By Michael F. Duggan
Robert F. Kennedy, who died 55 years ago today, represents the last gasp of the vital American liberalism that died along with so much else of the promise of the 1960s in 1968. What many Americans do not know, is that for much of his life, Bobby Kennedy was suspicious of liberals.
Bobby had been Jack’s pit bull, his “ruthless” fixer, and there was a hard, pragmatic edge to him that is so conspicuously missing in many progressive politicians from Adlai Stevenson to the present day. Writing about himself in the third person, Norman Mailer observes “Of course [Mailer] had been partisan to Bobby Kennedy, excited precisely by his admixture of idealism plus willingness to traffic with demons, ogres, and overlords of corruption.” In spite the depth and soulfulness of his final years and his steady drift to the left, Kennedy had long been skeptical about “professional liberals.” He once observed that, “They like it much better to have a cause than a course of action that’s been successful.”1
Was RFK right? Do some American liberals prefer to talk about their outrage rather than realistically solve problems? Could this in part be why conservatives have been more successful than liberals in recent decades and why hard-nosed, unapoligetic progressivism is more or less dead in the United States? Some of the liberals whose posts I read on social media are happy to express indignation, but do liberals really prefer to be right than successful? They seem to like pushing back against rhetoric with rhetoric of their own rather than trying to solve the root cause of the serious and not-so-serious problems so conspicuously manifested in the sound and fury of the culture wars.
For instance, many of progressives I read tend to focus on the outward symptoms of the perspectives that offend them, whether it is racism, sexism, homophobia, and related gender bigotry. Cleverness appears to be a surrogate for effective action. Their opponents are simply stupid or else bad and without motive beyond a kind of unthinking, unfeeling malice existing in an ahistorical, causal vacuum. Progressives also seem to take a solemn, righteous joy in the discomfort their positions on gender instill in opponents who embrace traditional morality, and then are quick to resort to name-calling rather than trying to understand the opposing positions and bridge the gap.
They consider their fellow Americans on the populist right to be beyond redemption and seem to have little curiosity about the longstanding issues of economics, bad governance, and national decline that led to such attitudes. Every day they are disappointed, disbelieving, or righteously indignant over the bigoted or insensitive attitudes of those who oppose them, and who are not sufficiently evolved in their thinking to agree with the moral purity and patent common sense their own enlightened positions.
As long as we address only the symptoms of our national divide, we will never find a way to bridge it. And while we must sometimes treat the symptoms of an illness in order to save a patient, such an approach will never stem a general outbreak. Americans are an unhistorical people; we prefer to react to what offends us, reinforcing what we already believe, rather than looking at longstanding historical causes and pedigrees behind the attitudes. As Bertrand Russel observes, “it is pleasant to think of ourselves as virtuous and our enemies wicked,” but we must go beyond appearances and get to the root causes of our differences if we are to bridge them.2 I hope that no reader of mine will think that my criticism is only reserved for the Left. I am far more critical of the extremism of the Right. But I believe that we must look below the surface of people’s positions in good faith and empathy if we are to effectively address the divides that threaten our nation.
Notes
1. Arthur Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy and His Times, 372.
2. Bertrand Russell, Why I am not a Christian, 50.