Origins of Denial

In Olympia, Washington, they're using children as human shields to block army transport trucks, and sabotaging railroad tracks with cement.

Obstructing the military in time of war? Railroad sabotage?

Normally that would be treated as a serious crime, but these protests are getting kid-glove treatment.

Indeed, one of the leaders is on the city council.

And the local university is offering "debriefing" and counselling sessions to students to aid their protesting.

Meanwhile "9/11 was in inside job" is gaining traction as an idea.

November 24, 2007 -- Nearly two-thirds of Americans believe the federal government had warnings about 9/11 but decided to ignore them, a national survey found.

And that's not the only conspiracy theory with a huge number of true believers in the United States.

The poll found that more than one out of three Americans believe Washington is concealing the truth about UFOs and the Kennedy assassination - and most everyone is sure the rise in gas prices is one vast oil-industry conspiracy.

Where did this madness originate?

When did the left-wing start hating America?

The key might be the origins of the Kennedy conspiracy idea.

According to this theory, the left started to go mad when it had to deny one of its own killed Kennedy.

Oswald, of course, was an idealistic communist.

Not much is made of that fact, is it?

What's wrong with American liberalism? What happened to the self-assured, optimistic, and practical Democratic Party of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry Truman, and John F. Kennedy? Why has Joe Lieberman, their closest contemporary incarnation, been run out of the party? How did anti-Americanism infect schools, the media, and Hollywood? And whence comes the liberal rage that conservatives like Ann Coulter, Jeff Jacoby, Michelle Malkin, and the Media Research Center have extensively documented?

In a tour de force, James Piereson of the Manhattan Institute offers an historical explanation both novel and convincing. His book, Camelot and the Cultural Revolution: How the Assassination of John F. Kennedy Shattered American Liberalism (Encounter), traces liberalism's slide into anti-Americanism back to the seemingly minor fact that Lee Harvey Oswald was neither a segregationist nor a cold warrior but a communist.
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Kennedy's assassination profoundly affected liberalism, Piereson explains, because Oswald, a New Left-style communist, murdered Kennedy to protect Fidel Castro's rule in Cuba from the president who, during the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, brandished America's military card. Kennedy, in brief, died because he was so tough in the cold war. Liberals resisted this fact because it contradicted their belief system and, instead, presented Kennedy as a victim of the radical right and a martyr for liberal causes.
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A New York Times editorial lamented "The shame all America must bear for the spirit of madness and hate that struck down President John F. Kennedy."

In this "denial or disregard" of Oswald's motives and guilt, Piereson locates the rank origins of American liberalism's turn toward anti-American pessimism.
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Viewing the United States as crass, violent, racist, and militarist shifted liberalism's focus from economics to cultural issues (racism, feminism, sexual freedom, gay rights). This change helped spawn the countercultural movement of the late 1960s; more lastingly, it fed a "residue of ambivalence" about the worth of traditional American institutions and the validity of deploying U.S. military power that 44 years later remains liberalism's general outlook.

Thus does Oswald's malign legacy live on in 2007, yet harming and perverting liberalism, still polluting the national debate.