Time Travel.
We are where we are now because of where we have been.
Trump and his supporters are busy fanning the flames of discontent among the Bernie-oriented progressive left. They need not bother.
They did not create the split. It has been there for over fifty years, and it fans itself organically.
They did not create the split. It has been there for over fifty years, and it fans itself organically.
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| "Stop voting for Evil." |
Yesterday this blog likened the anti-war protesters of fifty years ago to the anti-Biden progressive left of today. There were lots of us around 1970. Big demonstrations get noticed. The March on Washington in November, 1969 certainly did. It was cold and gray. The black and white photographs reflect my memory of the event. There was no color. If there were speeches I don't remember them. Mostly we just showed up and let the world know there were over a million of us.
Big protests like this one are a warning to governments of potential disruptive change. They also can create a backlash by vulnerable people invested in the current system who fear disruption will endanger what little they have. The protests of the 1960s did. Nixon exploited it. So did Reagan. So is Trump. Bernie Sanders' movement put governments and citizens on notice, and it, too, has created both elevation of progressive issues, and a backlash. Trump and his media use the progressive left as the boogie-man. Bernie!!! AOC!!!
The most vocal people on the progressive left of today reflect white, educated college-town sensibilities. Bernie Sanders did not lose the election in South Carolina because his brand of Democratic Socialism and a theory of bottom up democratic engagement lost the argument in coffee bars and seminar rooms. He lost because black voters in the state wanted Biden, the more familiar, presumably safer, less disruptive choice.
Who were those protesters in DC back fifty years ago? My observation and experience at the time was that it was a crowd almost entirely of young people, who traveled to Washington DC to change the world. We were on the side of righteousness. We wanted to end an immoral war being carried out by the Establishment. We were the left. We were college students. We weren't the proletariate. We weren't supported by the unionized workers in hardhats. Indeed, they didn't like us. They thought we were privileged dilettantes. They said we were unpatriotic and bad for jobs. They said we had lousy moral values. Get a haircut and get a job, they said. They like their Social Security and they like their benefits, but they don't want "socialism" and they didn't like us.
Here is what we looked like. I am somewhere in here:
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2 comments:
Baby Boomer Generation (born 1946-1964) 22% of current population
Millennial Generation (born 1982-2000) 22% of current population
The big difference in the generational response to the Eternal War is due to the draft. Young men and their girlfriends (and some parents) were not convinced that Vietnam was legitimate and they were right. If there was conscription now we probably would see much of the same resistance. Now the risks imposed on young people are economic; through student debt, where many college educated young now face virtual servitude, while the less educated have few opportunities that afford them a middle class lifestyle, with one exception being the military.
But the larger issue is that the Progressive movement, while getting a lot of attention and having some success politically in the 60s, really didn't reflect the whole generation. Those embracing the counterculture probably weren't more than a few percent while the majority more or less followed traditional career paths. After Vietnam they all settled in and many left behind their ideals, and now face a bitter and cynical old age, after a lifetime of compromises and disappointments.
I think the Obama election was a genuine resurgence of the Progressive ideals that had been simmering since the 70s, but the Regressive backlash was equally strong, resulting in the McConnell/Trump movement that exploits all the resentments of a generation that lost its way: racism, sexism, intolerance and religious fanaticism.
So the problem isn't necessarily capitalism per se, but the fact that the capitalism that only serves a diminishing number of citizens creates divisions that leaves it vulnerable to crises, which is where we find predictably find ourselves now.
I was one of those protesters too.
And then, 10 years later, I was working at a defense contractor in California, and four of us traveled to Washington DC wearing suits to go and talk to the government agency that gave us the contract. We got lost driving in from the airport and ended up driving over the same bridge that I had marched over as part of an antiwar protest 10 years before. That was a weird experience.
By then, I had started to drift away from "the movement" of the 60's. One major part of that was the early 1970's, when around 90% of who I thought were my fellow hippie brothers and sisters in the revolution of cosmic consciousness cut their hair, started doing cocaine, dressed up in polyester, and joined the disco scene. Turned out they were nothing but trend victims moving on to the latest new thing.
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