Evidence of liberalism's divided nature can be found in the enduring love-hate relationship between "hopeful" liberals and "apocalyptic" leftists. Throughout the 1960s, centrist liberals made allowances and apologies for the radicals to their left. And when push came to shove — as it did at Cornell — they capitulated to the radicals. Even today, mainstream liberals are far more inclined to romanticize the "revolutionaries" of the 1960s, in part because so many of them played that role in their youth. On college campuses today, administrators — often living fossils from the 1960s — applaud the Kabuki dance of left-wing protest as a central part of higher education. The only time they get worried is when the protest comes from the right.
But the most important legacy of the 1960s has to be liberal guilt. Guilt over their inability to create the Great Society. Guilt over leaving children, blacks, and the rest of the Coalition of the Oppressed "behind." Guilt is among the most religious of emotions and has a way of rapidly devolving into a narcissistic God complex. Liberals were proud of how guilty they felt. Why? Because it confirmed liberal omnipotence. Kennedy and Johnson represented the belief that an enlightened affluent society could solve every problem, redress every wrong. Normally you don't feel guilty when forces outside your control do evil. But when you have the power to control everything, you feel guilty about everything. Lyndon Johnson not only accelerated Kennedy's politics of expectation when he declared, "We can do it all; we're the richest country in the world," but rendered any shortcomings, anywhere, evidence of sagging commitment, racism, insensitivity, or just plain "hate." Feeling guilty was a sign of grace, for it proved your heart was in the right place.
Conservatives were caught in a trap. If you rejected the concept of the omnipotent state, it was proof that you hated those whom government sought to help. And the only way to prove you didn't hate them — whoever "they" were — was to support government intervention (or "affirmative action," in Kennedy's phrase) on their behalf. The idea of a "good conservative" was oxymoronic. Conservatism by definition "holds us back" — leaves some "behind" — when we all know that the solution to every problem lies just around the corner.
The result was a cleavage in the American political landscape. On one side were the radicals and rioters, who metaphorically — and sometimes literally — got away with murder. On the other were conservatives — hateful, sick, pre-fascist — who deserved no benefit of the doubt whatsoever. Liberals were caught in the middle, and most, when forced to choose, sided with the radicals ("they're too impatient, but at least they care!"). The fact that the radicals despised liberals for not going far enough fast enough only confirmed their moral status in the minds of guilt-ridden liberals.62
In this climate, a liberal spending spree was inevitable. Like noblemen of yore purchasing indulgences from the Church, establishment liberals sought to expiate their guilt by providing the "oppressed" with as much swag as possible. Fear, of course, played an important role as well. Pragmatic liberals — while understandably reluctant to admit it publicly — undoubtedly bought into the Bismarckian logic of placating the radicals with legislative reforms and government largesse. For others, the very real threat of radicalism provided precisely the sort of "crisis mechanism" liberals are always in search of. The "race crisis" panic sweeping through liberalism was often cited as a justification to dust off every statist scheme sitting on a progressive shelf.
From cash payments to the poor to building new bridges and community redevelopment, the payout was prodigious even by New Deal standards. The civil rights movement, which had captured the public's sympathies through King's message of equality and color blindness, quickly degenerated into a riot of racially loaded entitlements. George Wiley, the president of the National Welfare Rights Organization, insisted that welfare was "a right, not a privilege." Some even argued that welfare was a form of reparations for slavery. Meanwhile, any opposition to such programs was stigmatized as evidence of bigotry.
The War on Poverty, affirmative action, community redevelopment, and the vast panoply of subsidies that fall under the rubric of welfare — Aid to Families with Dependent Children, housing grants, Medicare, Women, Infants, and Children benefits, food stamps — were churned out by a massively increased administrative state on a scale undreamed of by FDR. But most on the left were not satisfied, in part because these programs proved remarkably ineffective at creating the Great Society or defeating poverty. While even FDR had recognized that the dole could be a "narcotic...of the human spirit," in the 1960s such concerns were widely dismissed as rubbish.63 The New Republic argued that Johnson's antipoverty program was fine "as a start" but insisted that there was "no alternative to really large-scale, ameliorative federal social welfare action and payments." Michael Harrington, whose The Other America laid the moral groundwork for the War on Poverty, led a group of thirty-two left-wing intellectuals, grandiosely dubbed the "Ad Hoc Committee on the Triple Revolution," which proclaimed that the state should provide "every individual and every family with an adequate income as a matter of right." The committee lamented that Americans were "all too confused and frightened by a bogey we call the 'welfare state,' [a] term of pride in most parts of the world."64
Recipients weren't the only ones hooked on the narcotic of "relief" the pushers were, too. Like a man determined to pound a square peg into a round hole, establishment liberals kept insisting that just a little more money, a little more effort, would produce the social euphoria of the elusive Great Society. As Mickey Kaus argues in The End of Equality, the liberal response to every setback could be summarized in one word: "more."65 When welfare seemed to cause fathers to abandon their families, liberals responded that payments should be extended to families where the father remains at home. But this in turn encouraged recipients to stay or become unemployed. The answer to that? Give money to employed poor fathers, too. But this in turn created an incentive for families to split up the moment the father moved out of poverty, so they wouldn't lose their benefits. Meanwhile, if you criticized any of this, you were a fascist.
The unintended but inevitable consequences of liberal utopianism spilled forth. From 1964 onward, crime in America grew at about 20 percent per year.66 Liberal court rulings, particularly the Supreme Court's Miranda decision, caused clearance rates to plummet in major cities. Welfare had the tendency to encourage family breakdown, illegitimate births, and other pathologies it was designed to cure. The original civil rights revolution — which was largely based on a classically liberal conception of equality before the law — failed to produce the level of integration liberals had hoped for. In 1964 Hubert Humphrey — "Mr. Liberal" — swore up and down in the well of the Senate that the Civil Rights Act could in no way lead to quotas and if anyone could prove otherwise, "I will start eating the pages one after the other, because it is not there." By 1972 the Democratic Party — under the guise of the "McGovern rules" — embraced hard quotas (for blacks, women, and youth) as its defining organizational principle.67 And it should be no surprise that a Democratic Party determined to do anything it could to make itself "look like America" would in turn be committed to making America look like the Democratic Party. And if you criticized any of this, you also were a fascist.