crisis as a front for the real agenda. As the Obama candidacy suggests, "punitive" liberalism is still with us, although since the 80s, it has had to adopt a wide range of cloaking strategies to hide itself - otherwise, voters would simply reject it.

The events of the decade-and-a-half starting in 1965 revealed that American liberals had become a panicked mandarin class, projecting their decline outward, and obsessed with exaggerated or invented problems, constantly trying to bully voters into accepting their dark vision. Whatever prospect the "new" liberalism of the 60s and 70s had of achieving legitimate electoral success was dashed in 1980 by Reagan's election. The Clinton years of the 90s proved frustrating for left-liberals. While Clinton was fairly popular (even though not a majority president) and his later policies more so, the left of the Democratic party found little way to force its agenda into American politics, in spite of its disproportionate influence in liberal institutions (universities, media, mainstream churches).

The Kennedy assassination itself, as Piereson explains in some detail, was the central event in this change. Waves of nostalgia and myth-making engulfed the liberal classes, distorting who Kennedy was and why he was killed. A sense of irreplaceable loss overcame much of the nation, giving rise in some quarters to despair, which is typically the root of political rage and radicalism. JFK's assassination was the first of a series of assassinations in the 60s and 70s encouraged by the rise of television, much as an earlier wave of assassinations in the late 19th century was encouraged by the rise of the telegraph and the penny press. The killing of Malcolm X in 1964 and Sirhan Sirhan's 1968 assassination of Robert Kennedy (motivated by RFK's support of Israel - Sirhan was a Jordanian-Palestinian) did not fit the template of the liberal obsession with the "radical right" either. Only Martin Luther King's 1968 death at the hands of James Earl Ray, a self-confessed loser acting out notions of white supremacy shared by parts of white society in those days, fit anything like what the liberal "narrative" required, although King's death, like the movement he led, is best viewed as a follow-on to the Civil War and Lincoln's assassination.

Pre-1965 liberalism is now a lost world to us. It's hard to remember that modern liberalism, from the 1890s until the early 1960s was the main party of ideas and reform in American life. Kennedy's own policies, while containing a liberal strain (such as the Alliance for Progress, the Peace Corps, and a belated recognition of the civil rights movement), were also exceptionally aggressive in opposition to communism as it spread into the Third World and newly decolonized countries. The Kennedy assassination started the disintegration of this older "reform" liberalism and accelerated its replacement by the new punitive liberalism. The mid-century liberal movement itself became split into radicalized and neoconservative wings. These events showed that, contrary to what many of its spokesmen believed, modern liberalism was not as rational a movement as it imagined itself to be. It had strong latent reserves of denial, selective misuse of facts, and wishful thinking. It took a series of unexpected and inexplicable disasters, starting with the Kennedy assassination, to bring that potential out. Often it's not events themselves, but people's reactions to them, that prove decisive.

In the years since, nothing has replaced the centrality of liberalism as America's guiding political philosophy, not Reagan-Goldwater-style conservatism, not neoliberalism, nor the flash-in-the-pan of neoconservatism. Its absence has opened a void in American life not yet filled.** Instead, the leftover fragments of the once-ascendant liberalism fight it out in a deepening twilight. It is worth remarking on the striking fact that, 40-plus years later, liberals and liberal institutions (especially the media) are still acting out and upon many of the themes of that era of disintegration. The era of FDR came to an end between 1968 and 1980. The era of Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon - including its misunderstood events, trends, and traumas - is, strangely, still with us.
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* The terminology reflects the vague anxieties of liberals who, by the late 1940s, were establishment, although they often had a hard time admitting this, even to themselves. (That's why Senator McCarthy could make them such an effective target for populist-style attacks, especially while the Korean war was still on.) While various portentous theories about the "radical right" were floated to "explain" who "they" were, the concept was never defined. If they were the pre-war isolationists, they had been discredited and marginalized. If they were the American fellow-travelers of fascism, they were never large in number and in precipitous decline by the 1960s. If they were the new post-war conservatives, there was never any danger of political violence - the problem here is that liberals had weak answers to attacks from the free-market, individualist right, whose anticommunism and opposition to collectivism were always more consistent and better thought-out. The real problem was that liberals continued to have a "no enemies on the left" mentality that served them poorly during the cultural revolution of the later 60s and 70s.

By then, as Piereson points out, it was clear that the main threat to liberal democracy in America was from this violent and anti-American "new" left. That movement's toxic residue remains in our major liberal institutions (academia and the media), which have been powerfully corrupted by it. Unfortunately, today's remnant of liberals still have a hard time seeing this - and thus, are slow to accept the free-market revival of the 80s, the end of the Cold War, and threat that political Islam poses to Western and non-Western nations. In the first two instances, they fundamentally misinterpreted the course of modern history. In the last, many cannot process something so alien to Western sensibilities.

