Liberals used to occupy the moral high ground in American politics. Operating from a Christian ethic of generosity and kindness, Christian Democrats in the highly Christian and democratic American culture of the late 1950s and early 1960s succeeded in making conservative Republicans look like nothing but so many selfish churls.
Then several things happened. First, television ownership became widespread in the late 50s. Nearly everybody, even the working poor, had a black-and-white TV. With this came the rise of the cancer of commercialism that is increasingly strangling us. The purpose of commercial television is not to entertain or to inform. It is to deliver an audience to a sponsor – to get you to watch, so the advertisers can pitch their products to you. Quality programs that don’t deliver an audience get cancelled. Cheap and exploitive programs that deliver an audience become national sensations. Advertisers soon learned that sex, violence and controversy are the main things that draw attention, and began to exploit all three to sell products. America became increasingly violent, oversexed and uncivil.
Betty Friedan’s book, “The Feminine Mystique,” gave rise to a feminist movement, which in turn gave rise to a liberal Supreme Court ruling in Roe v. Wade, which found that a fetus is not a human being, but only a lump of tissue. The Democratic Party embraced abortion on demand as a woman’s right, and the gender feminists who came to dominate the feminist movement have defended this extreme view ever since, while becoming a major constituency in the Democratic Party base.
