When They Tell You It's Not About Generations...
I had only minor quibbles with Matt Stoller’s essay. One of them was that I thought he was a little too defensive in denying that there was a generational difference or that the “new movement” is largely youth-driven. I was going to paraphrase former Senator Dale Bumpers in his defense of Bill Clinton: “When they tell you its not about generations, it’s about generations.”
I hardly have to say it, though, because the responses here so vividly prove it. Stoller has put a lot of effort into understanding and explaining the social movement he’s part of, and in return, he’s been met by a whithering blast of Boomer vanity.
Matt’s been sat down and solemnly informed that:
1. He doesn't appreciate all the different distinctive subgroups within Students for a Democratic Society and how they changed over time.
True enough, and he probably also can’t name the members of Jefferson Airplane and Jefferson Starship. But I don’t think Matt even mentioned SDS. It’s pretty clear that his use of the term “New Left” is broad - appropriately so - and is not distinguishing between those most engaged by the civil rights movement, the anti-war movement, the identity politics of the Black Power and women’s movements, the suburban utopianism of the Port Huron Statement, etc. If he turned his essay into a book - as he should -- it might benefit from some examination of why some 60s leftists turned into Joe Lieberman and others became more radical. But if he wrote 1,000 pages on this topic, and barely mentioned SDS, nothing would be missing from his argument.
2. The New Left read real books, like Marcuse and Fanon, while "netroots" just reads garbage like George Lakoff’s Don't Think of an Elephant.
What a nasty canard, echoing the tired right-wing bull about "we all know our Hayek and our Russell Kirk and you people have no philosophical foundations." Much of the New Left canon was ridiculous pretense, and bookshelf-dressing anyway, rather like our Beatnik-in-Chief supposedly reading Camus. I have no admiration for George Lakoff’s recent popular books, but he’s hardly an inferior intellect to Herbert Marcuse. Has anyone noticed that one of the great activities on the left-wing blogs, not just this one but Firedoglake and many others, is the book discussion? Some of it is books about practical politics, like Crashing the Gate or Whistling Past Dixie (an element that the all factions of the New Left could have used a dose of, by the way, and more on that below) but there are discussions of constitutional law (Glenn Greenwald’s fine book), economics and globalization, realism vs. idealism in foreign policy, religion and politics, liberal education, etc. No there’s not a “canon,” like the right’s Hayek-Friedman-Burke-Kirk, or the New Left’s Marcuse-Fanon-Chomsky, but that’s a GOOD THING.
3. There’s nothing new under the sun, people always think they’re starting something new, and you’re just standing on someone else’s shoulders.
This one comes less from Sawicky than from Nathan Newman and others. It’s the most interesting as well. Newman argues that all great organizing occurred in the 1970s and 1980s, with, for example, the founding of Citizen Action. True, that middle period is an important history, and I’ve pointed out, for example, that Ned Lamont’s challenge to Lieberman was made possible not so much by the Netroots, but by the existence of one of the oldest of those middle-period organizations, the Connecticut Citizen Action Group (CCAG). Most of the netroots activists involved in that campaign have said the very same thing, and the Lamont campaign became a key point where these two movements meet and learn from one another. But they also learned some of the limits of those older organizing models as well.
Newman doesn’t acknowledge that these organizations never reached anything approaching the scale they aspired to. Citizen Action, as a national organization, collapsed in 1997, having been caught up in the corruption of the Democratic Party itself. Only in recent years have some of these organizations really stepped up and lived up to the promises made for them in the 1970s and 1980s. The defeat of Social Security privatization, for example, which is often cited as a netroots success, really owes at least as much to institutions that have their roots in that earlier era, such as US Action, which is, loosely, a successor to Citizen Action. It is when the netroots energy and the grassroots energy come together that their full promise is revealed.
I was cleaning out some things in my mother’s basement recently, and came across some old copies of a magazine called Working Papers for a New Society, which in the late 1970s and early 1980s was edited by Bob Kuttner, later a founder of the American Prospect. It was an impressive magazine that in a sense supports the view that there’s not much new under the sun, but if the ideas aren’t new, their realization is. I’ve been carrying around an issue from 1981, which is full of stuff that would be at home on Daily Kos or here, including a vicious takedown of the self-described “post-liberal” Senator Paul Tsongas by Sidney Blumenthal that would put David Sirota’s broadsides to shame. My favorite piece in the magazine was a speech by my friend Heather Booth, a great organizer and leader, from the founding convention of Citizen Action in 1980, one of the events that Newman mentions in his “it’s all been done before” response.
