I have this
picture in my head of groups of former hippies and leftists getting together every
year since, let’s be generous and say Reagan’s second term. I imagine these
meetings involved them all lighting up joints, popping The Doors album into the
8-Track, and bitching about America today.
At one point, someone will say something like: “They should have listened
to us, man,” and the crowd will just nod.
I think similar
meeting take place with African-Americans of the generation, though they may
have begun earlier, say with Nixon’s reelection. The attitude will no doubt be
exactly the same, though it takes on a darker tone: “We never had a chance.”
I’m not saying
there have not been countless reasons for both of these groups mutual pessimism:
so much of the conservative movement as we know it day had its founding in the
aftermath of the 1960s and one can trace so much of our society’s problems –
especially the partisan divides that have crippled our politics – to that era.
Where I fundamentally disagree with them is, having heard so much of what both
groups ideological descendants have been saying ever since, is that their arguments
about to the idea that everything that was good in America died forever in the
1960s and looking at it from a historical standpoint, that isn’t true.
The apartheid
state of the South, which had been a fixture in America since essentially the
founding, finished its nearly dissolve. The Civil Rights movements reached its pinnacle
in the 1960s with both the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act
of 1965. The Great Society may not have
achieved everything that Lyndon Johnson hoped it would, but much of the so
called social safety network that many Americans take for granted was established
during the 1960s. Man managed to do the
impossible, explore space and finally walk on the moon. And by 1971, the 26th
Amendment was enshrined in the Constitution giving suffrage to 18 year olds.
But by that point,
there’s an argument that the children of the 1960s, particularly on the left,
were in agreement with part of Ronald Reagan’s famous statement: they didn’t
think government was the solution to the problem. Their disillusionment with
the system was pretty much complete even before Watergate and the Reagan
Revolution; there’s a good chance they might not have cared even by the time
George McGovern was running for President in 1972. Certainly the young who had been enfranchised
didn’t care; less than half of Americans who had been given the right to vote
in 1972 did so, and those who did divided their vote pretty evenly between McGovern
and Nixon. By that point, so many of those who had been at the heart of the
struggle in the 1960s were certain that the system was broken and nothing would
change.
I find it ironic
that so many of those same children of the 1960s considered JFK the only President
who was truly inspiring; based on their behavior not only at the time but for
decades afterwards, they basically have spent their lives spitting on the most
famous line in his inaugural address. By the time of the mid 1960s, not only
were they not the least bit interesting in doing anything for their country,
they mocked and demeaned anyone who thought that there was something gained in
doing so. This attitude was clear in their behavior towards the military, brass
and soldiers, to the generations who had struggled so that they could achieve,
and most damningly to elected officials who had the power to make the changes
they seemed to want. I think the best
way to make this very clear is to look at two different election years: the
1964 Democratic Convention when it came to African-American activists and the
1968 race for the Democratic nomination when it came to the students and the
left. The reactions of each group demonstrate in the clearest possible sense
the divide between the activists who believed in working towards social change
and pure performance, a divide that neither movement ever recovered from.
As I wrote in an
earlier article in 1964, the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee and
other civil rights groups defied Mississippi’s whites-only Democratic Party by
creating a parallel party, the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, which
would be open to all. Fannie Lou Hamer,
a member of this party, testified before the Credential Committee. This
inflamed the actual Mississippi delegation, who threatened if any of the
Freedom Democratic Party delegates were seated, they would publicly walked out
of the convention.
LBJ was
understandably terrified that if this happened on television, it would send a message
to the South which the Republican candidate Barry Goldwater could easily capitalize
on. There were other realities: George
Wallace had run a primary challenge to LBJ in three states and had gotten a
considerable amount of the vote. A walkout
by the South could appeal to those Wallace voters in the North – and Wallace
had made an effort to reach out to Goldwater before the Convention. Through arm-twisting
based on more desperation than he wanted to reveal, he managed to agree to a
compromise where two delegates from the Party could be seated at the
convention.
In hindsight, I
find that there was less principle than performance by SNCC. I don’t deny the reality
of the horrors that had gone on Mississippi – the murders of three civil rights
workers in that state were fresh in everybody’s minds. But there was a larger issue in play that the
protesters seemed determined to ignore. The previous month LBJ had signed the
Civil Rights Bill which seemed the culmination of all these struggles that so
many men like Rustin and Martin Luther King had spent their lives fighting
for. Goldwater had been one of only
seven Republicans to vote against it. The
1964 election was, in a sense, a referendum on that bill.
