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I answer Dr. Bastiat’s Question: JFK and the death of American hope
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Between the pill and age of the internet, there was the death of John F. Kennedy.
Before JFK was killed, the left believed in progress. Technology gave rise to wealth, penicillin and indoor plumbing. Humanity was moving from poor rural farms to glittering cities with cars and skyscrapers.
Things were looking up for black Americans as well. Blacks were making substantial progress in American society after decades of stifling Wilsonian Jim Crow. Just as importantly, black Americans were advancing economically as well as politically in the 1950s and 1960s, as Thomas Sowell has noted.
Internationally, Communism forged a unity among Americans. As much as conservatives (rightly) complain about FDR being soft on Communism, and Communists infiltrating Hollywood and the State Department, your average Democratic voter loved Jesus and hated Communists. Republicans and Democrats may not have liked the other party but usually didn’t hate them. Eisenhower Democrats were a thing, after all.
When JFK died, NYT editorialists responded by writing that America killed Kennedy because it was racist. That Lee Harvey Oswald was a Communist was forcibly ignored. This is a great interview about the subject here. Peter Robinson interviewed the author an eternity ago, but I can’t find that interview.
The death of JFK gave rise to punitive liberalism. It used to be that some liberals believed in affirmative action in order to make America more fair and equitable to previously oppressed populations. After JFK, affirmative action was necessary to punish white America. This is particularly odd considering JFK was a moderate with regard to Civil Rights. But when have convenient myths ever needed to be constrained by facts?
Meanwhile, racial equality degenerated into black power and the war on poverty became about transferring wealth to poor people who stayed poor. We forget how optimistic FDR’s and JFK’s left-liberalism was. They thought that they could end poverty through technocratic allocations of wealth. Why did LBJ declare a war on poverty? Because he thought he could win it. Lefties today talk about how the poor will always be poor so they should receive various forms of financial aid.
Though not as materially important, American academic life became more and more corrupted and this has enervated the nation’s spirit. A source of serious thought about American advantages and weaknesses became worse than useless. Listen to Yeonmi Park’s take on college if you don’t believe me.
Perhaps most importantly, family life fell apart. This was mostly due to the pill and abortion, but I also think cultural factors were a big deal as well. I disagree with the materialist view of the world that scientific advancements and physical resources are the only things that determine history. The loss of confidence in Western Civilization that Dr. Bastiat laments has to do with the West telling itself the wrong stories.
I think the death of JFK was more of a symbolic event than one that shifted world history. Still, I think that single event is the best marker of the shift between an optimistic left-liberalism and a bitter and punitive left-liberalism.
Published in General
If conservatives were
smartsavy they would invest in investigative journalists to go to in and talk to all the old people in University Park Elementary. Dan Rather probably lied about everything but I still want more proof.I think that was regarding the civil rights bill. Anyway, his motivation was the same for all his actions.
So do you disagree with the tens of thousands of people who have said World War I was the end of the belief in progress?
I didn’t know about that, either. What I remember is that for the next ten years after JFK’s death the news media were blaming the assassination on the American right and the “spirit of Dallas.” I hadn’t known about Dan Rather’s part in it.
I think that was a much greater phenomenon in Europe than in the US, the difference being driven mainly by relative casualty numbers and length of time in the war.
See my post Western Civilization and the First World War.
A lot of writers don’t make that distinction, but you are probably right.
A large part of the 70s were spent arguing whether or not the Vietnam War would have happened if JFK had lived. Kennedy’s close advisors (or, as I call them, sycophants) swore that Kennedy had promised he was “pulling out” of Vietnam after the 1964 election. To me, this was ridiculous as Kennedy was the consummate cold warrior and would have never left Southeast Asia.
Still, the northeastern liberals cling to their fable. Folklore dies hard.
I don’t think Kennedy was the consummate cold warrior. Part of the reason some think so is the narrative his sycophants have pushed about the 1962 missile crisis.
Several months ago I had some trouble reconciling some of my family memories of October 1962 and the dates in my mother’s diary with the standard narrative of the episode. Studying some old newspapers from the era (using my newspapers.com subscription) refreshed my memory even more and helped to reconcile the two.
Suffice it to say that right-wing newspapers in the U.S. (such as the Omaha World-Herald, which I read daily) and conservative members of the Congress had been screaming about Soviet missiles in Cuba, and the administration had been pooh-poohing the danger, long before the usual narrative has JFK becoming aware of the missiles, which supposedly initiated the crisis and led to his showdown with Khrushchev.
In our family we had discussed whether we should really travel to North Dakota for a funeral when there was a danger of nuclear war started by missiles from Cuba. We decided to go, anyway. The part I had trouble reconciling with the dates of the crisis was that we had gone to ND and returned well before Kennedy had supposedly been made aware of the missiles. In my mind at the time, perhaps due to naiveté, as I was only a freshman in high school, the crisis so much emphasized in the news media was at the time just the denouement in my mind. Finally Kennedy had admitted the problem and done something about it. The dangerous part, in my mind, was before that, when he wouldn’t admit there was a danger.
Tom Lehrer called it the “most sanctimonious song ever written,” and he’s probably correct. It’s the smug little snippy recitation of the privileged little brat who romanticizes the cold-water walk-up apartments in the city with their wonderful vibrancy. Who wants great green veldts of suburban backyards when you can have children scampering in the gush of an open hydrant?
The new Left hated the private realms afforded by the suburban house, so they had to invent the narrative of stifling conformity. Because, you know, people pressed into dense communal spaces are known for their incandescent individuality – enjoyed and celebrated by all their neighbors! – and people who have the privacy to live as they wish impose upon themselves all manner of repressive behaviors. In case Hoover and McCarthy are watching, you know.