Heather’s speech was largely an argument that citizen organizing groups that had largely eschewed electoral politics (as Matt says), preferring the ‘60s techniques of protest and shaming, needed to fully embrace an aggressive, issue-driven, practical electoral strategy to win a real majority. Again, much of the speech would be at home on Daily Kos, with its ideology of “just stand for something!” She argued that an ideologically coherent and forceful vision would be more politically successful than the cautious anti-inflation politics of the Carter years, and called for a national effort to produce by 1984 “something like 500 candidates committed to a common program,” and that “at present, each election of an isolated progressive is largely ignored because it happens in isolation. When some crackpot right-winger is elected it’s news because he is part of the New Right. We can do this just as well as the right, but around different politics and programs.” (I’ll try to scan a copy of the speech so I can link to it.)
No one in this discussion can argue seriously that the kind of forceful, electorally engaged and ideologically uncompromised vision that Heather described twenty-six years ago actually took hold. Elections of progressives, like Paul Wellstone, remained isolated events, and efforts to develop coherent projects to recruit and support candidates were limited and quickly co-opted. When I started to work with state-level progressive groups in the late 1990s, the fatalistic refrain I often heard from their leaders was, “Well, we got one guy elected to the legislature a couple years ago, but he’s only one and now he’s one of them, not one of us.” Only in the last few years, with the netroots’ insistence on a coherent and forceful vision and their willingness to actually engage with the institutions of politics and seek to take control of them, and the candidate recruitment and support made possible through this movement, has the vision that some of those “in-betweeners” proposed in the 1970s and 1980s begun to be realized. There’s a level of energy and enthusiasm out there of which the netroots - if it is defined as those who engage in progressive politics primarily through blogs and internet-centric campaigns - are only one part. George Bush helped too.
It is on the issue of takeover of institutions that I have a few other small differences with Stoller. He says that 60s leftists eschewed institutions, and that’s true if he means institutions like labor unions and electoral politics. But they did have faith in one institution: the courts - that’s why they all went to law school. The view, shaped by the experience of the civil rights movement, that movements are about rights, and rights can be vindicated by legal claims rather than politics, has had very specific consequences for the effectiveness of liberals once forced into the electoral arena. A younger generation, raised entirely under the regime of the Rehnquist Court, has no such illusions that courts will save us and thus no escape from politics.
I also hope that in thinking more about the relationship of the New Left to the netroots, he would acknowledge that the 60s left was actually a reaction against liberalism, not against conservatism. I pointed out a while back that the facile analogy holding that opposition to the Iraq War would hurt Democrats in the same way that the anti-Vietnam War movement hurt Dems failed to acknowledge that Vietnam was divisive because it was the Democrats’ war, a war rooted in many ways in the overreach of postwar liberalism.
I’ve written more on these issues, particularly in this column.
Comments (28)
Re : #1, the broader (and more diverse) the object of Stoller's analysis, the less his generalizations could possibly apply. #2, being human, those in the left (or in politics of any sort in any age) were susceptible to pretentiousness.
We don't need a canon, but we could use better arguments that come from first principles and systematic analysis, not just tactical ripostes, from me as much as from anybody else. Otherwise the people will ask whither we go as we wither. The elevated discussions described by Mark are confined to some brilliantly exceptional sites.
Call it vanity if you like, but silly statements about the 60s are still silly, as are delusions of grandeur about having discovered things that are really old and sometimes not worth (re)discovering.
January 16, 2007 3:56 PM | Reply | Permalink
My older brother was very active in New Left activism back in the day. I was in college from '67 until '71, and was not all that active. Not as much as he had been, at least, and was really turned off by both the activists and the morons who elected Nixon. My son now is deeply involved in the draft Obama movement and speaking as a boomer father of his perspective on politics now, it is most definitely as much of a generational shift to him as JFK's campaign seemed to me way back when.
