Diagramming The New Frontier's Implosion

In 1973, Daniel Patrick Moynihan looked back on the decade which had recently concluded and said, “Most liberals had ended the 1960s rather ashamed of the beliefs they had held at the beginning of the decade”. Back in January of 2005, I attempted to use Tom Wolfe’s Radical Chic as a signpost on the road between the traditional liberalism of FDR, Truman and JFK and the more radical, punitive version that followed and exists to this day. But in Commentary, James Piereson argues that it was Kennedy’s assassination and its immediate aftermath, that would cause the momentous shift that would ultimately consign New Deal-style American liberalism to the ash heap:

Liberalism entered the 1960