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 through much of the decade, found a broad new audience for their warnings against the disorders and disruptions bred by reform.
. . . 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, 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.
. . .Liberals themselves share blame for the waning of their movement. Just because right-wing politicians used "law and order" as a code for race did not mean that concern about crime was illegitimate. On the contrary, the country was in the opening stages of a serious crime wave and had good reason to worry about rising violence.
Liberalism itself was cracking up in 1968. Liberals had turned on each other over Johnson's Vietnam policy. The old civil rights coalition splintered as advocates of racial integration warred with the defenders of Black Power, a slogan voiced in 1966 by a young activist named Stokely Carmichael.
. . . For decades before the 1960s, conservatism was held in contempt by large swaths of the intellectual and political class. It was one of the great achievements of William F. Buckley Jr., whose death we mourned a few weeks ago, to insist that respect be paid to the great tradition whose cause he championed.
