Senator Kennedy, Liberalism and the Left

Senator Kennedy, Liberalism and the Left

My wife and I traveled across Massachusetts on Friday, August 28, to be part of the public wake for Senator Edward Kennedy. Though much of the summer has been a washout in the Northeast, this morning proved worthy of a late-summer New England day with wispy curls of high cirrus clouds in a sparkling blue sky above Dorchester Bay. A fresh wind rose from the sea to the south and east and onto the peninsula that makes up the landform where the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum are located. Jets and propeller-driven planes swooped down out of the west and glided effortlessly over the high roof of the library, then across the bay as their landing gears lowered with the certain prospect of momentarily disappearing over the tree line to land at Logan Airport.

Getting to the library just before 11:00 A.M., we joined the line of thousands of other mourners who had come to pay tribute to the senior senator from Massachusetts, but what also brought us to this place on a day that could easily have been made for leisurely summer sailing was the fact that a great epoch in U.S. history had come to a close.

John F. Kennedy’s life, a president of only mildly liberal politics and Cold warrior, left an indelible mark on the American psyche. No one who remembers that era can forget the wrenching grief of that day on which the young president was assassinated, and the days to follow, in November 1963. A person knows exactly where he or she was when Walter Cronkite announced the news of the president’s death. It was as if that day, forty-six years ago, had just happened. It was as if the nation, like Cronkite, would forever be brushing aside a tear of grief.

Only five years later, in an era so different from his brother’s, Senator Robert Kennedy was gunned down in California after winning the presidential primary and almost certainly assuring himself a place on the national Democratic ticket and a probable win. How different the world would have been! Senator Kennedy had transformed himself from a member of his brother’s cabinet to a bona fide liberal. He had been touched in a positive way by the societal upheavals of the late 1960s and was genuinely antiwar as the all-important California primary drew to an end.

Back to the Dorchester of the present. Remarkably, though visibly in mourning, members of the Kennedy, Smith, and Reggie families pass down the line of mourners greeting everyone who has come to pay respects to either their father, or uncle, or grandfather, or stepfather. The news media does not interfere with these personal and heartfelt interchanges, and instead interviews a few people from the line of mourners as it approaches the entrance to the library. One man quite inappropriately drones on endlessly to anyone who will listen about spirituality, interrupts an interview in progress, as is soon quieted by others who stand in line quietly waiting their turns to pass the senator’s coffin.

In an article in the Socialist Worker, “Myth of the Liberal Lion” (August 28, 2009), Lance Selfa criticizes Kennedy for selling out on the liberalism of Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society” and eventually supporting regressive bills such as the deregulation of the airline and trucking industries, incremental improvements in healthcare legislations verses a single-payer plan (which Kennedy did champion in the early 1970s), budget balancing legislation, and the No Child Left Behind education act.

Senator Kennedy was indeed an effective dealmaker who could forge relationships, both personal and political, with those in the juggernaut of regressive politics that took shape with the ascendancy to the presidency of the far-right former governor of California, Ronald Reagan. It was not so much that Kennedy abandoned his liberalism, as much as the voters in the U.S. jettisoned those values as the economy became less and less egalitarian and their representatives in Congress followed suit. Kennedy’s very real triumphs included legislation in the areas of women’s rights, the rights of those with disabilities, civil rights, health care for children, and the admittedly flawed prescription drug plan now a part of Medicare. Though originally a supporter of the Vietnam War, Kennedy came to strongly oppose that war and the current war in Iraq. He stopped the nomination of the far-right jurist Robert Bork to the Supreme Court. He worked tirelessly for his constituents and was an accessible senator to them.

Senator Kennedy was most certainly a flawed individual and came from a family of enormous wealth, but he also witnessed much personal tragedy not of his making and went on to fight the fights in which he believed he could be most effective. After witnessing the vicious assassinations of two brothers, losing one brother to war, and dealing with disease and addiction, he could have easily sat on the sidelines, but he did not.

Liaisons with liberals have always borne the brunt of criticism from the left. But it was just that ability to make working connections with those whom he had nothing in common with politically that makes Senator Kennedy an outstanding person. The late singer-songwriter Phil Ochs picks fun at liberals in his humorous parody on liberalism “Love Me, I’m a Liberal,” written in the 60s when liberalism and liberals were easy targets. After associating with leftists for all of my adult life, and in many cases with less than rewarding results, it seems that being able to relate to others the way Senator Kennedy did is a most enviable, ennobling, and human trait.

Over the past several years, since the demise of both the anti-globalization and antiwar movements, what remains of the left is hard-pressed in making an argument that connections to political liberals weakens the left in any material way. What indeed is left to weaken?

During the 1980s, while living in Rhode Island, I organized a meeting between the late Senator Claiborne Pell and a group opposed to U.S. interventions in Central America, and in particular in Nicaragua. Senator Pell, a liberal, had lost his chairmanship of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee when Ronald Reagan was elected president. After several individuals had spoken to the senator in his Providence, Rhode Island office, the senator observed that in order for him to take a more visible role against U.S. intervention in Central America he would need a vibrant anti-interventionist movement from which to draw energy. In other words, the senator knew that in order for him to effectively make the case against intervention there would have to be an increased level of activism among members of the group meeting with him. Several members of the group expressed their dissatisfaction with the senator following the meeting, but Senator Pell had made a keen observation about the political system: it never changes unless pressure is placed on it through outside forces.

That the left has been so weakened in recent years is not due to magical or mysterious forces operating in and outside of the political system, but rather comes directly from the fact that the left is no longer the attractive force for change that it once was in the U.S. The latter is of grave concern for leftists, a problem of organizing real people, and not a problem created solely by liberals! That the left cannot mount an effective campaign of opposition in the face of multiple wars, an economy that meets the needs of fewer people, and a largely failed environmental policy tells more about the left in a complacent society than it does about liberals.

A commentator on one of the major news networks observed how respectful the public outpouring was during the days of mourning for Senator Kennedy. It was indeed respectful, but of greater worry to anyone left or liberal are the continuing vicious expressions by the right against Senator Kennedy’s signature legislation, health-care reform.