As Obama himself has said, there are still too many arguments taking place that sound like the echos of dorm room arguments of the 60s. I've been hearing them all these years, and I'm sick of the same crap over and over. It's time to move on.
January 16, 2007 6:15 PM | Reply | Permalink
It's interesting to note that the pendulum swings with FDR and the legislature locked in conflict with the Four Horsemen, then when the Dixiecrats allied with Republicans, Dems/Liberals used the courts. When the Republicans began to infest the courts Watergate enabled a switch back to the legislature, only when the 1994 revolution occurred, there were no courts to fall back on and so we got well, where we are today.
It's not a perfect observation I grant, but I think it points to one thing: there was a series of events culminating in the late 60s and early 70s that caused the infrastructure of the party to decay greatly after the Watergate legislative captures. This was not alleviated by concentration of power that occurred in Democrat circles under Clinton and when Clinton was gone there was a huge gaping hole that the netroots by having a cheap world-wide communication and database (the internets) have used to bring together activists and liberals for the purpose of filling.
I hope this time will be different at least because many have realized the importance of not letting infrastructure decay, because then the party is more likely to actually be a vehicle for voters.
Unfortunately we had to learn it from the Republicans who are now watching THEIR infrastructure decay or in cases of Haggard and Foley self-destruct.
January 16, 2007 6:18 PM | Reply | Permalink
I disagree with Mark Schmitt's contention that the "new left of the 60's" was a "reaction against liberalism." It wasn't. It was a reaction to the establishment - both republican and democratic parties and their monopoly of the system. And it was the system that was the problem, not ideology. The new left was an ideological mix of those who were disenfranchised by the system and excluded by virtue of colour, sex and age. It was the fact that the system used up our generation in a war in which we in effect had no say because we had no right to vote - it was okay for 18yr olds to fight, but they couldn't vote for those people who made the decision to send them to war. It was a system that denied women the right to even be adults, to make decisions about finances, education and most importantly reproductive rights. It was a system that denied minorities even the right to pull themselves up the ladder through education and access to funding of the American dream. It was a reaction to the institutions of higher education which colluded with the government in their restriction to the upper classes, and their complicity in notifying draft boards of student status and allowing government to monitor and spy on student activists. It was a reaction to a system that used the military to quash student protest by firing on them during a peaceful demonstration and killing them.
The reason the Vietnam war was a failure wasn't because of the democratic party "overreach of postwar liberalism" it was a failure because the system lacked any kind of mechanism to stop it. It was a furnace that fed itself and the bigger the fire the more it consumed in lives, treasure and any hope we had in the future. No one stopped it because no one knew how. And that is exactly the same place we find ourselves in now - no one knows how to stop this war.
The only way our generation (which was the greatest affected by the war) could make ourselves be heard was to try to shut down any part of the system we could or at the very least flatten a tire or two to slow it down. We couldn't work within the system because we weren't a part of it - but we did what we could. Some got arrested, some got their heads beaten with a truncheon, some marched and sat in, some rallied and some were killed. And I'm proud that we cared.
Now this generation has a voice in the system - it has a right to be heard and the ability to change the system itself. Good luck to them, and I hope they succeed.
January 16, 2007 10:36 PM | Reply | Permalink
One thing that might be useful is to comprehend why the "New Left" was called that. In many ways the New Left was built on themes from the Old Left, even some of its politics, but it too went through an intergenerational battle with its past, and an analysis as to why it seemed the old lefties had failed.
Taylor Branch has a great descriptive narrative in "From Cannan's Land" on the scene inside the headquarters of the "Democratic Socialists of America" when the Neo-Con's broke with their Trotskite bretheran in 1967 over the issue of whether support should be given to Martin Luther King's speech about Vietnam at Riverside Church.
Earlier in the 60's -- indeed it may have been 1959, I remember sitting through a workshop conducted by Irving Howe. About half the audience had already been south participating in the sit-in's, but his point was no one could be intellectually prepared to join the Civil Rights Effort unless you had read *** and *** and the criticism of *** in **, and so on and so forth. Eventually someone stood up and put it to Howe -- "It is Kristal Nacht all over again in Tennessee right now, and we got to put off reading the books till later, or we will all be toast all over again." The old left really had no answer to that. Much about the New Left is what it was because of that comprehension. It was much about rejection of "World of our Fathers" and about a critique of where the leftie fathers had failed.
