Every liberal initiative, from welfare to antismoking measures, is justified by reference to 'the children.' Yet the clear result of liberal policies is to harm children even more than adults.

Liberals cling to the idea that critics of welfare are motivated by greed or callous disregard for the less fortunate. In fact, during the twenty-five years that followed Lyndon Johnson's declaration of war on poverty, U.S. tax payers spent $3 trillion providing every conceivable support for the poor, the elderly, and the infirm. Private foundations spent scores of billions more, and private and religious charities even more. Nevertheless, as Ronald Raegan later quipped, 'in the war on poverty, poverty won.'

Time and time again throughout the latter part of the Cold War, liberals chose a morally perverse pose. They would seek to find any suspect motive or impure act on the part of the United States rather than confront the staggering scale of destruction and misery being wrought by our adversaries.

Liberal hostility to the traditional family helped to undermine centuries of accumulated wisdom and experience about what was best for children and adults. Far from benefiting only men, marriage confers enormous advantages on women and children as well - a fact that has been thrown into sharp relief by its breakdown over the past forty years.

To judge by what my children are learning in school, you'd think American history was 75 percent slavery and 25 percent everything else (and that 25 percent includes a large dollop of imperialism, racism, sexism and homophobia, leaving little time for Lincoln, Edison, Clay, Holmes, Alcott, Dickinson, Adams, Longfellow or Fulton).

If the party of gloom is ever to regain its footing, it will have to start by understanding that those who defeated them are not a bunch of ignorant yahoos looking forward to Armageddon.

Liberal child welfare experts decided that child abuse was not evidence of a moral or character flaw in the abusing parent. Instead, like poverty, crime, and homelessness, child abuse came to be viewed as evidence of a societal failure.