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I was hanging out at home this weekend, being relatively lazy, and one of the things I did was listen to some classic baby boom rock and roll from the 1960s and early '70s: Janis Joplin, Hendrix, Led Zeppelin, Clapton (in his passionate, fucked-up, in-love-with-my-best-friend's-girl Derek and the Dominos phase, not the mellow stuff he's done more recently). Being a baby boomer raised on all that, it's still the best music there is in my book.
I'm not sure what got me in the mood for all that, but perhaps it was Tom Hayden's eloquent open letter to Barack Obama last week, which had gotten me thinking about the last big progressive moment in American history, and how it compares to today.
I'm not going to write about Obama's odd triangulation strategy, which many others have been discussing for months now. I'm more interested in how the entire political culture keeps looking back to that period as a reference point. From progressive activists comparing their tactics and strategies to the civil rights and anti-war movements of that era, to progressive politicians constantly invoking Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr., to the DLC types who scream "McGovern" every time a Democrat stands strongly against the Iraq war, to right-wingers who, to this very day still get their rocks off attacking Hayden and Fonda for taking that trip to Hanoi, everybody is obsessed with that era of politics. Perhaps it's because that was the last time that society fundamentally shifted in a positive way.
What haunts me more than anything about the era is why the progressive movement lost the momentum, and the country's politics turned so far to the right. Unlike the 1930s, whose progressive accomplishments set the stage for a New Deal coalition that dominated American politics for two generations, the 1960s generated a backlash that gave us Nixon, then Reagan, then Gingrich, then the 2nd Bush, each one worst than the one before in terms of their right-wing politics and their negative impact on the nation.
The study of history is not well-served by offering simple explanations, and there are many factors in the toxic stew of right-wing political success. The racial backlash is a very big factor, and in combination with the general white-male, working-class backlash against feminism and "hippies", has been a central dynamic. The rise of the carefully constructed right-wing infrastructure discussed by Rob Stein and many others has been a very big factor as well, along with the failings of single-interest group politics that Markos wrote about in Crashing the Gates. My own larger analysis of these dynamics is posted here.
All of these problems, and more, have been written about at nauseum. Something that I think has gotten less attention is the individuality of the movement in the latter '60s and early '70s. While the earlier civil rights movement was very focused on community, and the 1962 Port Huron Statement was written by Hayden and the other SDS founders was all about building progressive communitarian power, I am often stuck when I read or watch documentaries about the late'60s how often protestors say things like "I just want to do my own thing" or even "we don't want to go to war, we just want the government to leave us alone." The identity politics which flourished in that era was often about individual rights, not about expanding the sense of mutual obligation we have to each other.
As these baby boomers aged, and the threat of being drafted and personally going to war ended, it's easy to see how too many of that generation became part of Grover Norquist's "Leave Us Alone" coalition. Indeed, white people in my age cohor who are of a decent income level tend to be as Republican a group as there is in terms of age- and if you are a white guy my age who is not a union member, gay or Jewish, you're in Republican base voter territory.
As we build the modern progressive movement, using online activism and communication as our most important tools, we should take care to learn this lesson from the last great movement era. The internet is a great tool for collective action, but the highly individualistic libertarians love it too, as Ron Paul's supporters have shown. We have the potential to build community and collective engagement as never before, but the individuality of doing your own thing typing away at home on your computer can also lead to the "leave me alone, let me do my own thing" syndrome. We should do all in our power to build that good old community feeling, to build a movement that works well together on behalf of goals that benefit all of us.
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