That is really less necessary with today's younger generation -- for the broad New Left of the 60's and early 70's can point to enough success in the areas of Human and Civil Rights, Gender, eventually ending a war and removing a bad President -- and much else (Environmental movement and others), that there is much to build upon, even if approaches shift.
But what we do need to see is a shot from the realm of economics, a 21st century class analysis that will serve us down the line, and an ethical-moral grounding that can compete in the public arena with the TV Preachers and the Theocrats.
January 17, 2007 12:58 AM | Reply | Permalink
I've spent some time learning about the New Left, and it was a reaction against not just liberalism but the liberalism that allied itself quite happily with McCarthyites so as to destroy the Wallace faction of the party.
January 17, 2007 1:14 AM | Reply | Permalink
The ghosts of Schachtman, Howe, and Harrington.
And who ya gonna call? Hayden, Gitlin, and Sawicky -- the Ghostbusters.
January 17, 2007 1:25 AM | Reply | Permalink
Exactly so, although we never talked about the "Wallace faction of the party". "Anti-anti-communism" describes it well enough. While not Communists and harboring no illusions about the USSR, China, or wherever, nonetheless, we felt the witch hunts were a bad idea that threw the baby out with the bathwater with tragic results that can easily be seen today.
Good on you, Matt, and let me compliment you also for your courage in stepping into this minefield. Given the fractiousness that has always characterized the American Lefts, "old", "new" and whatever the hell this one shall be called, no attempt to understand it could possibly expect to go unpunished.
While I may disagree with some of your conclusions, as a member of the New Left generation in age, if not in the stereotypical spirit, I want to applaud you for making the effort and urge you not to make the reaction you've received from some quarters (whom I believe are also well-intentioned) make you gun shy. This topic has in no way been explored too much.
January 17, 2007 1:31 AM | Reply | Permalink
One distinction might be useful. The gradations of the Left. One that in New York often seems to be about when did you realize Stalin was a creep. In many ways the neo-Cons are an outgrowth of this small journal and academic fights.
However, then there is the real political world. Roosevelt, Truman, Kennedy, Johnson and Clinton and the Democratic leaders in the Congress didn't share this Leftwing ideology. They were supporters of both anti-communism and expansion of the capitalist system. The intellectuals of the Left might have put some ideas on the table but they do not seem to have controlled political outcomes.
To some extent the fights on the web at TPMCafe and elsewhere seem much more akind to the fights at the various journals.
An aside about Henry Wallace. My father-in-law worked for Wallace at the New Republic. He was very excited to work for Wallace until he actually met him. He told me that Wallace did not have a serious thought in his head and he could not believe anyone thought Wallace should ever be president.
Daniel A. Greenbaum
January 17, 2007 4:00 AM | Reply | Permalink
Did your father-in-law tell you that when Wallace was TNR's editor in '47-'48, or after he'd thought about it for twenty years or so? Always amazing how often one's memory aligns itself with conventional wisdom.
January 17, 2007 4:21 AM | Reply | Permalink
If you spent some time learning about the new left then you would know that the "new left" a term coined by C. Wright Mills, was not reactionary against liberalism or conservatism, but reactionary against the establishment - the economic, military and political institutions which were run for and by elites. To say that it was reactionary against liberalism is to completely misunderstand the movement. The new left was a movement away from the labour activism of the old left and their collusion with the system to protesting the inequality and social unjustice of the system itself. The new left wasn't an ideologically pure movement of socialists and neo-communists, it was an amalgam of ideologies that coalesced around the issue of the Vietnam war which was the primary symptom of the sickness of the system - the establishment itself. To focus on the war itself as the only issue or a reaction to liberalism is to miss the big picture. It wasn't a protest against the "overreach of postwar liberalism" no one advocated disengagement from the world, in fact it was the opposite - it was to engage the world through peaceful means by actively fighting against the social injustice of poverty, bigotry and disenfranchisement.
Schmitt is wrong - the reason the democrats were tarred with the loss of Vietnam is because we allowed the conservatives to define the war not as a failure of the system but as a failure of will. The same damned thing they're doing now, by the way.
