The hard-core right wing was not the main threat to the Party. Rather concessions to blacks and opponents of the war reestablished the credibility of liberalism to key constituencies.4 It was much easier for the parents of young adults to find Tom Wolfe’s parody of Leonard and Felicia Bernstein’s Panther fund-raiser funny when they believed their children would not be drafted to die in Vietnam. When the government had pursued the war irrespective of the public will, killing countless young Americans, the Panthers’ concerns were not so far afield. But when the Democratic Party began fighting to end the war, the Nixon administration rolled back the draft and created affirmative action programs, the United States normalized relations with revolutionary governments abroad, and black electoral representation ballooned, the Party had to work harder to maintain allied support. Eventually, the politics of armed self-defense became impossible to sustain.