By the last issue, our shell-shocked, cynical world is well on its way to being born. Johnson refuses to stand for re-election, King and Robert Kennedy are assassinated. The ghettos are in flames. One cannot help but sense that, as the issues pass, we lose something as a nation. The group who bears the brunt of the transition is liberals.
Liberalism requires faith in government and other institutions of society.
Liberals have spent most of the intervening three decades on the defensive. At the height of the New Deal's last stand, in those days when Democratic leaders were dropping like flies, more than one-third of Americans considered themselves liberals. Now only half that number do. In 1968, Bobby Kennedy was the last liberal to get the overwhelming support of blue-collar America. Those votes shifted first to George Wallace and then to Reagan.