Now it is time to disparage the state of the contemporary American left and, for a change, I'll be direct and to the point. FDR's strategy to use the resources of government to help out the little guy during the Great Depression has become an overbearing, intrusive, wasteful, and counterproductive government machine. The political movement that set out to protect the powerless and truly disenfranchised in the early 1960s has become a conglomeration of perpetual victim groups and the elites who claim to know what is best for them (and everyone else too). Finally, and worst of all, the patriotism of the World War II generation of liberals gave way to skepticism over Vietnam and then frank opposition to any projection of American military power ever since. While I believe that history has proven the ideas of the American liberal movement wrong, I can understand the first two and might have even joined in if I had been there. On foreign policy though I have no sympathy and find the current stance of the American Liberal something between naive and contemptible.Where (or when) did it all go wrong? The economic ideas were wrong from the start. But when did the honorable (if ultimately misguided) social ideas of Wilson, Roosevelt, Truman and Kennedy become so wrapped up in divisive identity politics. Where did the patriotism of the Greatest Generation give way to the anti-Americanism of the new radical left? Answer: Grant Park, Chicago, the week of the National Democratic Convention in late August 1968.
In 1968 American politics belonged to the Democratic party and the Liberal establishment. But at the national convention the "revolution" that had followed the Summer of Love took to the streets to oppose the Vietnam War, which at that time was still supported by most of bourgeois America, and to support the anti-war candidates Eugene McCarthy and George McGovern. Violent riots broke out between the Chicago police and the protesters, mostly college students. Hubert Humphrey, the establishment candidate, went on to win the nomination and then lose the general election by a tiny margin to the previously unlikely Richard Nixon.
So although they lost that battle, the revolutionary left had now thrown down the gauntlet. They had made a loud statement and probably cost the Democrats the general election. (A big chunk of usually Democratic votes went to the reactionary George Wallace and who knows how many switched to Nixon or, more likely, just turned on, tuned in and dropped out) Those riots were the opening salvo of the revolutionary takeover of the Liberal movement. The baby-boomer college kids who protested, fought the cops and rejected the establishment candidate Humphrey went on to become the leaders of todays Democratic party, the universities and the media. It's been downhill ever since.
