M.S.: Why Oh Why Can't We Have a Better Press Corps: Ira Stoll on John F. Kennedy: This week in up-is-downism: Noted
M.S.: John F. Kennedy: This week in up-is-downism:
The public interest is not served by a #slatepitch race to the bottom. So I will confine my response to Ira Stoll's ridiculous argument in Time, "JFK Was a Political Conservative", to simply noting that John F. Kennedy, the Democratic president who inspired a generation of liberal idealists, championed liberal labour and civil-rights legislation, and, in accepting the 1960 presidential nomination of New York State's Liberal Party, announced "I'm proud to say I'm a liberal", was in fact a liberal.
Here, for example, is then-Senator John F. Kennedy explaining why he voted against a Republican attempt to strip government funding for public housing, education and medical services and a minimum-wage hike from a civil-rights bill in August 1960…. Here is the senator the following day, explaining his support for amendments to the Fair Labour Standards Act which raised the minimum wage by 25% and extended the act's protections…. Mr Stoll's argument boils down to two points. The first is that Kennedy was a staunch anti-communist…. Mr Stoll waves away Kennedy's enthusiasm for liberal causes such as foreign aid (including the Peace Corps) and big-government scientific research (including the space programme) by arguing they were ultimately intended to make American capitalism more appealing than Soviet communism. And so they were! Liberals believed that the strength of the West's mixed state-private economies, their ability to provide better social safety nets, deliver more aid to poor countries, and lead the world in science, would make them more attractive than communism. If being anti-communist makes you a conservative, every single elected federal officeholder in American history has been a conservative.