Rustin argued that
defeating Goldwater was more important than what was, at the end of the day, a
performance piece. To be clear, there was nothing really to be gained by
seating the Freedom Party delegation at the convention. Mississippi had been opposed to the Civil
Rights bill and their stand had been repudiated by its passage. SNCC seemed less interested in being gracious
in victory than a public humiliation. It’s hard to see what they were truly
hoping to change by this token battle when the consequences could have been
disastrous for their cause.
But the movement
of the era was for patience and so many activists at that time were impatient.
This became clear in another aspect of Rustin’s behavior that many historians
try to play down: the significance of his dispute with Malcolm X (before he
broke with the Nation of Islam) and later on the Black Power movement.
At the end of the
day Rustin realized the fundamental flaw of the Black Power movement that most
of its defenders and rehabilitators will never admit: their total percentage of
the population is lower than they think. The most recent census shows that Black
Americans make up 13.6 percent of the U.S. population, and in the sixties it
was somewhere between 11 percent and 12.
The idea of them going it alone and surviving is nearly as ridiculous as
those 19th century Americans who thought the slavery question could
be resolved by sending slaves back to Africa.
Rustin wrote that shouting the slogan of ‘Black Power may afford a momentary
satisfaction that is calculated to destroy them and their movement.” In this essay, written in 1966, he argued that
the youths who had rioted in Watts and elsewhere were members of a truly lost
and hopeless generation.” Rustin was a lifelong pacifist and saw advocates such
as Stokely Carmichael, as being out of touch when they exhorting these young men
to oppose the Vietnam war when many of them so tragically see it as the only
way out.” To imagine that a dispersed minority could take up arms against
someone unnamed to something unknown against
something unknown was absurd – one might say nearly as ridiculous as those members
of MAGA who assemble in crowds arguing that they can take ‘our country back’.
The idea of the Black Power movement and of so
many of those advocates seemed to be arguing for creating a society for Black
Americans that was somehow separate and equal. One does not deny their
struggle or the racism that was against them, but one does truly wonder what
their endgame was. I also find that so many
of these Americans on the left mock the idea that conservatives use the words
of Martin Luther King without any idea what he really meant. The irony was that
for quite a few years before his assassination many of them had stopped
listening to King’s words altogether and thought him a figure out of touch with
the struggle of today. Indeed by that point they, like so many on the left, had
begun to work against the idea of what men like King and Rustin had spent their
lives working for. Their activism was designed to draw attention to the
struggle and create the kind of change that led to the laws of America changing
to make things better for them. The Black Power movement was all about drawing
attention to the struggle and did not think America could make things better
for them or that their efforts counted for anything. So much of their actions in
hindsight seems based on the idea that ‘No Publicity is Bad Publicity’. They were clearly wrong but like so many on
the left, they will blame everybody themselves.
This brings me,
naturally, to the student movement for the War in Vietnam. Just as they never
gave LBJ the credit he deserved for what he did for so many of the underprivileged,
the youth were perfectly fine blaming him for the Vietnam War. The fact that he
had inherited the mess from his predecessor and that most of the men who advised
him were part of that same circle will never make an impact in the minds of
those of the 1960s: indeed, Oliver Stone said pretty directly in JFK that
LBJ was an unindicted co-conspirator in Kennedy’s assassination to make sure
the war was escalated.
That the young and
the leftist were angry about the War was killing thousands of Americans in a
meaningless war seemed critical. (Though to be clear, they never seemed to show
much remorse for the Viet Cong we were killing in far larger numbers.) If they
had a strategy at all in their marches and demonstrations, it fundamentally
seems to be in getting everybody as angry as they were and it didn’t much
matter why they were upset. As to doing anything to end the war, that had to be
done by someone else.
Allard Lowenstein
did the world a service when he tried to get someone to stand in a protest vote
in New Hampshire against LBJ. But I really don’t think even he thought it would
succeed. If he had, I’m pretty sure he would never have chosen a man like Eugene
McCarthy as his standard bearer.
