"The dawn of the third fascist moment in American life"

(more thoughts inspired from Jonah Goldberg's Liberal fascism)

I remember the Nixon-Kennedy debates prior to the 1960 election. Most people who listened on radio thought Nixon was the clear winner. Most people who watched on t.v. thought Kennedy was the winner. He had style and charm, which Nixon, with his beads of sweat on his nose, did not. I listened on the radio, and gave Tricky Dick my vote. Goldberg calls that election "the dawn of the third fascist moment in American life, which would unfurl throughout the 1960s and into the 1970s, both in the streets and universities, and in the halls of government."

"Like Wilson and FDR before him, Kennedy couched his programs with allegations that we were in one crisis or another. He also made nationalistic appeals to unity, celebrated martial values, blurred the lines between public and private sectors, used the media to glamorize the state and its programs, placed important decisions in the hands of experts, and encouraged a cult of personality for himself as national leader. He promised to transcend ideology in the name of what would be described later as cool pragmatism" (which I believe also describes Obama). JFK shared Robert McNamara's confidence that "every problem could be solved" by technocratic experts. In a May 1962 press conference he asserted that the problems of the nation "deal with questions which are now beyond the comprehension of most men" and should be left to experts to settle without subjecting them to divisive democratic debate," according to Goldberg.

Goldberg alleges that the Kennedy presidency "marked the final evolution of Progressivism into a full-blown religion and a national cult of the state."

Goldberg writes, "Kennedy's assassination was a gift to LBJ, who built the Great Society "upon the rock of Kennedy's memory."