The death of Senator Henry Jackson has left an empty stillness at the center of American politics. Jackson was the symbol, and the last great leader, of a political tradition that began with Woodrow Wilson and reached its apogee with John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson and Hubert Humphrey. That tradition—liberal internationalism—held that if democratic capitalism was to have a human face, it had to have a big heart and a strong hand. At home that meant developing and defending the institutional embodiments of the national conscience: civil rights, Social Security, Medicare, welfare (what ambivalent...
Essay: What Ever Became of the American Center
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