In many ways
McCarthy was the perfect model for so many leftist candidates. McCarthy had no
interest in being President, and there was never much evidence he liked being
an elected official. Even by the time he was selected to run, he’d basically
become a gadfly to the Democratic Party someone who no one in the establish
could count on. He had famous given the nomination speech at the 1960
Democratic Convention for Adlai Stevenson when JFK had already sewn up the
nomination and his fellow Minnesotan Orville Freeman was nominating Kennedy. He never truly got along with his fellow
senator Hubert Humphrey and spent much of his career as Senator being a reliable
Democratic vote and not much else. It wasn’t even clear he had a position on
Vietnam at all; indeed, some New Hampshire citizens thought he favored
escalations when they voted for him. McCarthy got the job because he wasn’t
running for reelection that year the way that George McGovern or other Senators
were. He might very well have considered a lark, a way to stick it to a President he just didn’t
like. (He didn’t like a lot of people.)
The high point of
the students movement was when a group of them were willing to shave their
beards and famously ‘Get Clean For Gene’. What will never be known is how many
of them truly believed this would change anything or whether it was just a
variation on performance. I think many of them were as surprised as Johnson was
when McCarthy very nearly won the New Hampshire primary.
The attitude of so
many of his volunteers can be summed up by that of a McCarthy staffer. “After
New Hampshire, it was like Christmas morning. And when Bobby declared, it was
like all our presents had been stolen.”
I’ve made it clear
in my article about Bobby Kennedy’s decision to run for President in 1968 as
fundamentally selfish. That said, at the
very least when LBJ dropped out, he at least had a realistic goal as to how to
try and win the Democratic nomination against Humphrey. It would have been
infinitely easier for everybody concerned had McCarthy just decided to get out
after Johnson dropped out of the race: the purpose of the campaign had realized
the next job would have been to unite behind a candidate who could get the nomination
in Chicago. The odds of defeating Humphrey would still have been difficult, but
far less arduous and Kennedy had a better chance than McCarthy ever did.
But McCarthy’s
refusal to get out was based in what has to be the definition of the leftist
candidate: it wasn’t so much about winning as it was hatred of your enemy. This
obstinance of McCarthy became clear even as Kennedy won primary after primary.
There were, to be
clear, some states McCarthy did well in after sweeping Wisconsin. He trounced
Kennedy in Pennsylvania and swamped him in Massachusetts. But in states where
Bobby put on effort such as Indiana, Nebraska and DC, Kennedy swamped McCarthy.
In Indiana McCarthy finished third to a stand in for Humphrey. Even on the day
of his victory in Oregon, he was swamped in Florida by a favorite son
candidate.
McCarthy’s
stubbornness was based in what is fundamentally in a leftist superiority: he
thought he was better than Kennedy and that the voters who voted against him
were dumber. For all the fanboys in the
press who supported Kennedy during the campaign, it’s hard to argue that they
had an unreasonable bias against McCarthy: he held them at arms-length in a way
Kennedy didn’t. After being trounced in
Nebraska, many of his followers thought he should get out and support Kennedy.
But McCarthy refused.
And in the
aftermath of Kennedy’s assassination, he did nothing to bolster any chance he
had for the fight he had ostensibly spent six months waging. It might not have
possible for McCarthy to get the nomination, but he could have worked to heal
the divide between him and the Kennedy forces against Humphrey against the
convention. Instead, he basically did nothing and George McGovern ended up representing
their remnants at the convention.
And there’s a
telling remark made by the radical attorney William Kunstler’s years later: “The
best thing that happened to the movement was Bobby Kennedy’s assassination.”
First of all, that is a truly horrendous thing to say regardless of your
feelings for the man. And second, how could this be counted as a ‘good thing
for the movement’? The implication seems
to be that if Bobby had won, the left would have had to compromise its
principles and pick a side in the Democratic convention. That says a lot about
the 1960s radicals. The best thing for
their movement was not the kind of coalition that could bring about the changes
that they claimed to be a part of but rather the freedom to never have to
choose a side, keeping making noise, and saying that the system is broken
without having to do a thing to fix it.
And that played
out in Chicago, not just outside the halls but in them. Rather than unite in
order to defeat a man that all sides considered a monster – Richard Nixon – the
Democratic Party spent the next week tearing itself to pieces. Part of it was
due to the manipulations of LBJ behind the scenes and his refusal to repudiate
his policy in Vietnam. But the idea that Hubert Humphrey and Richard Nixon were
essentially alike in the minds of so many young people speaks volumes to their
decision to ignore what both men stood for. The Gonzo journalist Hunter
Thompson seems to have looked at this and said that he cast a protest vote for
Dick Gregory that year. In a book, he
speaks in the kind of terms that somehow only McCarthy and Bobby could have ended
the war on Vietnam, as if he has decided to ignore the reality of what was
going on behind the scenes at the time.