** Just one fact alone demonstrates the enormity of the change. In 1964, almost 55 percent of registered voters were Democrats. Today it's slightly less than a third.

When will the Obama cult end?

This spring? This summer? This November?

It's clear that Hillary Clinton is the better of the two Democratic candidates for the general election in November, and the primary voters seem to agree with this. She has won all but one of the big states (including her almost-certain victory in Pennsylvania coming up) and all of the swing states the Dems will need in November. Obama's entire primary vote lead came from his home district of Cook County, Illinois. If the Dems had more rational primary rules, like the Republicans, she would already be the nominee. The weird inability of Dem primary voters to make the full weight of their voice heard is what's allowing the media and the left wing of the party to "wag the dog," so to speak. This is likely to be the Democrats' final opportunity for the forseeable future to have a large impact on national politics, and they seem determined to blow it.

Obama has on his side an extraordinary alliance of the left wing of the Democratic party and the media, which seem determined to get him nominated. Let's go over this again: He's the most underqualified candidate to run for President in a long time. His political "movement" smacks more of a cult than anything else. Given his views, which are to the left of Clinton and which he tries hard to hide, he has a poor chance against McCain in November. Without the center and center-left vote Clinton has a better chance of getting, Obama stands no chance of winning the general election. The Democrats, in fact, would have to start thinking about how big the loss will be: not just the White House, but one or both houses of Congress as well. The defections will be fatal and leave the Party in a shape similar to what it was like after 1972 or 1984.

The complaints about Bush, his inexperience and provinciality, were well-founded seven or eight years ago. They hold with much more force for Obama. In spite of his talk of "restoring" America's reputation, he's a foreign-policy lightweight, at best - it's more about restoring some fantasy shared by, say, Ted Turner and George Soros. His obvious ignorance of foreign trade and the Middle East make his noises about these issues laughable. With leadership on trade and other international issues, Bush looks profound by comparison. Obama has in addition the heavy political baggage of the people he's chosen to associate with. All of these problems will become far worse in the general election, no matter how hard to media tries to distract people. That only works for so long.

Of course, the Democrats were always going to have a hard time this year: they're no longer running against Bush. Early on, they eliminated their most qualified candidates and, instead, gave us the spectacle of empty identity politics and exceptionally slick levels of political cynicism - more obviously from Clinton, less obviously but even more disturbingly from Obama - that leave any outside observer with a simple conclusion: the Democratic party is politically and morally bankrupt. Its putative base continues to shrink, and an Obama nomination will accelerate the shrinkage and defections to the point that the Dems may cease to be a viable national party at all. Once a forward-looking optimistic bunch, the Dems have become a strange collection of panicked, self-hating rubes.

The cult of Obama feeds on a number of things, including a surprising amount of misogyny. But more than anything, it is the desperation of liberals that makes them prone to bad choices. Democrats can look back on over fifty years and not see (with one exception) a successful Democratic presidency since Truman left office in 1953. The turning point was undoubtedly the awful day in November 1963 that started the liberal "unhingement." The JFK presidency left an ambiguous legacy; Johnson began with great success and ended as a failure. Carter was just a failure. Clinton's second term, after a failed first term, is the only bright spot for the Democrats in half a century - but it came at the price of Clinton's adopting some of the most conservative Democratic policies since - well - Grover Cleveland. This left liberals in the strange position of being ready to do anything to defend Clinton personally but hating his policies. The consequences were bad for the Dems. In 2000, Gore, instead of sensibly running on Clintonism but keeping Clinton at arm's length, ran a bizarre pseudo-populist campaign spooked by the fringe candidacies of Bradley and Nader to his left. The same logic was at work in the fringe Dean candidacy in 2003, heavily promoted by the media and the left wing of the party, and only ended when the primary voters had their say.

The Democrats need to think long and hard before they continue down the road with the Obama cult, drink the Kool-Aid, walk over the cliff - or whatever other cult metaphors you want to use. Cinnamon Stillwell has this to say: "He's not the Second Coming, you know" - but according to some, he is apparently the First :)

When will the Obama cult end? Maybe when Clinton wins in Pennsylvania ... nah. The cult will end when the media lose interest.

POSTSCRIPT: I missed this column by Robert Samuelson in February, but it's worth reading.

A detailed article on Obama's early career, including more disturbing material about the Reverend Wright (see page 8), from the New Republic.

William F. Buckley, Jr.: An appreciation

Where to start? A giant of the postwar world, one of the founders of modern conservatism, and a leading light who remade American politics, died just over a month ago. Many tributes have appeared, and his positive influence is everywhere you look.

