Back To The Future

I don't know who this group of hippie protester strawmen are in Kevin Mattson's cautionary tale in this months Prospect, but I've not had the pleasure. I don't think there exists a vast number of nostalgic baby boomers and utopian youngsters out there who are planning to launch another Summer of Love, unless he's specifically talking about the anti-Iraq war protests, which of course, he is, but won't admit it. That's because those war protesters weren't trying to hop on a nostalgic magic carpet ride back to the days of Hanoi Jane, they were participating in a worldwide protest about a very specific unjust war being launched by an illegitimate president --- a war which the "fighting liberals" like he and Peter Beinert foolishly endorsed. I suppose the fact that millions of people all over the globe also marched merely means that they too were recreating the alleged glory days of People's Park.

People will always take protests to the streets from time to time. The 60's liberals certainly didn't invent the tactic and the fact that liberals are associated with protesting has a lot more to do with an image propagated by the right than any real danger of a resurgent Yippie movement.

My instinctive reaction to this entire line of paranoid ramblings about the wild and crazy lefites making a big scene and ruining everything is that if this guy thinks that a bloodless, wonkish liberalism is ever going to compete with the right wing true believers he's got another thing coming. American liberalism grew out of a passionate progressivism and a worldwide union movement, both of which featured plenty of "protest politics" in their day. And if he thinks that the modern GOP's political might hasn't drawn much of its power from pulpits and talk radio demagoguery, then he hasn't been paying attention. Nobody does political theatre better than the right wing.

He very generously offers that he doesn't agree that Move-On should be purged from the coalition because they are, after all, learning that street protests are bad form. As long as they "behave" they can stay. (And all that money they raise can stay too, presumably.) The author fails to realize, however, that just as the rabble on the right took to the airwaves, the rabble on the left is taking to cyberspace. This ain't no hippie protest movement, dude. It's as modern as modern can get.

People need to feel things about politics, not just think. It's a grave mistake for political types to insult and marginalize those who have passion and wish to express that publicly. These jittery fellows who are so afraid of "the left's" overheated energy need to remember that their golden post war age was populated by a people who had just been through a crushing economic upheavel and a cataclysmic war. They were willingly docile and conformist for good reason. Don't expect that to be present in other circumstances in a thriving democracy. It isn't natural nor should it be desired. It only lasted a very brief time even then.

And remember, the favorite candidate of the wonkish cold war liberals was Adlai Stephenson who warmed the blood of at least 43 upper west side society matrons and a couple of college kids in Cambridge. Other than that, even in Stepford America of the 1950's they picked the man who looked good in a uniform. All the wonky goodness in the world doesn't necessarily translate into votes. You've got to resonate on a deeper level with people and while I appreciate the need for an elegant foreign policy argument, I frankly wonder if this public wonkfest isn't just going to reinforce the Republican image of us as a bunch of weenies. In today's political climate nothing spells defeat for Democrats more than the image of a bunch of fey, ivory tower eggheads running the military.

Furthermore, it should be remembered that until JFK's assassination, there was plenty of theatrical and violent public rhetoric coming from the right. It may be that that violent impulse found its catharsis in the assassination, and massive social opprobrium required a severe ratcheting down of anti-communist demagoguery. Could it be that the benign institution building for which the Republicans are now being canonized as visionaries was actually a pragmatic reaction to the country's disgust with their vocal extremism? Regardless, it's ridiculous to completely place the Republicans as some sort of calm, reasonable suburbanites in contrast to us crazed extremists on the left then or now.

Please:


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Yes, the New Left was a bunch of wankers, but you know, that wasn't news even at the time. And it's true that much of the peace protesting of the 60's were pretty much a reflection of a large youth demographic and an unpopular military draft. There was a lot of babble but in the end the radical political movement of Tom Hayden et al mostly collapsed because its raison d'etre, Vietnam, collapsed as an issue. But, underneath that Chicago convention circus a bunch of really important other things were happening that are glossed over by these newly minted men in the grey flannel suits with patronizing lip service to "idealism". He acknowledges that the world before the 60's was unequal and starkly illiberal for many people and says that nobody wants to go back to those days. But he then scribbles a long essay about how the protest movement was terrible for liberalism.

These critics of the unwashed rabble just can't seem to recognize that with great prosperity and political power the time had come for liberalism to act on its long overdue responsibility to fully extend the rights and responsibilities of the American experiment to women and racial minorities --- to use, as Dear Leader would say, its political capital. The social changes that were ratified in the 60's and 70's were arguably more important to the lives of more than 50% of Americans than anything that had happened in the previous century. That's not hyperbole. The women's rights movement alone is one of the greatest progressive leaps forward in human history.

My 36 year old mother couldn't get a mortgage in her own name in 1955. She had to have her father sign the papers. Birth control was illegal in many parts of the country until 1965. Women were routinely denied slots in education and were openly and without shame discriminated against in employment. African Americans, we all know, could be denied the right to enter even public buildings in many areas of the country until 1964. Their "right" to vote was a joke. I needn't even mention the fact that they were dismissed socially as second class citizens without a moment's thought by very large numbers of Americans until quite recently.

That is the world that the "fighting liberals" were protecting. And that is the world that was changed irrevocably during this allegedly frivolous time of liberal protest politics in 1960's. And it was done though the means that this writer seems to find so distasteful --- while he perfunctorily agrees that the ends were all in all a good thing. I'm sorry if all those changes subsequently made it difficult for policy wonks to make a good national security argument, but you know, tough shit. Sometimes you have to do hard things and there is often a price to pay for it.

You don't make radical quantum leaps in social equality without there being a reaction. The reverberations of all of that are still being felt in the culture wars of today and it has made things difficult for Democratic party politics. However, the energetic political activism of the 60's resulted in tangible, everyday improvement in the lives of vast numbers of Americans who fought for and won the right to be equal under the law in this country. That betterment of real people's lives is what liberalism is supposed to be about.

The lauded "fighting foreign policy liberals" of the 50's were the dying dinosaurs of an establishment that was rapidly losing its energy in a stable, wealthy, globally dominant America. As the writer acknowledges, it was quite easy for them to ride the back of the liberal consensus because they were the inheritors of it --- a condition that does not exist today. It's harder now. That's the reality that we are facing.

I don't know where this vast horde of reborn hippies worshipping at the feet of Jerry Rubin are but I do not see them. What I do see is modern political activism that is demanding change in modern ways. It seems to me that it isn't "the left" that is nostalgic for the past, it's these centrists who for reasons I cannot fathom have decided that their grandfather's political methods are the ticket to political dominance in the 21st century.

Sure, policy wonks should be developing a cohesive and persuasive voice on foreign policy. Have at it. But to try to create some quasi "movement" from a very brief and quite uninspired --- even at the time --- political era strikes me as strangely reactionary. As the author writes in his first paragraph, "examining ... history can mean recycling good ideas and tactics. But what if it means recycling bad ones?" Excellent question and one that I would suggest he ask his colleagues in the "let's take a trip back to 1948" club.

We're progressives. We're supposed to progress. We don't do nostaligia. Let's leave that to Pat Buchanan.


correction: hoard,horde,whored
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