But that was unacceptable to liberals—both on November 22 and the days afterward and for years to come. Will notes that the New York Times promptly offered its own explanation in the editorial “Spiral of Hate”: at fault was “the spirit of madness and hate that struck down” Kennedy, for which all Americans must bear the “shame.” Comments Will, “Hitherto a doctrine of American celebration and optimism, liberalism would now become a scowling indictment: Kennedy was killed by America’s social climate whose sickness required ‘punitive liberalism.’” Liberals became scolds, and scolds they would remain.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
First of all, the book is six years old and the events it examines half a century past, so why is Will bringing them up now? What is he trying to say about our present difficulties in Washington, which he does not address at all but which, I suppose, if looked at in a certain way through the right tinted lenses, could be called another moment of punitive liberal scolding? Certainly there is no shortage of liberals who believe President Obama, Washington, and the country are beset by right-wing madness and hate. A friend who recently made the trip tells me that if I were to drive south all the way to the Gulf listening to local talk radio stations, the din of ignorant rage would curl my toes.
“This latter attack occurred barely two weeks after the historic civil rights march in Washington D.C., where on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, Martin Luther King delivered his historic ‘I Have a Dream’ speech, and only a week after George Wallace, the segregationist governor of Alabama, openly defied a federal court order to integrate the public schools of Birmingham.”
In fact, in Will’s view, the rot was setting in even before the assassination. “Under Kennedy, liberalism began to become more stylistic than programmatic. After him—especially after his successor, Lyndon Johnson, drove to enactment the Civil Rights Acts, Medicare and Medicaid—liberalism became less concerned with material well-being than with lifestyle, and cultural issues such as feminism, abortion and sexual freedom.”
