For those who missed the whole story, today Nordlinger had a whole series of stuff:

A Cool Ten-Year-Old Head

In today’s Impromptus, I have a few words on the 1964 presidential campaign. The invective directed against Goldwater was amazing, as you know. A month after the election, Martin Luther King said that the American people had shown “great maturity” in rejecting “a dangerous Fascist path.”

referring to earlier writing:

Goldwater was a conservative, of course: the author of The Conscience of a Conservative, no less. But he was also a classical liberal: a free-marketeer, a constitutionalist, a decentralizer, an anti-statist. Being a classical liberal is enough to get you labeled a right-winger or worse. (I can testify from personal experience.)

Martin Luther King gave his Nobel lecture in December 1964, a month after LBJ trounced Goldwater. He said the American people had showed “great maturity” in rejecting “a dangerous Fascist path.” It was not MLK’s finest moment, obviously.

I disagree with Nordlinger dismissing MLK’s concerns about a “fascistic path”.

Nordlinger wants to soft-peddle just how extreme the current vitriol from the “tea party” right wing of Americana truly is, or how the American system has indeed found itself tempted to go down a “fascistic path”.

Nordlinger wants to make himself out to be a victim (“I can testify from personal experience”) of being wrongly labeled, but as his use of “wetback” demonstrates he is indeed tin-eared about social issues in America.