Fighting words in the NY Times headline:
"These Young Socialists Think they have Courage. They Don't.
Many disappointed fans of Bernie Sanders would prefer a quixotic display of principle."
It is bodycounts, all over again.
Opinion writers in the New York Times and The Nation are expressing regret for their behavior in young adulthood. They were leftist radicals and were righteous and uncompromising. They voted third party. Click: NY Times They urge young leftists not to make the same mistake. Be realistic. Vote for Biden, they say.
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| The angry left, 1969 |
Some will. Many will not. Maybe Boomers will make up for those missing votes.
Fifty years ago I sat in on discussions by college students led by SDS, Students for a Democratic Society, about how to change policies that were killing us, literally. There was a war in Vietnam and a draft. Every night on the news American generals would report a daily bodycount, a couple hundred Asian bodies, defined in death as communist enemies, versus only twenty or thirty Americans, typically a five or six to one advantage.
We were winning the bodycount war, and therefore the war itself. One of our pawns for five or six of theirs, equal to a rook or bishop. Good chess.
Reader may suspect this is hyperbole or false memory. Surely the government didn't try to sell Americans on the idea that trading American lives for Asian ones was good, so long as we outscored them, but that was exactly their strategy. We were winning the war of attrition. It was flawed PR. Military and media analysts observed that Asia was producing new people far faster than we were killing them. It was bad for soldier morale. It fueled protests back home. Parents didn't like it.
Within that context, radical leftist antiwar change-the-system thinking was widespread. I shared it. We considered Hubert Humphrey and Richard Nixon essentially equivalent, two sides of a war machine OK with my death for the greater good. We considered Democrats, with leaders like Scoop Jackson, the "Senator from Boeing," Bill Daley, the Chicago sponsor of police riots, and southern Democrats with seniority chairing committees, all proof that the Democratic establishment was indistinguishable from the Republican establishment. Many leftists in the era voted third party, to send a message that we weren't going to accept half-assed reform that wasn't actually reform.
I read Facebook and Twitter groups dominated by Bernie Sanders supporters. A great many people expect to vote Green or Socialist or anybody but Biden. They consider a vote for Biden to be a vote to continue the status quo. "Vote Blue No Matter Who" is widely derided as positive enablement of a bad system destroying the climate, crushing the young, enriching the corporate elite at the expense of the people.
The ok-with-Trump left understands Trump to be an enemy. Biden is actually worse. He is insidious because he complicates and debases the left message, using comforting words of false reform. Capitalism reformed will still be capitalism. Fossil fuels drilled a bit more carefully will still perpetuate fossils fuels. Improving the ACA will make Medicare for All that much harder to implement.
Biden muddles the left. Trump clarifies it. Cast a vote of conscience for anybody but Biden.
Bodycount Deja Vu. The missing votes of young leftists may re-appear in the form of former leftists who grew old enough to relive the era of bodycounts. My generation was Trump's strongest support group in 2016. Some of us--not me--became old white men in MAGA hats. That may be changing according to current polls. Trump is on the leading edge pushing for re-opening the economy, in open acknowledgment that a few extra old folks--Boomers--are going to die, and that it is a price worth paying to protect the American Way of Life.
Trump looks bravely mask-less in his bunker of tested people. We are on our own, out in the dangerous jungle of people back in bars and restaurants and side by side at work, people spreading the virus, people who can kill us. Indeed, a few of us will die, Trump acknowledges. This is war. We are draftees.
Like General Westmorland fifty years ago, Trump massages the number to put a good political face on them. Don't test so many people, he says. Question the cause of death. Whether stopping communist dominos or opening the economy, we realized the real mission is re-electing a president. We are pawns in a chess game. Go back to work. Stand close.
You can get a haircut again. Do it for America. That again,
3 comments:
80,000+ dead. How are we winning the body count?
Let’s see, hippies smoked pot, said “F” the establishment, then became the establishment.
How’s that working for ya?
"a few extra old folks--Boomers--are going to die, and that it is a price worth paying to protect the American Way of Life."
I fear disillusioned Progressives will simply not vote at all, feeling that they are not represented by anyone. We are heading into this election as a divided party, again. The polling margin remains a nail-biting 5%.
The response to the epidemic is regional. As we head into the second wave of infections there may be some awakening in some areas of the seriousness of situation. The notion that the weak and old are expendable persists, but It's also true that a significant percentage of cases require hospitalization; the cost of treating the sick will wreck the healthcare system and drive costs higher for everyone, never mind the moral abdication.
What we are facing is the continuing quarantine of those at risk, who will then watch the rest of the population play Russian Roulette with their own health, prolonging the epidemic by months if not years, until a reliable vaccine is available to all.
I, too, was one of those leftists in the 1960's who worked for Eugene McCarthy, and would not vote for Hubert Humphrey. I have tried in vain to explain to today's leftists that I contributed to the election of Nixon. I tried to explain that in 2016, but hatred for Hillary was just too great.
There is just no comparison of what Nixon did with what trump is doing and will do if re-elected! That thought is scarier than the thought of the virus getting worse!
Trump could win by making this seem like a "war" where we should not change horses in mid-stream. Older people seem to be wising up, and too many young people are still embracing trump.
The point spread in the polls is too small! I sometimes despair for this country's future.
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