When World War Two ended, American conservatism seemed to be finished. Although opposition to the increasingly statist bent of liberalism came from many and often conflicting points of view (individualism, religion, nativism, etc.), the two large forms of opposition were isolationism (opposition to American entry into the war - although that was not in any way purely a cause of the Right) and hostility to the dramatic expansion and pretensions of the federal government. Both oppositions appeared discredited, although disillusionment with the New Deal and federal intervention in general was widespread by the time of the 1940 election. And a significant part of the Republican party - its East Coast, Anglophile wing, led by Wendell Wilkie - did support intervention, in fact preventing foreign policy from becoming a major partisan issue in the 1940 and 1944 elections and marginalizing isolationism to a great degree. Nonetheless, while much of the New Deal had been repudiated after the 1938 midterm elections, everyone in 1940 knew what the great question was: to intervene or not, how fast and how deep. Of course, the Germans' undeclared submarine war of 1940-41 and the attack on Pearl Harbor at the end of 1941 rendered that debate moot. The US did intervene in World War Two, on the Allied side, and few regretted it afterwards, in spite of the immense cost and the dubiousness of having the Soviet Union as an ally.

Other factors were at work in the fragmented state of the American right in 1945. It had some of the same components familiar today. There were conservatives, people who deferred to tradition because it was tradition. The fact that the American political tradition was largely a liberal one (with one major exception) created something of a paradox.* That tradition was one of limited government, one overturned by the socialist-tinged "new" or "reform" liberalism of the Progressive and New Deal eras. (The change was large enough that it is questionable whether the adjective "liberal" should be used at all.) Classical liberals (later called libertarians) never bought into tradition-for-tradition's-sake and based their views on straightforward, historically informed ideas (abundantly confirmed by recent experience in the world wars and totalitarian dictatorships) about the negative effect on human liberty and prosperity by too-large and too-powerful a government. Some went further and re-developed the familiar 18th-century theories of natural rights and consensual government in terms understandable to a 20th century audience. To that they added a more modern and deeper appreciation of the limits of social knowledge and the impossibility of social planning.

A striking fact astute readers might notice is that I make no mention of the "religious right" in this potted history. That's because, after the liberal-fundamentalist battles of the late 19th and early 20s centuries, the fundamentalists retreated to their own, anti-political, subculture. To the extend that they were political, they largely voted Democratic, because they were largely southern or urban-ethnic Catholic - and in those days, virtually all white southern and Catholic voters voted Democratic. The "religious right" as we now know it, an alliance between conservative Catholics and conservative Protestants, was 30+ years in the future at the end of the war. In 1945, a few feeble attempts at ecumenism apart, the relation between Protestants and Catholics was one of mutual suspicion, laced with ignorance and prejudice - although the war itself had had a strong positive impact on this state of affairs. The full scope of this impact is in large part the complete transformation of religious and ethnic identity in America in the postwar era. This transformation made black civil rights easier to swallow (for whites), gave rise to a new level of interreligious understanding, and made Buckley's type of "big tent" conservatism possible. All of these were out of reach and almost unthinkable before 1945. In his relationship with American Jews, Buckley's approach was even more radical, given the level of anti-Jewish prejudice still prevalent in 1945. By the late 1950s, his nascent movement and its allies counted a significant number of Jewish thinkers, many of them refugees from Europe and carrying first-hand experience of life under the totalitarian dictatorships. Well before the Republican party, under Nixon, fully embraced support of Israel, Buckley adopted such support as a matter of course, because he understood the basic issues at stake. When the Soviet Jewry movement started in the mid-1960s, Buckley and his followers were among its early non-Jewish allies and supporters.

Buckley was a wealthy liberal Catholic, a man from a social background (including a father who was an American ambassador) that, on the surface, seemed conventionally WASP. It was his quirky Catholicism that initially made the difference. It made him have to think - really think - about political issues in a deeper way than most people have to, people who take their political views without much thought from their parents, teachers, and peers. This led him initially to oppose modern American liberalism from a traditionalist point of view, but also made him open to libertarian approaches. From these experiences, he formed a clear conception of how to rebuild the American right around a few simple and broadly appealing stands that any rational person could assent to, without regard to ethnic or religious background: opposition to the growth of government at home and opposition to the dominant form of collectivist tyranny abroad, communism. Buckley and his allies founded National Review, still the flagship of American conservatism, and began a campaign that stretched from the early 1950s to the late 70s to absorb all opposition to modern liberalism in this way. By doing this, Buckley sidestepped the leftover isolationist-interventionist debate and ended the American right's parochialism. By the late 1950s, all sorts of people, many Protestant, but a large minority of Catholics, and a surprising number of Jewish thinkers had been pulled into Buckley's movement, so much so that by the 1960s, the movement had become a broad political tendency in its own right and no longer a "movement." Buckley concentrated on the crucial common ground, dispensed with the provinciality and ethnocentrism of the prewar right, and even proved ecumenical enough to accept individualist and libertarian followers. (They often rejected him anyway, but that was their doing, not Buckley's.) Buckley even flirted with libertarianism himself, in his 1965 run for Mayor of New York and his famous, offshore 1960s pot parties on his yacht.

