Kennedy death week continues...

I saw the last half of a show on the RFK assassination last night and I had a thought--it's not such a brilliant one, but I never hear anybody say it, and so it falls to yours truly, Idiot Humorist.



American Liberalism of the Rooseveltian type didn't die, as the Reaganauts would have you believe. It was murdered. The cumulative effect of the assassinations of John Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King, and Malcolm X--not to mention Medgar Evers and surely some people I'm forgetting--weakened American liberalism in two ways. First, it changed the standard-bearers.There's a difference between Bobby Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey--and just because charisma is difficult to quantify, that doesn't mean it can't make the difference in politics. All of those men were less than 50, too; so they would've been prominent leaders for at least another 15 years, and probably more. Who knows what solutions they would've offered? Second, the assassinations sent a powerful message to the country as a whole: change will get you killed. The assassinations vastly ratcheted up the role of fear in American politics, and a fearful population is a more conservative one.



So: you don't have to be a Kennedy-worshipper (which I am not) or a misty-eyed Boomer or a rapid conspiracy nut to see this: American liberalism was murdered; 1933-1968, R.I.P. We can quibble over the details and get lost in the personalities, but much of what we have now in this country, politically speaking, is the hateful, selfish, slime that moved into the vacuum the assassinations left.