The Liberal Tipping Point

I sent this to some liberal friends on January 20:

I think we should remember the generation before mine that did the heavy lifting on civil rights and that made today possible.

• The African Americans who fought in WWII in an army that was desegregated by President Truman after they came home.
  
  
• Liberals like Hubert Humphrey who had the courage to split the Democratic Party over civil rights in 1948.
  
  
• Lawyers like NAACP Chief Counsel Thurgood Marshall who argued segregation before the Supreme Court rather than in the streets.
  
  
• Activists like Dr. King who led African Americans in an exemplary campaign of non-violence.
  
  
• The African American rank-and-file who overcame their fears to offer their bodies and their lives in the cause of freedom.
  
  
• The young freedom riders, often Jews, who went into the South to register voters at risk of their lives.
  
  
• President Johnson, a Southerner, who pushed the civil rights and voting rights acts through Congress even though he predicted that Democrats would lose the South for a generation.
  
  
• And so many more.

We are inheritors, standing on the shoulders of those who came before. And I am glad to know several liberal men now in their 70s and 80s and appreciate the generosity of spirit that still shines from that generation as it heads for the exits.

What I did not say was this:

Right after the triumph of the civil rights acts came the Tipping Point (to coin a phrase). In 1965 a young Assistant Secretary of Labor put out a report entitled “The Negro Family: The Case For National Action” which “hypothesized that the destruction of the Black nuclear-family structure would hinder further progress towards economic, and political equality.” That man was a Democrat, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and he was told to shut up.

The year 1964 was liberals’ finest hour. The year 1965 began the descent into hubris. It began the descent into the liberalism of today: cruel, corrupt, unjust, and deluded.