1. "
there has been a slow but steady decline of which liberals have been steadfastly oblivious. The heirs of the New Deal are down to around 20% of the electorate, according to recent Gallup polls. Conservatives account for 42% of the vote, and in the recent election the independents, the second most numerous group at 29% of the electorate, broke the conservatives' way. They were alarmed by the deficit.
2. Liberalism's decline might appear, at first glance, to have begun with the 1961 inauguration of President John F. Kennedywhen historians noted the first glimmerings of what was to become liberalism's distinctive trait, overreach. On the domestic side, the oratory set in motion President Lyndon Johnson's catastrophic War on Poverty.
a. JFK's stirring language represented a break with the Burkean understanding of President Dwight Eisenhower. Ike, whether he articulated it or not, wanted to put the Great Depression and the dangerous confrontations of the early Cold War period behind us. He wanted to return to normalcy.
3. Still, in tracing liberalism's decline, one cannot ignore an earlier event: the civil war that broke out in the aftermath of World War II. The conflict pitted what we might call the radicals led by Henry Wallace against the advocates of what Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. would call in his book, "The Vital Center," more practical liberals like Hubert Humphrey, Joseph L. Rauh and Walter Reuther. They were hard-headed and patriotic, and their desiderata were reasonable by comparison with the radicals' utopian ideas about the Soviet Union.
4. The practical liberals won in the late 1940s, but in 1972 civil war broke out anew. This time the radicals won. In the meantime, LBJ's Great Society caused even some liberals to warn against the "unintended consequences" of government programs. These were to be the first new recruits to modern conservatism. Jeane Kirkpatrick, Irving Kristol and, for a time, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, were in Kristol's words liberals "who were mugged by reality."
5. Conservatives have had Edmund Burke and the Founding Fathers as their cynosures. Sometimes they have provided discipline; sometimes conservatives have followed their own star. The problem for liberals is they have been denied a cynosure. Some had looked to the British Fabian Socialists and some to Karl Marx, but since the late 1940s liberals became coy about their intellectual mentors.
6. Conservatism has steadily spread through the country since its larval days in the 1950s, and the reason is that the vast majority of Americans favor free enterprise and personal liberty. Note the tea party movement. The Republicans just took the House of Representatives by over 60 seats and gained six seats in the Senate. The social democrat in the White House has been routed.
7. Over the past two years the Democrats showed their true colors. Faced with an entitlement crisis, they rang up trillion dollar deficits. We now face an entitlement crisis and a budget crisisand liberals have no answer for it beyond tax and spend. They still have support in the media, but even here they are faced with opposition from Fox News, talk radio and the Internet.
a. As a political movement liberalism is dead. They do not have the numbers. They do not have the policies. They have 23 seats in the Senate to defend in 2012 (against the Republicans' 10) and Republican control of state houses and legislatures will give them even more seats in the future. Liberalism R.I.P. "
R. Emmett Tyrell Jr.: LiberalismAn Autopsy - WSJ.com
(emphasis mine)
2. Liberalism's decline might appear, at first glance, to have begun with the 1961 inauguration of President John F. Kennedywhen historians noted the first glimmerings of what was to become liberalism's distinctive trait, overreach. On the domestic side, the oratory set in motion President Lyndon Johnson's catastrophic War on Poverty.
a. JFK's stirring language represented a break with the Burkean understanding of President Dwight Eisenhower. Ike, whether he articulated it or not, wanted to put the Great Depression and the dangerous confrontations of the early Cold War period behind us. He wanted to return to normalcy.
3. Still, in tracing liberalism's decline, one cannot ignore an earlier event: the civil war that broke out in the aftermath of World War II. The conflict pitted what we might call the radicals led by Henry Wallace against the advocates of what Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. would call in his book, "The Vital Center," more practical liberals like Hubert Humphrey, Joseph L. Rauh and Walter Reuther. They were hard-headed and patriotic, and their desiderata were reasonable by comparison with the radicals' utopian ideas about the Soviet Union.
4. The practical liberals won in the late 1940s, but in 1972 civil war broke out anew. This time the radicals won. In the meantime, LBJ's Great Society caused even some liberals to warn against the "unintended consequences" of government programs. These were to be the first new recruits to modern conservatism. Jeane Kirkpatrick, Irving Kristol and, for a time, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, were in Kristol's words liberals "who were mugged by reality."
5. Conservatives have had Edmund Burke and the Founding Fathers as their cynosures. Sometimes they have provided discipline; sometimes conservatives have followed their own star. The problem for liberals is they have been denied a cynosure. Some had looked to the British Fabian Socialists and some to Karl Marx, but since the late 1940s liberals became coy about their intellectual mentors.
6. Conservatism has steadily spread through the country since its larval days in the 1950s, and the reason is that the vast majority of Americans favor free enterprise and personal liberty. Note the tea party movement. The Republicans just took the House of Representatives by over 60 seats and gained six seats in the Senate. The social democrat in the White House has been routed.
7. Over the past two years the Democrats showed their true colors. Faced with an entitlement crisis, they rang up trillion dollar deficits. We now face an entitlement crisis and a budget crisisand liberals have no answer for it beyond tax and spend. They still have support in the media, but even here they are faced with opposition from Fox News, talk radio and the Internet.
a. As a political movement liberalism is dead. They do not have the numbers. They do not have the policies. They have 23 seats in the Senate to defend in 2012 (against the Republicans' 10) and Republican control of state houses and legislatures will give them even more seats in the future. Liberalism R.I.P. "
R. Emmett Tyrell Jr.: LiberalismAn Autopsy - WSJ.com
(emphasis mine)
