Basic Instincts

Someone writes to Sullivan:

Liberals are instinctively opposed to racial pride, nationalism, religious bigotry, and leader-worship–and we saw it in spades with George Bush and Bushism.

After all, if you don’t count 20th century progressive support for eugenics and sterilisation policies, the French Revolution (or, for that matter, almost any 19th century national movement), 19th and 20th century liberal nationalism, the Kulturkampf in Germany and Austria, WWI, and the adulation bestowed on FDR, John Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy, and Martin Luther King (the last three mostly posthumously), when have liberals ever been associated with any of those things?  Arguably, left-liberals today show fewer signs of some of these past liberal enthusiasms, but that would show this claim of “instinctive” opposition to be rather hollow.