Let me begin by offering a personal story about Ted Kennedy that is illustrative, but quite possibly apocryphal. At the time of Robert F. Kennedy’s assassination, he was a Senator from New York. The other member of the delegation was the liberal Republican, Jacob Javits. In that time of less politicized judiciary appointments, senators had significant sway with the White House and the party in power made a less concerted effort to pack the courts with ideologically safe choices. At any rate, the two politically similar senators had worked out a deal to the effect that for every two judges RFK got to recommend, Mr. Javits would get one.

As it happened, my grandfather, Orrin G. Judd, had gotten their joint nod, on April 25, 1968, to fill an open seat on the United States District Court, Eastern District of New York, but with RFK out of the way, the Johnson administration started making noises about withdrawing the nomination and naming a Democrat instead. The story has it that Senator Javits went to the Senator from Massachusetts, explained the deal he’d had with the dead brother and asked Ted to intervene with the White House. He did and the appointment was confirmed on June 24, 1968.

While this anecdote naturally inclines me to be a tad more charitable to Ted Kennedy than many conservatives, the takeaway is really what a creature of the institution of the Senate and of Washington he was. There must have been some irony for Mr. Kennedy when Barack Obama became the first senator elected to the presidency since John F. Kennedy, despite his never having passed a significant piece of legislation through the chamber. Ted Kennedy, by contrast, steered some 300 bills into law, a legislative record that is likely unparalleled in the history of the US Congress. The imprint he leaves behind effects every facet of our daily lives, from immigration liberalization to passage of civil rights laws to trucking and airline deregulation to election and campaign finance reform to funding for cancer and AIDS treatment and research to No Child Left Behind and so on and so forth. And his skills as a parliamentary infighter and role as a voice of the party served him well when it came to stopping Executive branch appointments too, as witness the way he single-handedly transformed the Robert Bork nomination to the Supreme Court, turning a seeming done deal into a vote that few Democrats could afford to oppose him on.

Though foreign policy was seldom his main concern, he was as much responsible as anyone for Congress cutting off funds to our South Vietnamese allies and to the Contras, for anti-apartheid legislation and help for Soviets Jews and dissidents, and he led opposition to both wars against Saddam Hussein. Indeed, his influence is so pervasive and so wide-ranging that it is difficult to make a broad generalization about his legacy. But what does seem fair to say is that he has for five decades been the avatar of modern liberalism.

Now, if you want to get a feel for what it was like to argue about angels and pinheads in medieval times, you could always just try start an argument about what the term liberalism means. Libertarians and paleocons will fight you for the right to it, in its original incarnation as a belief in human freedom. And plenty will tell you it’s an epithet, standing for naught but statism and economic redistribution. But Ted Kennedy claimed the term for himself, always wore it proudly, and defended it even after most Democrats had tried escaping it. So perhaps we can say that, to a remarkable degree, modern liberalism was whatever Ted Kennedy said it was and however he stood on the issues. He certainly leaves no fellow politician behind who Americans would both recognize and describe as a liberal. The last Democratic nominee who would have been comfortable describing himself as a liberal was probably George McGovern and most of the remaining liberals in Congress are intentionally kept out of the limelight. Nancy Pelosi is probably the closest thing he has to an heir, but House Speakers are fairly anonymous. No, Teddy was it. All that “last liberal lion” is more true than not.

So when we look at his public record we can learn wider lessons about modern liberalism. What that record teaches us is that there are pronounced inconsistencies to liberalism such that it can barely be considered a political philosophy, inconsistencies so drastic that we can see why it failed to stand the test of time.

Had Mr. Kennedy done nothing else in his career, he would justly be remembered as a great American for his work on the Immigration Act and the Voting Rights Act when he first got to the Senate in 1965. These two bills helped to undo the ugliest sort of institutionalized racism that had persisted in America for forty years in the one case and a hundred in the other. In cases like this, he really was a classic kind of liberal, seeking to lift the boot of government off of the neck of discrete groups of Americans who were being treated unfairly because of what they were, not being judged on the basis of who they were. Here he appealed to the very best in the American people, with the demand that we recognize that all men are created equal and are thereby endowed with equal rights.

