Sunday, April 04, 2004
CONSERVATIVES AND LIBERALS CHANGE PLACES
Here's an excellent essay about how the left and right in America have swapped thematic approaches to politics over the last 50 years, with the main ingredients having changed hands being optimism and pessimism. The author puts the turning point in the Johnson administration:
Optimism is difficult to maintain when things don't turn out the way they're forecasted. No one was more an apostle of liberal optimism than Lyndon Johnson, who had studied, after all, at Roosevelt's knee, but the Vietnam War eroded confidence in government and ultimately forced liberals into a pessimism about the value of trying to do good in an uncertain and dangerous world. Indeed, the war divided the Democratic Party not only between hawks and doves but also between those who believed in America's mission as the beacon of freedom and those who had come to doubt it. Once the war turned bad, liberals turned wary, fixating on examining how things had gone wrong. As everyone now knows, this was the new liberalism -- gun-shy and cautious. It no longer embraced a "rendezvous with destiny," as Roosevelt had declared. By the 1970s and the Carter administration, it had a meeting with malaise.
Excellent analysis.
GB, THHotA
posted by Greg 8:51 AM
