Way too harsh sPh.

But then, so is Max.

But what you both aren't seeing is that that's just the way it is for the Left in the United States. Just as the sixties generation thought their elders had SO screwed things up that they had to start all over again, so today's cohort is doing the same kind of bitching about our generation.

STOP IT! Both of you.

There are some pearls of wisdom in what Max is saying. "Crack some difficult books" may not be one of them. But Max does have a point about the Social Security debate. Now that some Democrats are proposing a Wall Street fix, will the Netroots be as strong in opposing it as when it came from Bush? A very legitimate question and some room for doubt. And yes, by the way, I DO have a sense of deja vu when I read the Mainstream Media's trashing of the progressive blogs. Bloggers who are aghast at their treatment by the MSM might show a bit more skepticism about accepting the MSM's historical judgments.

Sure the younguns misunderstand what has gone before. How could they not? But I do get the sense that Matt Stoller is making an effort to bridge the gap. He ought to be applauded for that and his mistakes of history should be pointed out,but he doesn't deserve to be trashed for making the effort.

.> Sure the younguns misunderstand what
> has gone before

Have you seen the age profile of active DailyKos users? It is of course self-selected, and there is no way to know if it is accurate (I can't think of any way to do a reliable randomized survey of web site members). But given those limitations, IIRC the mean age was 42 with a significant tail into the 60 range and not an insignificant number of 70s. The assumption of the aging 1960s dudes that the netroots is made of of 19 y.o. in their mother's basement is not only arrogant, it is incorrect.

sPh

The 60s left read Marx, Trotsky, Luxembourg, Lukacs . . . [&c]. Max Sawicky

It, also, read Report From Iron Mountain, Soul on Ice, and The Greening of America.

It was never hard for me to understand that each new generation believes it invented sex.

Nevertheless, it has been amusing to discover the number of successive generations that think they invented distributed resource-sharing networks, or that the ARPANET/Internet is equivalent to the Web.

--
Howard

*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*

The assumption of the aging 1960s dudes that the netroots is made of of 19 y.o. in their mother's basement is not only arrogant, it is incorrect.

Point taken, and truth be told, me and my views are in many ways different from those of my generational cohorts. I thought it was obvious I was being somewhat facetious however in my use of "younguns" but maybe not.

In any case, buying heavily into generational stereotypes is pretty much always a bad move. Stoller has done a little bit of that but not so much. (I was actually very happy to participate in his several threads on the subject on myDD ) Max has taken the bait.

There's history of bad blood here though. Daily Kos delinked Max about a year ago for reasons that have never been explained to my satisfaction.

What I'd really like to see here is a sustained exchange between Max and Matt.

As for cracking good- if not difficult- books,
I recommend Duncan Foley's Adam's Fallacy for a serious and critical primer on economics. Sheri Berman's The Primacy of Politics for a fascinating look at early 20th centruy European reactions to the crises of capitialism. Both relevant to our current political situation and both rewarding and helpful in developing and clarifying a reasonable progressive Democratic program.

I recomend folks check out Max's blog regularly. Along with Brad Delong's, and Dean Baker's. You'll get a good share of both orthodox liberal economics and some heterodox and idiosyncratic economic and political analysis. And you will become more aware of Max's unique sense of humor.

I thought I was both the '60s generation and the netroots. I went to lots of marches in the '60s, but it's a bit harder on me now, and a much longer commute.

Some people did read Fanon. And most people just got into conversations where someone who had read Fanon talked about Fanon. (A lot of people just read Ferlingetti and Corso.)

But whatever we did, we seem to have blown it.

We are here now because we didn't recognize the threat then.

I would recommend that people read the Port Huron Statement, but I'm not sure all that other stuff is really necessary.

Let the kiddies try it their ways, because we screwed up, my brother.

AC

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose

The tone of your post and specifically your reference to the SDS gave me a flashback to a small Southern community college auditorium in 1969. 

The faculty brought in speakers to talk about Vietnam, the anti-war and counterculture movements.  The auditorium was full.  I would guess that most of the student audience was there because their teachers intended follow-up discussions in their next classes.  The rest of us were genuinely interested in the subjects.

First speaker up was from the SDS.  She began by haranguing us for our Southern sins then told us how ignorant we were and how awful the United States was.  Needless to say, her remarks were not well received.

The audience was quickly on its feet and screaming back at her.  Despite our (undeserved) reputation for violence, the worst that happened was that a few drinks and some food were thrown at her.  The sponsors prudently canceled the event and the crowd dispersed.  There were no follow-up discussions but no doubt a lot of stereotypes were reinforced on both sides.