However, the Senator and liberalism soon went beyond this basic and quintessentially American idealism and–in the form of programs like affirmative action, Title IX funding, hate crimes legislation, pay equity, and the like–insisted on pretty much the exact opposite, that people be treated differently solely on the basis of what they were. Where the original civil rights laws were able to win society wide support because they said that you should not be forbidden to vote or denied access to a public restroom just because you were black, the liberals now claimed that you were entitled to a job or admission to college or whatever if you were black and your competition was white. Standing the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. on his head, Americans were to be judged on the color of the skin or on their gender. Unsurprisingly, this round of the “civil rights” fight proved to be far more divisive, to the point that it is unresolved today but the trend appears to be towards phasing out the special pleadings Kennedy and company depended on. And the fight would have already been decided against liberalism if public opinion prevailed, rather than court rulings.

Nor was the movement from anti-discrimination to “positive discrimination” the most contradictory stance of Ted Kennedy and liberalism. Far more difficult to accept and disastrous for society was the embrace of abortion. Despite the teachings of the Church to which he putatively remained devoted and despite an oft-stated concern with the weakest members of society, Mr. Kennedy became a devoted proponent for and defender of unlimited abortion (including partial birth abortion), which has seen the killing of tens of millions of American babies, and for federal funding of fetal tissue research. Not only did this aspect of liberal politics dehumanize the most vulnerable, it had its origins in racism and eugenics as Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg recently reminded everyone:

“Frankly I had thought that at the time Roe was decided, there was concern about population growth and particularly growth in populations that we don’t want to have too many of. So that Roe was going to be then set up for Medicaid funding for abortion. Which some people felt would risk coercing women into having abortions when they didn’t really want them.”

The attempt by Kennedy and company to cast abortion as a women’s rights issue has always smacked of an attempt to cast slavery as a property rights question. And the callous disregard for human life is so at odds with the rest of what liberalism claims to, and often does, stand for that it has tended to drown out much of the rest of the message. It is no coincidence that liberalism, which was already struggling by the early 1970s, has been in steady decline since Roe v. Wade. It is ultimately just not possible to reconcile the claims that you are “progressive” and humanist but that there can be no limits on abortion. Here again, liberalism went to war with itself.

Another area where Ted Kennedy and the liberalism he represented failed to adapt and has therefore lost coherence is on Third Way social reforms. This is not the place to debate the meaning of that freighted term, but we can think of the Third Way broadly as an attempt to make the social welfare net that the Second Way made an integral part of every industrial society more efficient and affordable by applying First Way (free market) principles. The first big fight in this regard came over Welfare-to-Work, where despite Bill Clinton’s support and decades of warnings from even good liberals like Daniel Patrick Moynihan that welfare had created a culture of dependency and fostered numerous social pathologies, many liberals in Congress, including Senators Moynihan and Kennedy, opposed linking benefits to work. Similarly, liberals have fought against social security accounts, health savings accounts, and other reforms that would preserve social welfare but reduce the role of government in its provision. The strange part of all of this is that liberals have disassociated themselves from what is good for the poor who they claim to wish to help and have set up opposition to such reforms on what can only be reactionary grounds, based on Republican support for such ideas, or a devotion to big government despite its failure to provide adequate services.

One revealing moment of recent years came with the No Child Left Behind law, that Ted Kennedy joined with George W. Bush to pass. Democrats have fought tooth and nail against any attempt to provide public school students with vouchers–including getting rid of the voucher plan that has been so successful in Washington, DC. as one of their first acts under President Obama. But No Child had a secret, it was a surreptitious voucher plan. And Ted Kennedy didn’t realize what George W. Bush had gotten him to agree to. As is often-noted, the testing standards that NCLB imposes are so stringent that eventually there may not be any schools that can meet them. Less often recognized is that the bill included a program allowing students in failing schools to opt out and attend a different public school instead.

Obviously, once every school is failing you’d have nothing but a gigantic voucher program, allowing students and parents to choose what school was best for them. Such is the real reason that Democratic opposition to NCLB became so strident. Such a system would benefit students, especially those in genuinely bad schools, but considerations like that don’t drive liberalism these days. On education in particular, they are too beholden to the whims of unions to worry about inner city kids and whether they get educated or not.

Step back for a second though and look at the bigger picture. Conservatives stand ready to yield on the question of whether there should be a safety net and are even willing to spend more on it, so long as the net is resewn in ways that empower people directly: education vouchers, personal retirement accounts, health savings accounts, etc. Reforms like this have been undertaken already from Chile to New Zealand to Britain to Sweden. And yet liberalism is anything but progressive when it comes to modernizing these programs. Senator Kennedy instead rallied his party to fight a rearguard action as if giving up any of the ground they’d won in the New Deal or the Great Society would be disastrous. He died still dreaming of giving America a Swedish-style health care system even though the Swedes themselves have left socialism behind.

