Who killed liberalism?

John O’Sullivan's piece in the American Conservative -- "What Jackie Did Next" -- bears some points of striking resemblance to Paul Krugman's analysis in The Conscience of a Liberal. In his review of James Piereson's Camelot and the Cultural Revolution: How the Assassination of John F. Kennedy Shattered American Liberalism, O'Sullivan argues that conservatives should have been flattened after JFK's death and LBJ's sweep.

But something odd happened:

Instead, they made impressive gains in the 1966 midterm elections, won the presidency in 1968 and, delayed only briefly by Watergate, placed Reagan in the White House a decade later. Why had the seemingly inevitable gone into reverse?

Conservatives prospered, writes O'Sullivan, because liberals "picked up Oswald’s gun and turned it upon themselves."

In the age of Reid and Pelosi, it’s hard to remember that the liberalism of those days was the reigning public philosophy of American life. It dominated the universities, the media, the great foundations, business corporations, labor unions, and (until Goldwater) both political parties. This governing philosophy was very different from today’s querulous utopianism. Though it had already drunk deep of statism, it was also meliorist, pragmatic, patriotic, and problem-solving. It embodied the grand compromises of American politics. It believed in containing the Soviet Union but not in rolling it back. It advocated a moderate welfare state resting on a relatively free economy (relative, that is, to Western Europe). It supported the advance of civil rights through federal intervention, but was nervously ambivalent about the “freedom riders.” And because it dominated both parties—it was Eisenhower who had sent troops into Little Rock to enforce desegregation—liberalism seemed to be the immovable center of American politics.

Paul Krugman would agree with this view. Most reactionaries -- and most hard-core "progressives" -- would not.

(To read the rest, click "Permalink" below)

Reactionaries love their idealized view of a conservative American past. They refuse to acknowledge that this country was, in its post-war days of ascent and command, liberal to the core. Progressive purists would agree that the Republican and Democratic parties were, and are, indistinguishable, but they would never use the word "liberal" to describe that shared philosophy. Cue up the SIBPATS speech.

So how did the liberal behemoth commit suicide? O'Sullivan goes off the rails when he blames the liberal establishment's reaction to the Kennedy assassination. Not the assassination itself: The reaction.

Before anyone knew the identity of Kennedy’s assassin, his death was at once and widely attributed in media speculations to “extremists” and “bigots” on the Right.

This is silly. The period of confusion lasted hours, not days. Oswald was identified as a communist with unnerving rapidity. Oswald's radio debate with Carlos Bringuier received a nationwide broadcast even before Jack Ruby enacted his role in the drama.

Krugman, by contrast, has the guts to point to the actual cause of liberalism's demise: Johnson's signing of the Civil Rights Act. At a stroke, Johnson signed away the South. But more than that -- he jolted life into the conservative movement of William F. Buckley. Eventually, that movement gave us Ronnie and Dubya.

Before the Civil Rights Act, Americans understood that FDR's legacy of liberalism benefited all. But after the Act, conservatives could -- using euphemism and code words -- play on racial fears. Any government program to help the poor became framed as an unfair hand-out to lazy blacks. In Europe, a piece of social welfare legislation might cause the average person to nod in approval: "This helps me." In America, a similar law might cause a citizen to sneer: "This helps them." Not us; the Other. Black people.

An argument over history thus segues into current events, since the stir over Hillary's reference to LBJ and the Civil Rights Act has not yet ended. I consider it wrong and unjust to denigrate the political courage showed by the Democrats who enacted that legislation. They legislated away the southern part of the Democratic coalition. More than that: They mortally wounded the New Deal itself. They did the right thing, but let's not pretend that it was easy.

Like most conservatives, O'Sullivan refuses to confess that the growth of his movement in the 1960s, '70s and '80s owes a massive debt to racism. He foolishly prefers to blame the Warren Report critics, who viewed (and still view) Oswald as a tool of reactionary schemers within the intelligence community.

If Amerika had killed Kennedy, then liberalism was merely a smiley face painted on a System of racist and sexist oppression. Liberals could best atone for their participation in such a charade by supporting the revolution in all its exotic incoherence.

Ridiculous.

The "revolution," born of the reaction to Vietnam, was not embraced by the liberal establishment of the 1960s, and the youthful revolutionaries were more likely to view the Kennedys as pigs than as martyrs. I never let my readers forget about the radicals who shouted "Sirhan power!" in 1968.

O'Sullivan cites Norman Mailer as an exemplar of the New Left. But Mailer and his crowd never really befriended the Warren Commission critics -- in fact, Mailer went on to write an "Oswald diddit" book with the help of a partner who despised the critics and acted as an FBI informant.

Who killed the liberal consensus in America? Sorry, but we cannot blame Mark Lane, Peter Dale Scott or Jim Garrison. Neither can we point to Norman Mailer, Abby Hoffman, Gore Vidal, Jerry Rubin, or any number of other '60s era "progressive purists," although their picturesque antics did alienate many.

Who killed liberalism? Put LBJ, Bill Buckley and the televangelists in the line-up of suspects, and maybe we'll get somewhere.