I don't know how representative of the SDS this speaker was.   I do know that contempt and condescension are not very effective ways to win hearts and minds.   Maybe she should have taken a break from some of those difficult books and read an easy one.  

The left has a different meaning than it used to.  Back when I was in school, the left largely meant socialists and communists.  The right meant the Ayn Rand types and the middle ruled over all.  Today, after the Reagan era especially, the definitions of what is left and right shifted dramatically.  Reagan's adoring worshippers moved the middle far out to the right, and what used to be the middle became the left.  That hasn't changed.

The fall of the Soviet Union pretty well wiped out communism as a leftist concern, leaving only socialism, but most people didn't even  know there was a difference, so socialism is largely wiped out too as a leftist concern.

What I am getting to is that by and large, the internet "left" bears no resemblance to the left of the 60's and before.  My hope is that a President with the charisma to push us back to pre-Reagan days will be found, and the good old days will return!  But, that has to be soon to affect me - I'm 70 now! 

Hoppy in Sacramento

I recently got into it on my own blog page here at TPM with a couple of the Boomer bloggers regarding the draft. I have no intention of hijacking this thread for my own soapbox, so suffice it to say I argued that the Boomer (a.k.a. "60s generation") may have harnessed the energy of young America, but in completely removing the personal consequences of military action for the average young person, they've only managed to generate wave after wave of increasingly disaffected and disconnected youth.

The next time you attend a "massive" peace rally, take a good look around you, then think back. Which generation is really providing the energy for demonstrations? You may consider it a testament to a generation adhering to its ideals to see so many 50 and up at these things, but it is more a testament to the failure to imbue your own offspring with the combination of idealism and activist energy. The "netroots" aren't much better, and that youth bracket doesn't have the personal equity to be major contributors--let alone the personal investment in the causes.

I'm not trying to scream "Soylent Green," but it is long since time that the post Boomers wrested some of the agenda from the lefties of that generation and restored some broader perspective--before we find ourselves locked into an endless cycle of geriatric social medicine, weighted to provide care for the last generation to think smoking was cool.

Ive always felt that if something didn't happen in my life it wasn't important, in fact, if it didn't happen to me it isn't real! Thats just how I feel and since I lived on Haight Street, it 's the only thing that matters.And Dylan is God.

I have much respect for you, Dan, derived from your other comments here at tpmcafe, but I have to take issue with some aspects of this post.

You say that we need more "open inquiry and debate aimed at finding out what is true in the first place," and that "intellectually and scientifically disciplined theoretical inquiry into the structure of our society and economy has given way to seat-of-the-pants pop culture observation."

I think social science is ill-suited to help us in some ways. It takes time to perform, and it takes more time to build scientific consensus. In most cases, social science is reactive, because it is most capable of studying existing states of affairs. One of the recognized problems with social science is that it is not predictive, at least not predictive in the way that the physical sciences are. In so far as it is reactive and not predictive, it might be difficult to use any such inquiry to actually affect the world. Nonetheless, its what we have, though it bothers me that a lack of consensus can be used to attack science.

Beyond that, I would argue that there is not much truth in the world. Having studied a little philosophy too, and I must quote William James: "Grant an idea or belief to be true, . . . what concrete difference will its being true make in anyone's actual life? How will the truth be realized? What experiences will be different from those which would obtain if the belief were false? What, in short, is the truth's cash-value in experiential terms?"

There is a lot I want to say about that. First, there are a lot of areas where, pragmatically speaking, two different truths can occupy the same ground without making a difference. James might tell us that these truths in that case would have the same content--they would mean the same thing. But I think he might also say that in those cases it doesn't matter what one believes. Put another way, if two conflicting truths don't make a difference, then there is likely no way to verify either. In short, that there is nothing in the world to which the truthful proposition corresponds. We have more truthful propositions and beliefs than there are states of affairs in the world--a single state of affairs may correspond to two distinct truthful beliefs. The point is that even in those cases, the beliefs still contradict each other and can be politically significant. I suppose that all I mean to say is that in many cases "what is true in the first place" cannot be found through normal verification processes of science. Call this a poverty of the world.

Second, politics specifically is an area of belief where these sorts of things become very difficult. A lot of the time in politics, we are asking individuals to evaluate the truth of a statement or proposition of which they may have no experience and for which they may never have any experience. Take, for example, the proposition that "The minimum wage should be increased." To many people this is a crucial proposition and whether it is true or not is vitally important. But if you are a salaried middle manager with strong job security, it does not make any difference to you whether it is true or not. This occurs on so many issues.

