‘In the course of the 1960s, the left adopted almost wholesale the arguments of the right,” said presidential policy adviser Daniel Patrick Moynihan in the early 1970s. The future Democratic senator from New York noted that during the Vietnam era, students at elite Eastern colleges could be found arguing “that the growth of federal power was the greatest threat to democracy, that foreign entanglements were the work of demented plutocrats, that government snooping (by the Social Security Administration or the United States Continental Army Command) was destroying freedom,” and “that the largest number of functions should be entrusted to the smallest jurisdictions.”
Needless to say, the liberal capitulation to Republicans did not last. But while it took a war for progressives to warm to the right’s causes, half a century later, it took a lot less for Republicans to trade in their principles.
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