53. However, in this work Dewey called the existing society the Great Society. He hoped that the state could transform the Great Society into what he called the "Great Community." But Dewey's Great Community sounds much closer to what Johnson had in mind with his Great Society.
54. Robert R. Semple Jr., "Nation Seeks Way to Better Society," New York Times, July 25, 1965.
55. Dewey, Liberalism and Social Action, pp. 15, 76. The lineage of the War on Poverty was similarly transparent. Just as the New Deal was sold in the language of war, the War on Poverty was another chapter in the Progressive effort to invoke the "moral equivalent of war." Indeed, most of the Great Society programs were merely greatly expanded versions of New Deal programs, such as Aid to Families with Dependent Children, which started as an insurance plan for the widows of coal miners. Those programs, in turn, were born out of a desire to re-create the "successes" of Wilson's war socialism. See also the chapter on John Dewey by Robert Horwitz, in The History of Political Philosophy, ed. Leo Strauss and Joseph Cropsey (Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 1987).
56. McLoughlin, Revivals, Awakenings, and Reform, p. 207.
57. John B. Judis, "The Spirit of '68: What Really Caused the Sixties," New Republic, Aug. 31, 1998.
58. The Feminine Mystique is an excellent example of how powerfully the Holocaust had distorted the liberal mind. A longtime communist journalist and activist, Friedan cast herself in The Feminine Mystique as a conventional housewife completely ignorant of politics. In a disturbing extended metaphor she argued that housewives were victims of Nazi-like oppression. The "women who 'adjust' as housewives, who grow up wanting to be 'just a housewife,' are in as much danger as the millions who walked to their own death in the concentration camps," she wrote. The home, Friedan wrote in direct echoes of Horkheimer, was a "comfortable concentration camp." The analogy is sufficiently grotesque, intellectually and morally, to merit further dissection.
59. This in turn led to another front of the great awakening: a fight to religious orthodoxy among Christian conservatives and others who rejected the politicization of their faiths.
60. For many, drugs became the new sacrament. After the New Left imploded, Tom Hayden went into hiding "among the psychedelic daredevils of the counterculture," believing that drugs were a way of "deepening self awareness" and helping him to find spiritual meaning and authenticity. Even the most ardent exponents of the drug culture grounded their defense of drugs in explicitly religious terms. Self-proclaimed gurus such as Timothy Leary, a Harvard professor who became a "spiritual guide" with tabs of acid as his Communion wafers, spoke incessantly about how drugs lead to a "religious experience." William Braden, a reporter for the Chicago Sun-Times, wrote The Private Sea: LSD and the Search for God, one of countless books and tracts that tried to update the new counterculture with the "New Theology," as it was called.
61. William Braden, "The Seduction of the Spirit," Washington Post, Sept. 9, 1973, pp. BW1, BW13.
62. The Reverend Martin Marty, an academic theologian and editor at the Christian Century, proclaimed in a series of speeches in 1965 that the radicals were "moral agents" and described writers such as James Baldwin as "charismatic prophets." Marty made these remarks at a speech at Columbia University. In response, a student radical challenged him: "What you say is meaningless because the Great Society is basically immoral and rotten." Marty responded that such comments were typical of those who chose to be "morally pure" instead of politically relevant. In other words, moral purity lay at the radicals' end of the political spectrum. "Radicals Called 'Moral Agents,'" New York Times, July 26, 1965, p. 19.
63. The famous passage is from FDR's 1935 State of the Union address: "The lessons of history, confirmed by the evidence immediately before me, show conclusively that continued dependence upon relief induces a spiritual disintegration fundamentally destructive to the national fiber. To dole out relief in this way is to administer a narcotic, a subtle destroyer of the human spirit. It is inimical to the dictates of a sound policy. It is in violation of the traditions of America. Work must be found for able-bodied but destitute workers."
64. Hayward, Age of Reagan, p. 20, citing "T.R.B. from Washington," New Republic, March 14, 1964, p. 3, and citing Gareth Davies, From Opportunity to Entitlement: The Transformation and Decline of Great Society Liberalism (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1996), p. 48.
65. Mickey Kaus, The End of Equality (New York: Basic Books, 1995).
66. Hayward, Age of Reagan, p. 124. A demographic surge in male baby boomers is partly to blame for the rise in crime, but the cultural, legal, and political climate was undoubtedly the chief culprit. In the 1960s policy intellectuals believed that "the system" itself caused crime, and virtually all of the legal reforms of the day pushed in the direction of giving criminals more rights and making the job of police more difficult. Culturally, a wide array of activists and intellectuals had proclaimed that crime — especially black crime — was morally warranted political "rebellion."
67. Ibid., p. 26, citing Richard Epstein, Forbidden Grounds: The Case Against Employment Discrimination Laws (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992), pp. 186-88; Penn Kemble and Josh Muravchik, "The New Politics & the Democrats" Commentary, Dec. 1972, pp. 78-84. McGovern later joked that his rules opened the doors to the Democratic Party and "twenty million people walked out."
68. Hayward, Age of Reagan, pp. 90-92.
69. "Text of the Moynihan Memorandum on the Status of Negroes," New York Times, March 1, 1970. See also Peter Kihss, "'Benign Neglect' on Race Is Proposed by Moynihan," New York Times, March 1, 1970, p. 1.
70. Parmet, "Kennedy Myth and American Politics," p. 35, citing Randall Rothenberg, "The Neoliberal Club," Esquire, Feb. 1982, p. 42.
71. Douglas Brinkley, "Farewell to a Friend," New York Times, July 19, 1999, p. A17; Reliable Sources, CNN, July 24, 1999. See also Tim Cuprisin, "Few Shows, Cost Blurring Appeal of Digital TV," Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, July 27, 1999, p. 8.
7. LIBERAL RACISM: THE EUGENIC GHOST IN THE FASCIST MACHINE
1. Michele Parente, "Rangel Ties GOP Agenda to Hitler," Newsday, Feb. 19, 1995, p. A38; Bond is quoted in "Washington Whispers," U.S. News & World Report, July 28, 2003, p. 12; Marc Morano, "Harry Belafonte Calls Black Republicans 'Tyrants,'" Cybercast News Service, Aug. 8, 2005; Steve Dunleavy, "There's Nothing Fascist About a Final Verdict," New York Post, Dec. 13, 2000, p. 6.
2. And to the extent these various dark chapters of liberalism are ever mentioned, they are mentioned by hard-left critics of America itself. The net effect is that whenever conservatives commit an alleged evil, it is the result of conservatism. Whenever liberals commit an alleged evil, it is the result either of liberals' insufficiently severe liberalism or of America itself. In short, liberalism is never to blame and conservatives always are.