The goo-goo campaign of George McGovern could only have taken place in the wake of the Democratic Party Convention riots of 1968. The riots of 1968 could only have taken place in the wake of the convention seating conflict of 1964.
Now, James Piereson, in Commentary Magazine, focuses on the JFK assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald.
In Lee Harvey Oswald and the Liberal Crack-Up, Mr. Pierson reminds us of how vital and central the Democratic Party, and Liberalism in general, were to the American scene. And motes how the political left and right have swapped places.
Liberalism entered the 1960'’s as the vital force in American politics, riding a wave of accomplishment running from the Progressive era through the New Deal and beyond. A handsome young president, John F. Kennedy, had just been elected on the promise to extend the unfinished agenda of reform. Liberalism owned the future, as Orwell might have said. Yet by the end of the decade, liberal doctrine was in disarray, with some of its central assumptions broken by the experience of the immediately preceding years. It has yet to recover.Piereson reminds us that the nation was ready to see American intolerance as the root cause of Kennedy's death. When the assasin was shown to be a Communist, indeed a Castro supporter, the cognative dissonance was too great for many liberal-thinking people. So they created the Queen Mother of all conspiracy theories.
What happened? There is, of course, a litany of standard answers, from the political to the cultural to the psychological, each seeking to explain the great upheaval summed up in that all-purpose phrase, "“the 60's."” To some, the relevant factor was a long overdue reaction to the repressions and pieties of 1950'’s conformism. To others, the watershed event was the escalating war in Vietnam, sparking an opposition movement that itself escalated into widespread disaffection from received political ideas and indeed from larger American purposes. Still others have pointed to the simmering racial tensions that would burst into the open in riots and looting, calling into question underlying assumptions about the course of integration if not the very possibility of social harmony.
No doubt, the combination of these and other events had much to do with driving the nation'’s political culture to the Left in the latter half of the decade. But there can be no doubt, either, that an event from the early 1960'’s--—namely, the assassination of Kennedy himself--—contributed heavily. As many observers have noted, Kennedy'’s death seemed somehow to give new energy to the more extreme impulses of the Left, as not only left-wing ideas but revolutionary leftist leaders--—Marx, Lenin, Mao, Ho Chi Minh, and Castro among them--—came in the aftermath to enjoy a greater vogue in the United States than at any other time in our history. By 1968, student radicals were taking over campuses and joining protest demonstrations in support of a host of extreme causes.
John F. Kennedy's very coolness (and believe me kids, he was the essence of cool) became the inkblot upon which every kook faction of the Democratic Party, not to mention the Socialists, Communists, and every other party of the left could project their own gestalt.
In the end, the mantle of Paranoid Party passed from the John Birchers and their insistence that flouridation was a Ruskie plot to poison our precious bodily fluids, to the Democratic Underground types that see plots and conspiracies everywhere.
Illuminati, thy name is Haliburton.
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