Ac-Cent-Tchu-Ate the Positive

You got to ac-cent-tchu-ate the positive
E-lim-i-nate the negative
And latch on to the affirmative
Don't mess with Mister In-Between

— Song lyric by Johnny Mercer

During these tense times when the government is partially shut down, we may wonder what has gone wrong. Why are we so polarized between liberal Democrats and hard-line Republicans that we can't pass a budget or even a continuing resolution through Congress, and possibly can't head off the threat of a default on paying our government's bills?

Washington Post columnist
George F. Will

George F. Will has a column in today's Washington Post that gives some insight. "When liberals became scolds" has it that liberalism went wrong in America as far back as the time of the Kennedy assassination in 1963. President John F. Kennedy was shot to death in Dealey Plaza in Dallas on Friday, November 22, 1963, and within two days liberals were downplaying the identity of the putative assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, and playing up a kind of collective American guilt that stemmed from “the hatred and bitterness that has been injected into the life of our nation by bigots," per then-Chief Justice Earl Warren.

Will extends the thought:

New York Times columnist
James Reston

The next day, James Reston, the New York Times luminary, wrote in a front-page story that Kennedy was a victim of a “streak of violence in the American character,” noting especially “the violence of the extremists on the right.”

(Oswald was actually a self-styled communist, not an "extremist on the right," nor a "bigot." The Warren Commission, headed by the then-Chief Justice, determined that Oswald acted alone in killing JFK, though many have since believed he had co-conspirators.)

Will's point is this:

The bullets fired on Nov. 22, 1963, could shatter the social consensus that characterized the 1950s only because powerful new forces of an adversarial culture were about to erupt through society’s crust. Foremost among these forces was the college-bound population bulge — baby boomers with their sense of entitlement and moral superiority, vanities encouraged by an intelligentsia bored by peace and prosperity and hungry for heroic politics.

Liberalism’s disarray during the late 1960s, combined with Americans’ recoil from liberal hectoring, catalyzed the revival of conservatism in the 1970s ...

... and, he adds, led to the election of the conservative President Ronald Reagan, who was first sworn in in 1980.

Adversarial culture? Will says:

Under Kennedy, liberalism began to become more stylistic than programmatic. After him — especially after his successor, Lyndon Johnson, a child of the New Deal, drove to enactment the Civil Rights Act, Medicare and Medicaid — liberalism became less concerned with material well-being than with lifestyle and cultural issues such as feminism, abortion and sexual freedom.

35th president John F. Kennedy

As a 16-year-old in 1963, I lived through those times. And, yes, we had a lot of material well-being ... though we also discovered the "other America":  a large minority of our citizens who were mired in poverty from one generation to the next. Too, we all had to confront the reality of racial prejudice in the land. But as of the time of JFK's assassination, most Americans of a liberal bent were still inclined to "ac-cent-tchu-ate the positive" more than rue the negative.

Civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr.

By 1968, at the height of the protests against the Vietnam War and in the wake of the twin assassinations that year of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, that had flipped. To many who were then speaking from and for the left, America was now considered a poisonous place. The country's history was mainly one of several negative -isms: racism, sexism, imperialism, and the like. "Tear down the walls!" went the leftist mantra.

If you were a liberal, no matter how close to or far from the center, you were infected by it. America: angry leftists wanted to end it, moderate liberals wanted to mend it ... but all on the left came to think more in terms of its historical poison than about the sheer nobility of the grand American enterprise.

That's what George Will is getting at:

Hitherto a doctrine of American celebration and optimism, liberalism would now become a scowling indictment ... 

Hence:

The new liberalism-as-paternalism would be about correcting other people’s defects.

Those "lifestyle and cultural issues such as feminism, abortion and sexual freedom" which took over the liberal mindset were typically couched, accordingly, in negative terms. Liberals' occasional perfunctory nods to America's greatness were at odds with an overarching narrative of American guilt. This is a narrative which — I think Will is correct here — has not played well with American audiences in general.

President Obama
ought to look like this
more often

Thus during the Obama presidency we have heard the president called, by his enemies, not a real American. Thus the endless foolish assertion that he was not really born an American citizen. Thus the claim that Obamacare is actually a foot-in-the-door for an alien socialism. And thus the tea party, which would rather bring down Obamacare than make sure the federal government has enough funds to stay solvent.

I think Will is right: liberals started shooting themselves in the foot as far back as the JFK assassination. I call myself oldstyleliberal because I would rather we liberals take back the night and start talking up America's fundamental greatness again. Then, after we have stopped demonizing the right, and vice versa, perhaps our politicians can get back to doing what they're supposed to do: engaging in the fruitful art of compromise.