Posted by
InchDeep on Friday, April 04, 2008 6:01:31 PM
Apparently that idiot E. J. Dionne thinks so. This is the tower of intellect that wrote that piece of crap
"Souled Out: Reclaiming Faith and Politics after the Religious Right." I guess Carter and Clinton were conservative Republicans in disguise?? What tool.
From the Washington Post.
Forty years ago, American liberalism suffered a blow from which it has
still not recovered. On April 4, 1968, a relatively brief but
extraordinary moment of progressive reform ended, and a long period of
conservative ascendancy began.
The assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.
and the ensuing riots that engulfed the nation's capital and big cities
across the country signaled the collapse of liberal hopes in a smoky
haze of self-doubt and despair. Conservatives, on the run for much of
the decade, found a broad new audience for their warnings against the
disorders and disruptions bred by reform.
A shrewd politician named Richard Nixon
sensed the direction of the political winds. When President Johnson's
commission on urban unrest released its report in early 1968 and blamed
the previous year's rioting on "white racism," Nixon would have none of
it. The commission, he said, "blames everybody for the riots except the
perpetrators of the riots." He urged "retaliation."
Nixon knew that his call for law and order was drawing working-class
whites away from their alliance with the New Deal and the Great
Society. "I have found great audience response to this theme in all
parts of the country," Nixon wrote to former president Dwight D. Eisenhower.
It is easy to forget that the core themes of contemporary conservatism
were born in response to the events of 1968. The attacks on "big
government," the defense of states' rights, and the scorn for "liberal
judicial activism," "liberal do-gooders," "liberal elitists," "liberal
guilt" and "liberal permissiveness" were rooted in the reaction that
gathered force as liberal optimism receded.
From the death of John F. Kennedy
in November 1963 until the congressional elections of November 1966,
liberals were triumphant, and what they did changed the world. Civil
rights and voting rights, Medicare and Medicaid,
clean air and clean water legislation, Head Start, the Job Corps and
federal aid to schools had their roots in the liberal wave that began
to ebb when Lyndon Johnson's Democrats suffered broad losses in the 1966 voting. The decline that 1966 signaled was sealed after April 4, 1968.
Liberals themselves share blame for the waning of their movement. Just
because right-wing politicians used "law and order" as a code for race
did not mean that concern about crime was illegitimate. On the
contrary, the country was in the opening stages of a serious crime wave
and had good reason to worry about rising violence.
Liberalism itself was cracking up in 1968. Liberals had turned on each other over Johnson's Vietnam
policy. The old civil rights coalition splintered as advocates of
racial integration warred with defenders of Black Power, a slogan
voiced in 1966 by a young activist named Stokely Carmichael.
Martin Luther King left this earth at a moment of gloom, at least
about the short term. "I feel this summer will not only be as bad but
worse than last time," he said, four days before his death, in a sermon
at Washington's National Cathedral. He was referring to the urban riots
of the previous summer. And then came the days of chaos that followed
his assassination.
"For those who had dreamed the dreams of the New Frontier, and
shared the hopes of a Great Society, this was perhaps the darkest
moment of the entire decade," wrote Godfrey Hodgson, a British
journalist who stands as one of the wisest chroniclers of the 1960s.
Forty years later, is it possible to recapture the hope and energy
of the days and years before that April 4? Has liberalism spent enough
time in purgatory for the country to revisit how much was accomplished
in its name and to acknowledge that the nation is better off for what
the liberals did?
In "The Liberal Hour," an important new history of the '60s that
will be published in July, Colby College scholars G. Calvin Mackenzie
and Robert S. Weisbrot note that for all its deficiencies, the period
of liberal sway "demonstrated what democratic politics can produce when
public consensus crescendos, when coherent majorities prevail, and when
skilled leaders provide direction, inspiration, and relentless energy."
For decades before the 1960s, conservatism was held in contempt by
large swaths of the intellectual and political class. It was one of the
great achievements of William F. Buckley Jr., whose death we mourned a
few weeks ago, to insist that respect be paid to the great tradition
whose cause he championed.
Now is the moment to put an end to our contempt for liberalism.
There was business left unfinished on that fateful day in 1968, and it
is time to take it up again.