Interview with Michael Medved

The January-February 2005 issue of The American Enterprise magazine contains an interview with Michael Medved, whose background is summarized at the beginning of the interview:

Michael Medved was voted "most radical" in his Los Angeles high school class, then graduated from Yale and attended Yale Law School, where he knew Bill and Hillary Clinton. He was an anti-war protester and backer of Eugene McCarthy, after which he worked for Robert Kennedy's Presidential campaign. He was at the Ambassador Hotel when Kennedy was shot. Medved also took part in George McGovern's 1972 Presidential run, and while living in Berkeley, California worked briefly for the re-election of Congressman Ron Dellums, described as the "angriest black radical in Congress." Medved eventually became a film critic, and for 12 years co-hosted the popular PBS movie review show "Sneak Previews."

The interview is good reading. Here are several interesting comments:

One of my "aha" moments in my 20's was recognizing that all the things I wanted in my life - stability, love, community, friendship, sense of purpose - all of those things were vastly more accessible within a religious context...

What we did go through in the 1960's and '70's was the revolt of the elites. Traditionally, elites defined duty, honor, good behavior, and the like for the rest of the population. Today that has been reversed. Today, if you're seeking strong concepts of duty, honor, discipline, and the kind of character that makes you a military leader, for instance, you're more likely to find that in a family named Gonzalez than a family named Winthrop...

[TAE: You write that "I refused to give up on thinking of myself as a liberal because I didn't want to stop seeing myself as a good person." How have liberals done such a good job of associating themselves with virtue?] By emphasizing good intentions while ignoring bad results...

"Liberal" became a dirty word in America not because of Republican ad campaigns, but because anybody with eyes could eventually see that liberalism just doesn't work...

Contemporary liberalism is based on the idea that the world is coming to an end. You can't embrace liberalism if you are optimistic about the world in which you live, or grateful, or cheerful. Liberalism today is based on gloom.

This is not a gloomy or failing country. Yet the Left believes we need to radically remake everything from our family structure to our economic system, because we're in the midst of a national epidemic of greed, and evil, and all-around badness. This whining has never been less appropriate for any people in the history of the planet than it is for Americans of the twentieth century.