Why the Left’s War on Fun Is Actually a War on God By Mark Judge for American Greatness
You can’t attain utopia if people are having fun.
Why aren’t liberals fun anymore?
That was the question asked in a 2018 op-ed in The Hill by Stephen Moore. Moore observed that liberals, who were once the fun ones in American culture, have become punitive, tight-assed, dour.
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“What a difference a generation makes,” Moore wrote. “It used to be conservatives who were the stuffy ones. Liberals were the fun ones to be around. Now the ones who are so uptight are the liberals like actor Jeff Bridges, who once was funny but now is so embarrassed by modern day America that he seems to want to be anywhere on this planet, except here.”
Moore doesn’t really pinpoint when the Left lost its sense of humor, but the anger can be found in James Piereson’s groundbreaking book Camelot and the Cultural Revolution: How the Assassination of John F. Kennedy Shattered American Liberalism. If you want to know why liberals are wailing, weeping, getting the vapors, and rioting in the streets, Piereson explains it.
As Piereson notes, modern liberalism, unlike classical liberalism, feeds on the desire to punish others. This phenomenon, which Piereson calls “punitive liberalism,” goes back to the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963. Piereson argues that prior to Kennedy’s death, liberalism was pro-American, anti-communist, pro-labor, and for incremental change to address social ills such as racism. The Catholic, anti-communist, tax-cutting Kennedy exemplified these beliefs. This is why Kennedy was disliked by the far Left (and would be a conservative if he were alive today).
When Kennedy was shot and killed by the communist Lee Harvey Oswald, liberals went into shock. They then found themselves at a loss to explain the horror. It simply couldn’t be possible that the conservatives were right, that Kennedy had been a martyr not to the civil rights movement, but to the Cold War, and that blood was on the hands of the communists. That was just too much reality to handle.
To avoid this reality, liberalism explained Kennedy’s death by blaming it on America. It wasn’t Oswald, a Castro-loving zealot, who pulled the trigger; it was “right-wing America,” the “climate of hate in Dallas,” and our collective historical sins. America was to blame.