Third, I don't believe in theory. There is no system of belief which is right. There are individual propositions which are true, but there is no true theory. I would have to do a little more work to explain why in pragmatic terms--James himself was an extreme empiricist, and empiricism should reject untestable hypotheses. In part I reject theories because whether one begins with a Marxist position or a Liberal position serves only to add a layer of belief that is unverifiable as I discussed above.

But more directly, every theory of the world fails at some point. It is said that no battle plan survives the first contact with the enemy. It may be said of broad theories that none survive contact with the world. The world is bigger and more complex than any theory we can have and it will invalidate any theory we advance. Call this a poverty of theory.

For me, that is why "leftism" is dead. I am against ideology. I am for solutions. The best we can do to find solutions is to rely on social science and common sense. Despite the problems, it's the best we have. In the end, this means that (forgive my equivocation) contemporary leftism isn't teleological. I'm ok with that.

Socialism and communism are largely interchangeable. I've yet to see anyone make a convincing distinction. The Soviets certainly didn't make one.

If it is true that all generalizations about the 1960s left are false, it also seems that all Max's generalizations about the netroots are false.

This seems like an indiscriminate attack with that the "Netroots" unfortunately happened to be in the way of. On one hand, Max seems to be calling out the New Left for focusing on identity politics at the expense of class politics. If so, fine, let's talk about that. On the other hand, he seems to be calling out bloggers for not making economics-based critiques of contemporary society--while inappropriately using the Netroots as a stand-in for the New Left. Now, there are some ways in which bloggers strike me as inheritors to SDS gripes, specifically media critique (60s leftists saw media serving bourgeois class interests; netroots bloggers see them as serving conservative political interests, which in turn serve economic interests). So just because Digby doesn't mindlessly quote slogans from the Communist Manifesto or Eros and Civilization or anything from that totally incoherent list from Trotsky to Fanon doesn't mean he's uninformed. And Atrios, we might as well note, has a PhD in economics.

Interestingly, Judith Butler, an academic representative of the New Left, has recently allied herself with folks on "the internet" -- so Kos is getting props from the intellectuals, even if he isn't wrangling with Lukacs (Lukacs?) on a daily basis.

It further needs to be said that most of the netroots people have plainly disavowed affiliations with the 60s left. I mean, I agree that the well trafficked blogs aren't radicals, but they never pretended they were, and, as has been noted above, within the spectrum of current mainstream political discourse, they're as far left as is imaginable!

Which leaves your final complaint: "The big decisions on governance are made elsewhere." Indeed: in the five years that there has been a liberal netroots, the big decisions on governance have been made by the Republicans who had actual power. I don't see how you can fault liberals on the internet for not wielding influence when liberals on capitol hill were equally ineffectual.

Max, here's the point on which I part company with you:

How in the world could you generalize about this Tower of Babel? Matt tries to, invoking the term "post-scarcity," which applies to hardly any of the worthies above. He suggests that economics was ignored. This is rubbish. Even those most alienated from the U.S. working class did not hold the starving Third World masses to be under the yoke of a post-scarcity economy.

I think we can't get rid of the post-scarcity charge that easily. Seems to me a lot of it is true, even if there were some, perhaps many, in the New Left generation, like you and me, who knew it was bullshit. Not everyone did.

There was the book entitled "Post-Scarcity Anarchism" that had some small following. Clearly the Yippies thought they were in a post-scarcity phase. The post-scarcity theme was also big in the early SDS (remember that famous line of the Port Huron Statement as they attempt to describe themselves: "housed now in universities".

This is the key difference between the Old and New Left, no matter how many exceptions there were. Post-scarcity thinking infused the entire New Left, even among those who understood what was up.

And your point about "those most alienated from the U.S. working class" is irrelevant here: NOBODY thought the WORLD was post-scarcity, but they believed it of the US. That was why the Weathermen and friends gave up on the "bought-off" American workers.

And it's not necessarily an indictment to have been partially under that spell. There's no mystery why feminism took stronger root in the sixties than in the thirties. That scarcity thing explains much of it. In the thirties and forties Pete Seeger could get away with singing

You gals who want to be free
Better take a tip from me
And get you a man who's a union man
And join the Ladies' Auxiliary

That verse, of course, could not be sung in the sixties and seventies, although the song was, by some - after revisions were made.

