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Mourning liberalism. I have too much nostalgia for the contribution that liberalism once made to our society not to wince when I hear Sean Hannity speak of it as if it were a skin infection or an unnatural sex act. There was a time, after all, when liberalism stood for freedom and tolerance instead of hostility to everything America supports, simply because America supports it. The torch once held by Ken Kesey and Alan Ginsburg has been passed to Ward Churchill. It was a socialist, George Orwell, who warned us of the evils of Stalinism. I have always believed that in his heart, Vaclav Havel was classically liberal. Would Paul Wellstone, now dead and in the ground, have called his opponents “little Eichmanns” or compared them to Hitler? This is the level of the national debate that survives him. Had Wellstone lived, the cancerous anti-American nihilism of the left would either have consumed him or destroyed the sincerity and idealism that sustained him.