Ted Kennedy, present at the creation of a menacing new era

When a Titan of any practiced art dies, brooding declarations of an "end of an era" often proceed in a rather overdone way. But, not so in the case of Edward M. Kennedy. They are, to our great misfortune, all too true.

As political historian Robert Caro, author of the opulent LBJ biography, Master of the Senate, told the NY Times with a dramatic sense of irretrievable loss: "Ted Kennedy was a senator out of another, very different, Senate era: an era in which senators who believed in great causes stood at their desks, year after year and decade after decade, fighting for those causes, and educating the country about them" -- an era, added Caro, that at least identified with the incomparable age of Webster and Clay and Calhoun; an era, he finally noted, "that seems all but lost today."

Lost, and nearly forgotten, given our steadfast resistance to historical memory, which can aid not one whit in the personal acquisition of the latest iPod or iPhone or iWhatever the ingenious marketers of material gadgetry wish to heave before our eager eyes. And that -- our loss of enlightened civic engagement -- is just one more intangible I would add to the Times' list of reasons why, since "Mr. Kennedy joined [the Senate] in November 1962," the once celebrated institution "has become coarser, more partisan and, many scholars and politicians argue, more dysfunctional."

The Times' limited catalogue was, I suppose, depressing enough. "One measure of that partisanship is the rise of the filibuster," it wrote, denoting neither cause nor effect, just a yardstick. The Times then muddled through a few other calibrations of dysfunctionality; again, diagnosing symptoms but assigning no ur-behavioral blame: "today’s senators are rarely acclaimed for eloquent discourse"; they stage adolescent spats through "Twitter feeds"; they're pressured by fundraising demands, making free time for "friendships ... harder to forge"; they strategically huddle these days with expert staffs rather than "one another"; and C-Span's presence has theatrically "quickened the pace and coarsened the atmosphere."

All true. But where, and who, is the actual villain since "Mr. Kennedy joined the Senate in November 1962"? As much as I'd like to blame the time-assassinating frivolity of "Twitter feeds" for having degraded this once great deliberative body, I find that in good conscience I can't.

The Times permitted associate Senate historian Don Ritchie, however, to edge closer to a deeper analysis: "When Kennedy came [in the early '6os] ... there were as many Eisenhower Republicans as Goldwater Republicans," observed Ritchie. "There were more liberal Democrats but a sizable number of conservative Democrats. There was never a party line vote on anything. There were ideological coalitions rather than partisan coalitions."

Limited story space prevented Ritchie from delving farther -- Democratic party-line votes haven't been much of a nation-retarding worry lately -- but he did manage to squeeze in two words of profound relevance to our villain-hunt: Goldwater Republicans.

Boom. Crash. They, ultimately, and broadly, were the ideological bugbears who contributed more than any other group to the derailment of conscientious democracy. They became better known in the late 1970s as the New Right, and are better remembered today (for those who bother with such silly pastimes) as the New Conservatives, or Movement Conservatives; and before all that, they were labeled by postwar political researchers as Pseudoconservatives, rather mentally primitive men and women bent more on the radical destruction of democratic processes than the truly conservative preservation of social institutions.

Today it's somewhat unfair to remember them as "Goldwater" Republicans, since the Arizona senator -- whose 1964 presidential ambitions had desperately unleashed a moralistic crusade against inexorable cultural shifts; against the "libruls" behind those shifts: against the godless, egg-headed social engineers out to remake America in unAmerican ways -- had shortly disowned the whole lot of 'em ("the New Right," he said, "preached little or no spirit of compromise ... For a democracy to function, there has to be ... some room" for that) and by the 1990s knowingly lamented, "Perhaps I’m one of the reasons [Washington, D.C.] is so redneck."

Goldwater knew what he had unleashed, and it broke his heart; for what he unleashed was a devastating corruption of real conservatism -- a political transmogrification so intent on victory at any cost it led, in 1980, one of its champions, John Terry Dolan of the National Conservative Political Action Committee, to foolishly boast to the Washington Post that "We're on the cutting edge of politics.... Groups like ours are potentially very dangerous to the political process. We could be a menace, yes. Ten independent expenditure groups, for example, could amass this great amount of money and defeat the point of accountability in politics. We could say whatever we want about an opponent of a Senator Smith and the senator wouldn’t have to say anything. A group like ours could lie through its teeth and the candidate it helps stays clean."

But that was no idle, what-if prediction. It was, rather, a history lesson. A new age of unbounded demagoguery and the pettiest of partisan politics had hatched.

Ted Kennedy was present at the New Conservatism's menacing creation. He did his best to stem and turn its destructive tide; and in so doing, he extended that earlier, nobler era. But whether we ever get it back isn't up to a "new" Kennedy, as so many commentators now yearn for. It's up to us.