Explaining Declining Liberalism

 I BECAME A KENNEDY FAN when I was in third grade and JFK was president. The very idea that the president could be killed had never entered my mind before the assassination, which permanently scarred my eight year old psyche, and everyone else in my age group. He was a sort of father figure to me. I finally abandoned conspiracy theories when I applied critical thinking to Oliver Stone's movie. Maybe I shouldn't have. When I was thirteen, RFK was my hero, and once again I was shell shocked. I latched on to EMK, and when he drowned that girl in 1969 in his are I, at fourteen,m knew his presidential chances were probably gone. Like everyone else, after RFK's murder in 1968 I worried and halfway assumed that some maniac would kill the surviving brother for some twisted notion of consistency. Thank God we were all wrong. I rooted for him against the insufficiently liberal Carter in seventy six, but was never optimistic about his chances against a safe bet incumbent. There is a new two volume biography of Ted, the second volume to be published in twenty twenty one, the two books titled "Catching the Wind", and "Against the Wind". In it Kennedy's personal scandalous misbehavior is given much of the blame for liberalism's decline beginning in the late nineteen seventies, dubiously, methinks. I became a young liberal in the nineteen sixties, It seemed the thing to do. I believe that liberalism was seriously damaged by LBJ's involvement in Viet Nam in contrast to his "Great Society" domestic agenda, and by the rise Ronald Reagan, the womanizing former New Dealer who transformed himself into the pied piper of conservative evangelical Christians and their resurgent movement into politics in the late seventies. Conservatism is tradition. Liberalism is change. The arc of human history is change. History moves from right to left. The best that conservatives can hope for, the worst liberals can expect, is that change will occur at a snail's pace. Because change is inevitable. The best examples of this in American culture and history are racism, homophobia, and unrestrained neo-liberal capitalism, all of whose periodic resurgences are ultimately eroded, if only gradually, by progress and cultural evolution. There will inevitably come a day when the very first hand wringing, alarm ringing conservative anti-socialist crusader for corporate hegemony will fell the uppers wearing off, take a  deep breath, take a furtive glance through split fingered mini blinds, and notice that democratic socialism has long since come to and conquered America, and that it has so deeply insinuated into American society as to be beyond surgical removal.Then, at the usual snail's pace with which conservatives accept present reality, the rest will slowly, if reluctantly follow.