The era of Buckley's and conservatism's success was the late 70s and 1980s. In the 1960s, American liberals had obtained a blank check, under Kennedy and Johnson, and led themselves and the country, both domestically and internationally, into a gratuitous mess: instead of triumphing, liberalism went haywire and, after 1965, began a free-fall from which it has never recovered. The fact that the president who brought the Kennedy-Johnson tendencies to their logical conclusion - Richard Nixon - was a Republican seemed at first to set back the conservative cause. But Nixon was not a conservative. He was nominated in 1968 in part because he wasn't Goldwater and couldn't be tarred as a "crazy radical." The Watergate crisis (and the war that led to that crisis) were largely, and correctly, perceived as failures of the new, expensive, obtrusive, and frequently dysfunctional expanded government introduced by liberals. Nixon went along with it ("we are all Keynesians now," he famous said in 1972) and did big government a few times better - wage and price controls, entitlements and affirmative action as we now know them, and so on. His fall opened up a singular opportunity for conservatives, one taken by Reagan. The rest is history: a halt in the growth of domestic spending in the 1980s and 1990s, the successful and peaceful end of the Cold War, the end of "stagflation" and a generation-long success of low-inflation economic expansion and moderating the growth of the federal government. It was a stunning achievement, especially for a political movement - conservatism - that never gained majority acceptance. Buckley's approach saw to it that what we now call "identity politics" would not wreck his coalition and that, even when not having a strong influence over the Presidency, conservative ideas and policies shaped by those ideas would have their continued impact. Certainly, the rise of Clinton in 1992 was a direct response - "neoliberalism" - to the prior failure of liberalism and the success of conservatism. Clinton went on, chastened by the 1994 mid-term elections, to become the most conservative Democrat since - well, Grover Cleveland.

Buckley, like his movement, spent more recent years in ill-health. Certainly, the decline of conservatism after 1994 troubled him. Even more troubling was the return of "Nixonism," in the form of Bush Jr. and Karl Rove. This tendency started at the end of the 90s with a grand throwing-up-of-the-hands by conservatives, a giving-up on ever implementing a conservative program. Being the majority party in Congress put them into the position of actually having to decide whether to go ahead with serious reform, and they couldn't do it. (Many thought conservative reform politically impossible.) Another disturbing trend was the return of authoritarian, big-government populism, as signaled by Perot in 1992 and 1996, with its powerful tendency to split the right-leaning vote. (Indeed, Perot made Clinton's election and re-election possible.) To capture these voters for the Republican party meant dropping much, if not all, of conservatism as Buckley and others had defined it. The prize was permanently incorporating white southern and Catholic voters into the Republican coalition. The price: alienating everyone else - and proving multiple times over that big government fails for an inherent reason, not just when it's done by liberals. It also led, on an intellectual level, to nasty disputes between conservatives and libertarians on one side and neoconservatives on the other, those disaffected liberals who dropped out of the Democratic party in the 1970s and 80s. The opposition of many conservatives and libertarians to the Iraq war sharpened the nastiness.

Buckely's synthesis of traditionalism and "classical" liberalism (to use the L-word in its original and best sense) seemed unstable and incoherent to many. But it has proved enduring, like his very Catholic mix of faith and philosophical reason. It is both seriously intellectual, answering to that part of us that is consciously rational, and attractive because it recognizes the limits of individual reason. It combines with a classical liberal understanding of government a solid understanding of the limits of politics. Conservatives view society as more important than government, culture as more important than politics, and custom as more important than law. Buckley made his own contribution to culture as a prolific author and as host of public television's Firing Line for more than 30 years.**

He will be missed.
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* That exception was the semi-medieval views that had taken hold in the antebellum South regarding slavery, which then influenced the dominant American thinking about race from the end of Reconstruction, in the 1870s, until the 1950s.

** When Binah was a youngster, he was confused by Buckley's sometimes notoriously Latin-inflected discussions on Firing Line, reflecting Buckley's high-level Catholic education. Latin came later to Binah and, with it, some understanding of what Buckley was talking about. Buckley himself adopted a less erudite and more straightforward style in later years.