January 17, 2007 9:20 AM | Reply | Permalink
I am not quite sure what you are asking me. He did not tell me about his view of Wallace at the time but many years later.
However, he and my mother-in-law were at a party with Wallace and were very excited to meet him and Ralph was looking forward to working for him. As they related it to me, they were appalled at how unimpressive Wallace turned out to be.
Daniel A. Greenbaum
January 17, 2007 9:45 AM | Reply | Permalink
Mark is absolutely right that much of Stoller's criticism (and reaction thereto) is generational. And why not? And especially his comment about the Boomers' faith in law, although I'd argue that began earlier with the Silent leaders who preceeded them.)
As Sara and BevD point out, the "New Left" and, indeed, the '60s movement as a whole, was definitely generationally based, a reaction to the "Establishment" that was seen as including the Old Left, as Sara's anecdote shows. There was definitely a sense of the immediacy of the struggle, based first on civil rights and the crackdowns in the South, and then with the draft and the War. Everyone active then can point to the moment of their epiphany when they realized that the whole system was designed to crush the young and progressive. (Of course as we got older, we could see the complexities. But the rage against the "System" that BevD describes was very real.)
Of course the younger generations now (the 45 and unders) rail against the Boomers, who were and are a pretty self-absorbed bunch. First they had to suffer through the effects, or the tales, of how wonderful the '60s were from the Lefties, then suffer through the reaction from the Right Boomers under Gingrich and Bush. Some legacy.
It is refreshing to see the emphasis on pragmatism and competence over ideology in the new activists. Their criticisms are healthy and should make progressivism as a whole more effective. As I said yesterday, I do hope they are able to see the value of community and what was once called collective action, because there truly are things the gov't can do better with it's taxing and regulatory power, and a world where everyone is on their own is a pretty cold place.
January 17, 2007 10:07 AM | Reply | Permalink
Xlent comment, BevD. As a pre-boomer red diaper kid I didn't think the New Left was left at all when it came on the scene. And of course the dismissal of the labor issue was at the heart of my perspective. My folks and their circle of friends were all about labor, period. But their political engines were fueled by what I would call a true ideology - the Internationale.
And I think it is important that you pointed out the simple fact that the New Left issues were diverse and fragmented - which I would characterize as quasi-ideological. It's an important distinction, in my view - and critical if one wants to argue that the sweeping changes that took place in culture in the 60s, represented in part by the old/new left schism, led to the coinage of the term "post modern".
Neoboho
January 17, 2007 2:06 PM | Reply | Permalink
Well that is it exactly. We were diverse, none of us had the same ideology, but we all had a common problem - we were in one way or another disenfranchised from the very system that was deciding our fates.
January 17, 2007 3:05 PM | Reply | Permalink
The reason the Boomers relied on the courts and eshewed Liberal politics is that they could. From 1932 to 1968 the selection of federal judges was mainly in the hands of Democrats. Liberals did not have to invest themselves heavily in the political process because they could count on the courts to rein in the worst impulses of the Right.
That is no longer true.
From 1968 to now, and for two more years at least, the selection of federal judges will have been mainly in the hands of Republicans. The sleeping Liberal beast is beginning to stir as people realize that the Neo-Cons actually mean what they say. They have every intention of rolling back, not only the Great Society of Johnson (largely gone as we speak), but FDR's New Deal as well. They would take us back to the policies of Hoover and Coolidge, and no court will stand in their way.
Roe v. Wade is dead. The Supreme Court will probably not overturn Roe, even if Bush gets another pick, which seems likely. They will simply not protect it and allow it to die of a thousand small cuts as states run by the Right throw up this and that roadblock to legal abortions.
Miranda as well, and other safeguards against prosecutorial and police misconduct, will be whittled away.
The majority of Americans that do not want to see these kind of changes are beginning to smell the change in the wind. What those who spoke of a permanent GOP majority failed to realize is that by their very successes they were sowing the seeds of their own electoral destruction. The pendulum swings once more.
January 17, 2007 3:39 PM | Reply | Permalink
BevD, you are certainly describing the anti-establishment bias I remember as a college student of the 1960s. The litany of frustrations that you listed is identical to those I recall. However, I disagree with your conclusion about the system lacking any mechanism to stop the war. There were three strong motivations for continuing the war at the time; two were ideological and one was economic.
