With due respect for Mr. Hemphill, I wouldn't say liberals got these issues quite right either. On Civil Rights, while they rightly criticized racial discrimination, many of them pushed quotas, discrimination based on race (ironically), politics based on racial group identity, outcome-based policies, etc., that pit people against each other based on race.

As for Vietnam, how can the Vietnam War be one of only “two major issues” in his lifetime and yet communist dictators killing and oppressing millions for decades not be? This is a major blind spot for liberals. Many liberal intellectuals overlooked and even apologized for Stalin and Mao who killed tens of millions of human beings. Their repressive regimes were still around after we left Vietnam. Whatever their flaws, conservatives were mostly right about the nature of these dictatorships and criticized them.