WE LOST MORE THAN A MAN THAT DAY

Inspired by and quoted heavily from a thought-provoking piece by E.J.Dionne in the Washington Post: Forty years ago, American liberalism suffered a blow from which it has still not recovered. On April 4, 1968, a relatively brief but extraordinary moment of progressive reform ended, and a long period of conservative ascendancy began.

The assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. and the ensuing riots that engulfed the nation's capital and big cities across the country signaled the collapse of liberal hopes in a smoky haze of self-doubt and despair. Conservatives, on the run for much of the decade, found a broad new audience for their warnings against the disorders and disruptions bred by reform.

April 4th, 1968 is the day the United States of America, burst into flames and the fires have not abated to this day. To this day, it cannot be said that liberalism has ever recovered. It had twitched a finger or two during the ineffective Carter years and the House was lost in the GOP revolution spearheaded by Newt and Rush in the 90's during the Clinton years.

Liberalism, in fact, is so dead, that the last seven plus years, despite eight preceding years of relative peace and economic prosperity, a surplus and a balanced budget after 12 years of Republican sledgehammering before that, liberals have let the GOP frame the word "liberal" as if it was as shameful as the words "pedophile" or "batterer."

For reasons that have yet to be divined and adequately explained, the American public still has not caught on to the inescapable and incontrovertible fact that America's greatest failures since 1968, failures that include two illegal wars, a major terrorist attack, the indefinite suspension of the Constitution, the loss of a major American city and the most massive deficits ever seen in American economic history are the results of conservatism.

And still the party is fragmented. Hillary Clinton spends more time attacking Barack Obama and questioning his own dedication to change more so than John McCain, who, according to some major polls, is in a dead heat with both she and Obama.

And still, when Republicans block and deny resolutions apologizing to surviving relatives of lynching victims, block legislation that seeks to apologize for slavery itself, we allow them to sound reasonable. When they blame the indigent African Americans of New Orleans for the federal government's massive indifference and failure in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, when these people are openly called names like "deadbeats" and "losers" by conservatives, neocons and libertarians, they sound nastier than Nixon at his nastiest yet are allowed to keep their airtime and infest the airwaves time and again.

Civil rights? It's a quaint notion but one that hardly forms the basis for a comprehensive domestic policy, as Dick Cheney would put it. Largely lost are the last great messages, those powerfully musical and intoxicating clarion calls of change once uttered by the man who had been slaughtered 40 years ago today. Civil rights, liberalism, even hope itself had been torched along with dozens of American cities starting the day Dr. King was assassinated. While Republicans rally to inspire those with nonexistent marches with Dr. King, they also don't take the time to remind those whose support they're soliciting that they and members of their party have only helped widen a divide that the same Dr. Martin Luther King had only begun to bridge toward the end of his life.

It is easy to forget that the core themes of contemporary conservatism were born in response to the events of 1968. The attacks on "big government," the defense of states' rights, and the scorn for "liberal judicial activism," "liberal do-gooders," "liberal elitists," "liberal guilt" and "liberal permissiveness" were rooted in the reaction that gathered force as liberal optimism receded.
From the death of John F. Kennedy in November 1963 until the congressional elections of November 1966, liberals were triumphant, and what they did changed the world. Civil rights and voting rights, Medicare and Medicaid, clean air and clean water legislation, Head Start, the Job Corps and federal aid to schools had their roots in the liberal wave that began to ebb when Lyndon Johnson Democrats suffered broad losses in the 1966 voting. The decline that 1966 signaled was sealed after April 4, 1968.

Martin Luther King left this earth at a moment of gloom, at least about the short term. "I feel this summer will not only be as bad but worse than last time," he said, four days before his death, in a sermon at Washington's National Cathedral. He was referring to the urban riots of the previous summer. And then came the days of chaos that followed his assassination.

Forty years later, is it possible to recapture the hope and energy of the days and years before that April 4? Has liberalism spent enough time in purgatory for the country to revisit how much was accomplished in its name and to acknowledge that the nation is better off for what the liberals did? Now is the moment to put an end to our contempt for liberalism. There was business left unfinished on that fateful day in 1968, and it is time to take it up again.