Deference to trade unions led to one other departure for Ted Kennedy liberals, another one that sounds queer coming from them, the move from free trade to protectionism. Once upon a time, it was the GOP, seeking to protect Northern industrialists, that sought to limit trade and economic competition, most infamously through the Depression deepening Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930. Democrats, on the other hand, had backed free trade, as in Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points. For liberals, the intertwining of nations via trade relations and the way they would come to depend on each other trumped the benefits to business from greater freedom.

Ted Kennedy voted for the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) when they came to the floor in the Clinton presidency, but in recent years opposed fast track trade authority for the president, the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA), and the piecemeal agreements with Oman, Singapore, Chile, etc., while insisting that subsequent agreements should impose American labor standards on trade partners. Somewhere along the line, trade between nations had gone from being an end in itself to a mere means for exporting liberal standards to sovereign nations. And if trade protectionism has repeatedly been shown to be counter-productive, so be it.

The final battleground on which modern liberalism fought against its former self was in foreign affairs, where the difference between John F. Kennedy and Ted Kennedy is truly stark. Woodrow Wilson had once taken America to war in order to make the world safe for democracy. FDR took us to war against the fascism of the Axis Powers. Harry Truman embraced the Cold War against communism generally and intervened against North Korea specifically. And JFK took us into Vietnam to save the South from communist aggression. But Ted Kennedy had turned against the Vietnam War by 1967 and over the next thirty years would generally oppose American efforts to extend democracy. Kennedy led Congress in opposition to Gerald Ford’s final request for aid to South Vietnam and Cambodia in 1975 and in limiting the use of American air power to support the government of South Vietnam. Historian Mark Moyar has argued that with our help the South could possibly have repulsed the North — instead, the final Kennedy legacy in Vietnam is the boat people and in Cambodia is the killing fields.

He fought against Jimmy Carter’s aid to Afghanistan, Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative, the deployment of Pershing missiles in Western Europe, and American assistance for the Contras in Nicaragua, all steps credited with hastening the fall of the Soviet Union. He opposed the invasion of Panama and both wars against Saddam Hussein. He almost perfectly represented the retreat of liberalism from a fighting faith into isolationism. Michael Barone in an essay today on how this same withdrawal is affecting Barack Obama says that the problem it creates is that “dovishness abroad and statism at home don’t readily go together.” On the one hand, modern liberalism stands ready to use every power of government to ameliorate anything it describes as suffering at home, but, on the other, is almost completely unwilling to interfere abroad no matter how severe the suffering, up to and including genocide — all while professing a love for all mankind.

It may or may not be a good idea for us to protect spotted owls and snail darters, but a politics that insists we must save them but can be indifferent to the Ba’athists feeding Shi’ites into giant shredders just doesn’t make any sense. It is passionate about the trivial but uninterested in actual evils. Over the course of Ted Kennedy’s political career, liberalism somehow became illiberal and he was instrumental in that unfortunate transition. Over that same timeframe the political center of the country also shifted from somewhere towards the Left of the spectrum to somewhere towards the Right. Those two shifts are inextricably linked.

Consider a president who enacts or proposes social welfare reforms that give the poor housing and education vouchers and give individuals control of their Social Security accounts so that they can build wealth; who develops a public/private/pastoral partnership so that social services can be delivered by churches and other community organizations; who liberalizes free trade in the Hemisphere, in the Pacific, and fights for a global free trade regime; who intervenes in places like Haiti, the Sudan and Liberia to stop violence against black populations; who takes the country to war against totalitarian dictatorships; who has the most diverse cabinet in American history and replaces a black secretary of state with a black female secretary of state… Well, you get the picture. If you’d asked someone in 1964, when Ted Kennedy was elected to the Senate, how such a president should be described, the answer would have been, as a liberal. They might even have suspected that you were describing a future President Ted Kennedy. Instead he fought nearly element of that presidency, and mostly unsuccessfully.

The passing of the great man–and I mean that without irony–affords liberals a unique chance to liberate themselves from Ted Kennedy. They can redefine themselves and their politics in a more modern fashion, without all of the retrograde Second Way baggage that Mr. Kennedy carried. They can get back to first principles, opposing discrimination even of the affirmative kind and opposing Islamicism even though it means fighting in foreign countries and embracing free trade even if we have to accept that Uruguay may not have the same workplace protection as we do yet and defending human life with the same steadfastness they do baby seals. This is the real MoveOn moment for American liberals, the opportunity to move on from a politician and a politics that served them well but no longer makes much internal sense.

The last liberal is gone. Long live liberalism.

Orrin Judd blogs at Brothers Judd.