One more thing -- Jack Niewold's new book, Frail Web of Intention, is hot off the presses. You can buy it at Amazon for $18.71 or WinePress for $18.97. I have my copy already and I'm thoroughly enjoying it. You might too as evidenced by the fine writing and clear-headed thinking of Jack's essay here.
One of the enduring political mysteries of our time has to do with the transformation of traditional liberalism, say of the kind that prevailed in the 1950s and early 1960s, into left-wing, McGovernite radicalism of the 1970s. The difference between JFK, Scoop Jackson, Patrick Moynihan, or Hubert Humphrey, on the one hand, and their successors such as Barbara Boxer, John Kerry and George Miller, on the other, is profound. For whatever reason, the Democrats who came to power in the so-called “class of 1974” and the years following Watergate not only have never officially repudiated the violence and radicalism of the 60s’ New Left movement, they’ve embraced it in spirit, if not in deed. Many of those radicalized Democrats now sit in Congress: Henry Waxman, David Obey (ret.), Barney Frank, Pete Stark, and the others mentioned earlier. This doesn’t even get us to later ideologues such as Harry Reid, Dennis Kucinich, Nancy Pelosi, Maxine Waters or Barbara Lee.
The hard base of the Democratic Party today is heavily weighted with groups like La Raza, PETA, and Earth First, to say nothing of closed collectives given to the politics of intimidation, like SEIU. The Obama administration is home to doctrinaire left types such as Carol Browner, Anita Dunn, and Donald Berwick. Vann Jones was the exception in that his appointment failed. The President himself is a ruthless party man through and through, having made his bones at the feet of former revolutionary thugs such as Bill Ayers and rabble-rousers such as Jeremiah Wright.
Wright himself provides an interesting window to the fact that leftist radicals seem to have little hesitation making common cause with Islamic movements and various Muslim brotherhoods when it benefits them. It is a short step from Wright’s liberation theology to jihadi front groups like CAIR. This lineage—a radical, anti-democratic and potentially violent fringe informing and inspiring a larger circle of politicians, whose names we all know—is what we have to remember about the contemporary Democratic Party.
The Republican Party, for all its foibles, has none of this flirtation with radicalism and violence. Efforts to paint the Tea Party as a nest of racist vipers have routinely failed the straight face test, to say nothing of empirical data. Furthermore, outliers don’t matter. For every skinhead loner like Timothy McVeigh, there is a marxist loner like Ted Kaczynski.
The evolution, I would say the devolution, of the Democratic Party from its traditional liberal stances on social change and foreign affairs to a movement contemptuous of constitutional government and limited governance has been chronicled recently by William Voegeli. ”Liberals in the 1960s couldn’t bear the enmity and scorn of the New Left,” writes Voegeli, and so they surrendered. “Mainstream liberals mindlessly followed the Zeitgeist.” Voegeli goes on to frame “the intellectual dishonesty and moral cowardice of conventional liberals when confronted by the radical, violent, incoherent Left.”
This kind of intimidation is the governing impulse of modern liberalism, and has metastasized throughout the Democratic Party. You wonder how all those Blue Dog Democrats and nice moderates were rolled time and again by Nancy Pelosi during the healthcare putsch? For the answer, look to the 1960s and the legacy of those years now embodied in our President.
