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Showing posts from April 17, 2005
This piece was meant to answer whether radicals in the 1960s were victims of circumstance, or whether the beliefs contained internal contradictions that made for failure. Thanks to David Horowitz for his autobiography Radical Son: A Generational Oddysey, which provided the backdrop for this response. JK What Happened to Liberalism? Radicalism itself (whether from the left or the right) is by definition the suggestion that ordinary electoral means are inadequate to achieve desired goals. To be radical in the truest sense is to hold that the United States cannot redress the grievances of its people in any form, or that it in no way represents the people it governs. It cannot be equated with liberalism, because the United States was being governed during the most relevant part of the 1960s (1961-69) by liberals. One could possibly claim that those Democrats were not authentically liberal; however, Kennedy began the rudiments of the Great Society right away, and Johnson oversaw the biggest