The trouble with liberals, Robert Kennedy complained in 1964, was that they were “in love with death” — they romanticized failure, finding greater nobility in losing the whole loaf than in winning half of it. In the years since then, liberals have not only lost a lot of loaves but have acquired a mess of other troubles, among them the difficulty of getting anyone to admit to being a liberal. To wear the label today seems an act of defiance, much as members of the gay rights community have appropriated, from their antagonists, the epithet “queer.” Liberalism — for decades (centuries, even) the prevailing philosophy in American political life — has become the creed that dare not speak its name, except late at night on MSNBC.
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