The Liberal Telling of America's Story

From Jonah Goldberg's "Liberal Fascism", which I highly, highly recommend.

This paragraph just jumped off the page at me.

In the liberal telling of America's story, there are only two perpetrators of official misdeeds: conservatives, and "America" writ large. Progressives, or modern liberals, are never bigots or tyrants, but conservatives often are. For example, one will virtually never hear that the Palmer Raids, Prohibition, or American eugenics were thoroughly Progressive phenomena. These are sins America itself must attone for. Meanwhile, real or alleged "conservative" misdeeds -- say, McCarthyism -- are always the exclusive fault of conservatives and a sign of the policies they would repeat if given power. The only culpable mistake liberals make is failing to fight "hard enough" for their principles. Liberals are never responsible for historic misdeeds, because they feel no compulsion to defend the inherent goodness of America. Conservatives, meanwhile, not only take the blame for events not of their own making that they often worked the most assiduously against, but find themselves defending liberal misdeeds in order to defend America herself.

This is exactly the position I find myself in again and again (that last sentence), but I've never been able to articulate it this well.

And of course, how Liberals have transferred the mantle of the Party of Intolerance and Bigotry to the Republican Party was a hat trick. Anybody who reads history....