I had taken up JFK’s challenge and was working on the Apollo program putting a man on the moon.
In case anyone checks up on my story, I should point out that I don’t think newspapers.com has the Omaha World-Herald in its collection. But that was the only newspaper I had available for reading in 1962, and it was a very conservative newspaper at the time. What I found in newspapers.com was other conservative newspapers, and their news items about the missiles in Cuba all of a sudden brought back memories of the kinds of things I had been reading in 1962. I think we also got Human Events at our house in those days, and I may have read some things there, too.
Also, I should mention that I always read the comics and sports before reading the news, even throughout October 1962. Didn’t Ronald Reagan also say he always read the sports and comics first?
I am so old I remember when there were right-wing (or at least Republican) newspapers. In major cities.
As Podhoretz might say, it’s worse than that. At age 4 I’d already seen so many wallet-sized Sacred Hearts tucked into the frames of so many newspaper sized JFK posters that I briefly thought they were the same person.
“They’re all made out of ticky-tacky and the all look just the same”
And yet commie Malvina Reynolds never expressed any misgivings about the truly low quality mass housing in the Soviet Union–not to mention low quality food and low quality consumer goods.
There’s always a longing to be in a permanently superior position…culturally, financially, morally. There’s the contempt for the nouveaux riches, the late adopters, Johnny-come latelys. What good is a club anyone can join? The Beats were pathetic and could only win in a game they made up themselves.
They still do. There is nothing simultaneously more odd and boring than a leftist ranting against suburbs, single family houses, and even townhomes/condominiums.
And yet as I recall it was massively popular on the left, including among the supposedly freedom-loving individualist counterculturalists and hippies.
There’s no one inflection point. Reagan had Morning in America 20 years later. And importantly the Soviets really started breaking down when their bankruptcy (moral, financial) was publicly discussed every day. It’s scary how much is controlled by narrative. Makes us look shallow as a species.
I was in a Catholic elementary school in Miami during the Bay of Pigs fiasco and the Missle Crisis. I knew Cuban kids who had fathers and uncles who went to Venezuela to train for the invasion. We had regular nuclear attack drills because we were reminded constantly that the Russians had placed missiles “only 90 miles away” (even though more like 200 miles but, hey, it was a crisis.) The grownups all thought war was a very real possibility.
Some historians say that Khrushchev sized up Kennedy as weak in their personal meeting and decided he could be bullied. (The politburo and military leadership was horrified at Khruschev’s recklessness and ultimately sacked him in 1964.) The US surrendered forward missile placements in Turkey and Italy and promised not to re-invade Cuba. The Soviets kept nuclear-capable bombers in Cuba. On net, Kennedy lost ground in that confrontation.
I do recall an uncle (a Democrat) saying that the Russians would never have attempted that stunt if Ike was still president.
I had a left-leaning history teacher that discussed the Bay of Pigs with the assessment, “Say what you want about Eisenhower, the man knew a thing of two about planning an invasion.”
Evan Thomas wrote an interesting book (“Ike’s Bluff”) about how Ike refused to disclose under what circumstances he would press the button. An outstanding poker player as a young man, he knew that keeping an adversary guessing had power. I doubt he would have OK’ed the Bay of Pigs but I also think that the Russians would not have attempted the missile placement on his watch.
“Lefties today talk about how the poor will always be poor so they should receive various forms of financial aid.”
No one has talked about this little gem so far. A blogger I used to read often commented on this in a couple ways.
I believe it was Richard Reeves who said in his book that JFK was a bit shaken when Eisenhower calmly discussed options for nuclear war with JFK, reminding him that Polaris was an invulnerable asset, during a briefing as JFK prepared to take office.
This is part of the scam. There is no consideration of standard of living. If the poor people have McMansions with a Rolls in the driveway, they’re still poor because someone has a bigger house and two Rolls.
Does anyone know the number of people on government side of the welfare systems? How many programs at how many levels of government, and how many people whose jobs depend on keeping those programs in place? They are a huge constituency, I’d guess.
To be clear, I spoke of belief in progress in the period of my boomer youth. During the post-war boom America was optimistic for sure. I suppose when Beatlemania hit (with the last Boomers still in diapers) the older generations were surprised how quickly we’d seized a big share the popular culture.
Social trends can be exaggerated by media content, often with conflicting themes to complete the picture: “Little Boxes” vs. “Father Knows Best”; “The Cosby Show” vs. “Married With Children.”
More important than content — arguably even more important than the stories we commission — is the impact of changing media tech itself. We don’t know who discovered water, but we know it wasn’t a fish is us trying to figure out the effects of media in real time. The first iPhone came out in 2007. It seemed like a good idea at the time.
Our population churns faster than a Paramount+ subscriber. Some youngest of the WWI generations were still around in 1960. We boomers knew them and picked up little tidbits. (Flat feet kept one of my great uncles out of the trenches.)
The massive flight of urban ethnics to suburbia post-WWII included many of my grandfather’s brothers who had lived through WWI, the Depression, and WWII. Their children, the “greatest generation” which fought but mostly didn’t command WWII, moved in significant numbers to suburbia to raise their Boomers, e.g. my suburban/exurban cousins.
For now, we remember the decades we shared with our parents’ generation well enough to remember certain inflection points in history. We’ll disagree about exactly what they were, just as my Boomer cousins and I respectfully disagree on the richness of sub/exurban vs. urban living.
I think those people are confusing progress with Progressivism.
Wasn’t bay of pigs planned under Ike?
There will always be a bottom 10%.