One thing that constantly bugged me about main line feminist politics in the eighties and nineties was that they had succeeded in making abortion a litmus test in the Democratic party, while seemingly ignoring the fact that the "post-scarcity" status of the American working class was under constant attack. No similar litmus test was applied to the "New Democrats" as they betrayed the working class voter again and again. You, of all people, know this very well, Max, as your posts about populism prove.

And even the least post-scarcity of the New Left generation did not foresee the deindustrialization of America. I was among them, and I plead guilty to that. But who did foresee it?

The growing respect for populism in the Netroots (admittedly, this has a long way to go) is a good thing, not a bad thing, and results, in part, from the shedding of post-scarcity assumptions.

And so, Matt Stoller and his friends should be engaged with, disagreed with on occasion, but not trashed. He's made an effort, imperfect to be sure, to reach out to the earlier generations, and the discussion should be continued, not cut off at the knees.

Bob Dylan?  The Doors?  Charlie Parker and John Coltrane Rule!

Dylan sucks.

Don't let the low rating get you down, Reece.

A prophet is not without honor, but in his own country, and among his own kin, and in his own house.  Mark 6:4 

You've heard the old saying, "If you remember 68 you weren't there"? Well it's not true. I was there, I remember.

I remember thousands of young men who had draft deferments being ordered to active duty within weeks of the beginning of the Tet without their draft boards being notified. I remember the night RFK threw his hat in the ring. I remember that no one in the barracks at Fort Ord dared to mention the fact or his name for fear of reprisal. Staff Sargent King turned the radio off. I remember Johnson saying he was not going to run again. I never saw footage of that address, all I remember is the haunting voice of a broken man over the radio. I remember all leaves at Fort Ord being cancelled the night King was shot, talk of regular troops being used to quell any riots. I remember de Gaulle and Danny the Red fighting for control of Paris. I remember watching late night news about Andy Warhol being shot the day before when the newscaster stopped and announced that Robert Kennedy had been shot in L.A. I remember walking the streets of San Francisco that night aimlessly until sunup. I remember Johnson adding a 10% surcharge to income tax to pay for the war. I remember the Soviets invading Prauge. I remember co-workers at the Fleet Post Office who'd went to Chicago for the convention finding out they had no jobs when they returned. I remember hearing Arlo Guthrie's Alice's Restaurant.

I've live a life full of joys and triumphs, sorrows and tragedies, loves and losses. But there has not been any ten years that compressed together would begin to equal the first 8 months of 68. Truth is, if you were there, you can't forget any of it.

But I wasn't aware of the perspective until a day in 1981 halfway around the world when I ran into my cousin. Bob was a few years younger than me.  When he introduced himself I honestly had no recollection that I had such a cousin. Then he said, "You remember that night in 65 you and my dad got into a fight about the war and he threw you out of the house." That I remembered. My uncle was a decorated WWII vet and a Colonel in the Reserves, and "throwing me out" was an accurate, but watered down, description of the physical event of that night. "I don't know if you know it, but you probably saved me and Sam's life that night". He explained that in 68 during the Tet his father tried to get the two boys to enlist. Bob was in college and Sam was still a senior in high school. They refused. Their dad, the Colonel went to the draft board to "volunteer" his sons. The draft board told him that the MPs had picked me up in San Francisco and hauled me off to Fort Ord even though I had a deferment. Bob said his dad ranted with glee for a couple of days over that, then he went silent for a week or so. They thought the silence was their warning that they were next. Instead, my uncle had spent those days remembering who I was. I was his brother's son. He was a staunch FDR Democrat and had admired the way I'd stood up for my leftist ideals in a high school that had 3 proud John Birch members on the school board. The war had finally come home to my uncle, it had crawled out of his head and into his heart, and it didn't fit there. Bob said that instead of volunteering his sons for the draft, his dad had written a letter to my CO at Fort Ord, and did it as a Colonel. I was given an honorable discharge on my 91st day in the Army. I got my discharge from a Chief Warrant Officer who opened my folder, and looked at a letter from my uncle for a long time before handing me my DD214 and telling me to "Get the hell out of here while you can". At the time I assumed that the letter had been the cause of my activation.  Suddenly Bob was saying that that was the last boarding call for his flight, then "This country was headed in a terrible direction back then. We were becoming a monster. People like you changed that." And then he was gone. I never saw him again, never had the chance to tell him that right then I'd realized that his father had probably saved my life too.

Thanks for the memories Max!