Thompson is far from a reliable narrator but his views were shared by
millions of Americans at the time. The idea the left seems to have been that
while Nixon was evil incarnate, Humphrey was just a tool for ‘the man’. And it
is that blanket indifference that the left seems to have expressed towards the
Presidency ever since. The Republicans
are evil incarnate but the Democrats are, you know, part of the system which
makes them just as bad.
It's worth noting
that Eugene McCarthy’s attitude in the aftermath of Chicago is completely
keeping with so much of the left’s behavior over time. Having spent the last
several months in a fight he neither could win nor had any real desire to and
having led a battle that had wounded his parties chances for victory, he spent the
fall basically sitting the campaign out. In the critical weeks of September and
October, he was not campaigning for Humphrey or Democrats but covering the
World Series for Sports Illustrated. He
gave no leadership to the people who believed in him going forward and gave
only the most lukewarm of endorsements for Humphrey in the final two weeks of
the campaign. In an election that was decided by little more than .7 of a
percent in the popular vote, McCarthy’s absence from the campaign trail has to
be at least one of the critical factors.
But McCarthy just
went on. Two years later, he resigned from the Senate rather than seek
reelection. (Hubert Humphrey took his seat.) He made a failed attempt for the
Democratic nomination in 1972, ran as a third party candidate in 1976 and did
so on two other occasions throughout his life. He spent the rest of his life
mocking the system of politics – so in that sense, he is the perfect representation
of the left in the aftermath.
America was
founded in the idea of activism. From the Boston Tea Party to the Freedom
Riders movement in the early 1960s, activism was about using spectacle to try
and build coalitions in order to help America realize its promise. Starting in the mid-sixties activism started
to be about spectacle, period. The
frustration might be understandable; the decision to ignore reality wasn’t, and
it is here the left fundamentally calcifies the position it holds to this day.
Whatever activism
they have engaged in over the last half century is not about social change or
even change at all. They have convinced themselves the country is broken beyond
repair. The incremental changes, even the sweeping ones that have come in our
society and our politics are wholly inadequate because they have not let to the
mythological utopia that so many believe they are entitled to but have neither
an idea how to form or an interest in doing the work to do so. Any massive wound our country endures – such as
Watergate – is something they take satisfaction in. “Serves you right for
trusting that man,” they say about a President they never voted for. In contrast the triumph of Barack Obama and what
it means for our society is meaningless because he’s part of ‘the system’ and
therefore utterly incapable of making the changes that they believe the country
needs but that no government can reasonably do.
They argue the Republican rise in the
aftermath of the 1960s is proof as to how broken society ids. They conveniently
leave out that in the aftermath of Nixon’s 1968 election, total voter turnout
dropped slowly for the rest of the century, barely averaging 50 percent for the
1980s and 1990s. The left is fond of Jesse Helms’ quote saying: “Republicans
win if fewer people vote!” They refuse to acknowledge that they spent much of
that period sitting elections out in ever increasing numbers.
Rest assured that lesson
has trickled down to the next generation of leftists, who spend endless amounts
of time and energy berating the broken system, Republicans, the conservative
media, the mainstream media, basically everyone for not being smart enough to
see what ‘they’ see and offer nothing in the way of realistic solutions or even
solutions at all. At least some of them will be willing to shill for Democrats
as at least trying to make America better (though they will hold them up to the
same impossible standard). Most of their more ideological purists have decided
that both sides are still equally horrible and that doing anything at all to
change things other their hashtag protests and endless columns berating the
broken system of America is pointless. They will rage that democracy is under attack
but are enraged that they have to be bother to do the bare minimum and vote. Some will protest in the street and chant
rallying cries for their cause and then go home and berate the other side as
being unamerican for doing the same thing for theirs.
To change minds
and build coalitions has never been easy – it is the long hard work of
democracy. But after the 1960s many on the left basically gave up trying to do
that because they had some kind of mythic idea of what the world should like
and no real plan as to how to get there. For years afterwards they have
gathered and mourned the loss of an America that never existed and that they
had no idea how to build. I don’t think the baby boomers deserve as much blame
for today’s world as they get from younger generations. But for those who believed in these myths and
refused to accept any version of them at the cost of making America worse for
future generations, there are many things I do want to say to them, and not one
of them starts with the word ‘okay.’
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