For those who didn't live through the '50s and '60s, or were too young to remember the political atmosphere clearly, the "domino theory" was a prevalent concept at the time (and is actually resurfacing with regard to the Middle East conflagration). The "domino theory" held that if we let even one Southeast Asian nation fall to the communists (read "Russia" for communists) that other Southeast Asian nations would soon become communist as well. There was particular concern about protecting the Phillipines from communism. So Vietnam was our proxy non-nuclear war with Russia for the domino theorists.
The second ideological issue was abhorrence of the concept that America could actually lose a war. Government PR and Hollywood movies encouraged us to think of ourselves as the primary heroes of WWII, and our entrance into the war as saving Western Europe and Asia from almost certain destruction. It was inconceivable to the American psyche that we could lose any war, but especially a proxy war with the Russians. Alpha male attitudes were prevalent among the political establishment.
The third issue prolonging the war was economic. In 1969, the U.S. economy was in a recession. Only defense contractors were in a growth mode, and the war's architects weren't about to shut down the primary segment of private enterprise that was operating profitably. As the economy began to recover in the early '70s, the defense industry remained a powerful voice, but no longer as critical to economic well-being. Once the economy began to improve, the anti-war sentiment increased also.
January 18, 2007 6:02 AM | Reply | Permalink
Not to be nasty, but it's insular, bellybutton examining discussions like these that get Republicans elected.
January 18, 2007 8:34 AM | Reply | Permalink
I agree with most of your comments. My point though, is that the "big three" - the economy, the military and the political structure had no mechanism to stop the war. In fact, they did exactly the same thing they did after 9/11 and that was to give Johnson (after the Gulf of Tonkin non-incident) a blank check to use any means he saw fit to to escalate and prolong hostilities. Once the door was open, their was no way to stop it.
January 18, 2007 9:46 AM | Reply | Permalink
I think you may misread Mark's point. Postwar liberalism *was* the establishment, in the Democratic party, and in the 60s that meant in the government as well. The liberal economic and political consensus that emerged from the 50s was equally responsible for the Great Society as well as the Vietnam war -- both were the products of a belief in an active government built on the philisophical foundation of the liberal tradition, going back to Mill.
This doesn't mean that the anti-war reaction against it was Rightist. Having grown up under Reagan/Bush and come of age under Clinton, it's taken me quite a while (and another jaunt through academia) to realize that the liberal/conservative and Left/Right dichotomies were not one in the same. What Mark's point here is, which I think is brilliant, is that the splintering of 1968 was the New Left, which was unquestionably Leftist but sigificantly more radical than liberal, was objecting to a horrific war that had grown out of the postwar liberal establishment. The establishment saw a bunch of unwashed radicals trying to destory the foundations of the coalition which had created the prosperity of the 60s, the moon landing, and the Great Society, whereas the New Left saw the establishment as a lot of out of touch old men who were perpetrating a horrible crime in the form of a police action in southeast Asia and who were allowing racial segregation to persist in the South. Sadly, both were probably more right than not, but it caused the splintering of the New Deal coalition that, of course, opened the door for the ascendency of Reagan/Bush/Bush conservatism.
Good stuff, Mark.
January 18, 2007 12:29 PM | Reply | Permalink
Oh, for God's sake. It's January in a non-election year. There's a time and a place for omphaloskepsis, and no, it's not in the middle of a campaign. But right after a very successful one, as we try to figure out what to do with the share of power we've just earned, some introspection is highly appropriate.
It's when we have nothing BUT discussions like these that we get into trouble. Let's have it out for a bit, then put it away and get back to work.
January 18, 2007 12:38 PM | Reply | Permalink
The Republicans have the same discussions, but they carry them out in two stages: (1) at the College Republican meetings (2) then behind locked doors by the elite decisionmakers.
I sorta thought one feature and strength of the Democratic Party was that it carried these discussions out in the open air.
sPh
January 18, 2007 1:21 PM | Reply | Permalink
I think you might be right. The boomers are ranting against their headless children. It is not as ideological as you characterize it, however.
