Liberals As Scolds [OregonMuse]

I tend to look at Washington Post columnist George Will as one of those tame 'house' conservatives who doesn't dare get too rambunctious or else he won't get invited to the D.C. swells' cocktail parties. Perhaps I'm being unfair. But nevertheless, I don't read him all that often.

But occasionally he'll line one over the outfielder's glove for extra bases. Like this column here, that I pulled out of the sidebar a day or two ago. In it, Will talks about how the liberals shifted the responsibility for JFK's assassination from an actual person to a a vague, amorphous 'culture' or 'Spiral of Hate'. And he argues that it ruined liberalism, turning it into something warped and deranged:

The bullets of Nov. 22, 1963, altered the nation’s trajectory less by killing a president than by giving birth to a destructive narrative about America. Fittingly, the narrative was most injurious to the narrators. Their recasting of the tragedy in order to validate their curdled conception of the nation marked a ruinous turn for liberalism, beginning its decline from political dominance.

Punitive liberalism preached the necessity of national repentance for a history of crimes and misdeeds that had produced a present so poisonous that it murdered a president. To be a liberal would mean being a scold. Liberalism would become the doctrine of grievance groups owed redress for cumulative inherited injuries inflicted by the nation’s tawdry history, toxic present and ominous future.

As the poet says, read the whole thing. The JFK assassination may have been the first time that liberals blamed a national tragedy on 'right wing hate'. And they've been getting lots of practice ever since.

posted by Open Blogger at 07:45 PM

| Access Comments