The problem resides in the fact that so much has been lost for so long that points of view that still seem mighty conservative to many of us are now promoted as a new liberal movement. For godsake, Clinton was a DINO on his good days. People take Hillary seriously and wonder whether she is too LIBERAL. It is INSANE.
I think the Boomers are suggesting a little perspective. I have nothing against ANYONE who pushes the John Birch Society Republican Party out of power. But before we start cheering someone as a new progressive leader, lets see someone who at least matches Harry Truman (I have deliberately chosen him, not FDR, JFK, or LBJ because I cannot imagine a true progressive leader of their stature in what remains of my lifetime).
January 18, 2007 5:41 PM | Reply | Permalink
I hope you'll reconsider your inclusion of JFK in your list of progressives.
Opportunist? Of course. Old fashioned liberal (in the mold of Mayor Daley, George Meaney, etc.)? Yup. But progressive? Not so much.
January 18, 2007 8:26 PM | Reply | Permalink
I don't know. He was around for less than 3 years when I was a kid. He had his faults, that is for sure. His first inaugural address is still the best piece of rhetoric I can call to mind other than some of FDR's. What did he accomplish? I don't actually know.
January 18, 2007 8:45 PM | Reply | Permalink
Yes Michael, the Vietnam war helped split the New Deal coalition, but the stake through it's heart was race. The race riots and affirmative action caused the southern Democrats and blue-collar suburbs to run to the Republican party. I grew up in a blue-collar suburb of Detroit. Some of my neighbors (mostly a union auto workers neighborhood) started associating the Democratic party with "dirty hippies and niggers". Most of my neighbors were not racist and remained Democrats, but there were enough defections to start tipping elections. In 1972, George Wallace won the Democratic presidential primary in Michigan. The Democratic party has been trying to rebuild an effective coalition ever since that period. Fortunately, liberal boomers, gen-Xers, blacks, and latinos may be forming a new progressive coalition. I hope so.
January 19, 2007 9:18 AM | Reply | Permalink
I'm in my early 50s (old enough to remember the 1960s, not old enough to have been a participant), and it's been years since I've thought about the ins and outs of the activism of that era.
And you know what? It bores me stiff.
There are a lot of people my age, plus or minus a few, kicking around the netroots. And I bet most of them feel the same.
Politically, I feel like I have a hell of a lot more in common with Matt Stoller and Chris Bowers than I do with people whose heads are still as deeply into memories of the '60s as so many of the posters in this thread are.
Few things in the politics of the 1960s through 1990s frustrated me as much as Clinton's failure to use the bully pulpit of his Presidency to assert a progressive vision of the future. The last six years of his Presidency were simply one long rearguard action to keep the gains of the past from being overrun by Gingrich & Co.
Then when we lost the Presidency in 2000, our side had no counter to the wingnut program, just a handful of mostly rabbity Congressional Dems afraid to stand for what they believed in, if they still did believe in much.
That's the bit of history that's shaped my politics more than the history of the 1960s, 70s, or 80s. I see the same world as Stoller and Bowers do, the same political terrain, the same challenges. Like them, I see triangulation as a one-shot success and a long-term roadmap to mushbrained failure. And I think I've got plenty of company in my age group, which after all includes bloggers like Digby.
So I'd speculate that while there are some old fogeys who want to sit Matt down and tell him how it was better back then, I don't think they represent any sort of majority, even outside the netroots. It's less generational than those who think it's generational think it is, if you follow that. (And if you did, don't bogart that joint, my friend.)
January 19, 2007 10:56 AM | Reply | Permalink
Well I am older than RT, but I agree with him completely. I was there and I can tell you there was not just "One Big Thing". There were hundreds of "One Big Things". Everyone had their group to hang with, believe in, and sin to march against. And each one thought their "One Big Thing" should be the most important. That's why the activism died in the minds of the public, and why it is so silent today. It wasn't just Viet Nam, it was the same litany of sins we are plaqued with today.......Too many things to fix, and not enough time or resources to go after them and fix them correctly. There aren't even enough band-aids to go around. And eventually there is just burn out........
So join the newbies, don't tell them about the good old days, or point out what's already been tried. Don't spoil their enthusiasm, or rain cynicism on their parade. its their turn! Maybe they CAN do better than we did.
January 30, 2007 11:32 AM | Reply | Permalink