Granted Dylan is not a great musician or singer or performer or celebrity and is certainly not a god but he is a damn fine poet, i.e. songwriter.  Here's a stanza from one of his songs you can probably identify with:

Come mothers and fathers
Throughout the land
And don't criticize
What you can't understand
Your sons and your daughters
Are beyond your command
Your old road is
Rapidly agin'.
Please get out of the new one
If you can't lend your hand
For the times they are a-changin'.

Atrios has has some interesting thoughts on opposition to the Iraq war as well.

sPh

Go and watch some footage of Bob Dylan performing music anytime between 1962 and 1970, and then come back and tell me he is "not a great musician or singer or performer". You have no idea what you're talking about. Dylan at the height of his powers in 1964-67 was the kind of incandescent, tungsten-white-hot flame that people couldn't stand next to without being burned. Watch the sequence in "Don't Look Back" where Dylan and John Sebastian are sitting in a room in London surrounded by hangers-on, fooling around on a guitar, and Sebastian plays some ridiculous and obvious tune he's just worked up, and Dylan says "Yeah, that's nice, that's real nice...here's something I been working on," takes the guitar, and plays "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue". If you think Dylan is a cracked, droning voice over white-boy blues, you are simply not listening. Open your ears.

"All governments lie, but disaster lies in wait for countries whose officials smoke the same hashish they give out." - I.F. Stone

I am a bit puzzled by this thread. What did SDS or SNCC or reading Trotzky or Mao do for anyone? They did not stop the war nor end racism.

Such groups allowed George Wallace to pry the South away from the "pointy headed" intellectuals who did not speak for his constituents. They then allowed Nixon to paint all liberals and Democrats as fundamentally unAmerican and anti-capitalism. Liberals in many respects never recovered from being painted with a Marxist brush.

One can see this problem at TMPCafe. Much of the debate is often among liberals and those with a socialist bent. What the Web does is promote ideological thinking over facts. It may be in this Bush represents not us Boomers but the current era.

Daniel A. Greenbaum

If you regard socialism and early-stage Communism as economic philosophies about the ownership of the means of production, there is very little difficult. Where we keep missing an important idea, however, is equating [economic] "socialism" with what the Europeans tend to call "social democracy", involving more of a safety net. Such a safety net, incidentally, can be pro-capitalist if it encourages the formation of small businesses and related jobs.

Unfortunately, I know of no common phrase in American political discussion that gives the captialist-oriented flavor of social democracy -- yet this may be an utterly key and centrist distinction from the current Republican base.

--
Howard

*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*

I like Dylan but I do think he is an acquired taste. I also don't think even he would use "great" to describe his voice or instrumental abilities. His greatness was his ability to express and evoke in lyrics the sentiments of his generation which was after all more 50's beat than 60's rock.

Howard B: "what the Europeans tend to call "social democracy", involving more of a safety net." This belongs, perhaps, more with Jo-Ann's post on David Brooks and economic philosophy, but their policies also result in greater social mobility. It's perhaps relevant here in that Dan K, I think, is mistaken worrying that liberals don't have a political philosophy while conservatives do, but I hate to rerun the "big ideas" debate here, so long after Chait had his fine say in TNR and we ran it into the ground. 

I could talk about Dylan forever, but isn't it a bit off-topic here? Besides, he's a bit past the need for a defense. Next we'll be discussing whether the Beatles or Stephen Sondheim might have made a contribution to popular music. 

John 

http://www.haberarts.com/

Max:

As one of your co-commentators in this series, thanks so much for livening things up.

And as an Old Guy who was sorta kinda involved in the New Left, thanks for the memories.

I also wanted to let you know that my main holiday reading was a biography of Karl Kautsky (note to Netizens: Kautsky was a friend and disciple of Engels, and the leading popularizer of Marxist thinking in the late nineteenth century; he was also the chief theoretician of the German Social Democrat Party prior to World War I).

Maybe we can argue about Kautsky over coffee sometime soon.

Ed Kilgore

SDS and SNCC broke the ice on opposing the war, when it was totally beyond the pale. SDS organized the first big anti-war demo in Washington.

I need to do a new post (next week, maybe) on this idea of the New Left provoking a huge conservative reaction and the ultimate success of Reagan etc. I don't buy it.

Perhaps the combination of living two blocks from the brownstone the Weather Underground blew up and going to a Friends School makes the SDS not seem to out front. There was no one at Friends who was not anti-War.

It wasn't Reagan that started the assult on the New Left but George Wallace followed by Nixon. The New Left did not provoke the reaction, they simple never spoke for most Americans. Nixon used this to create the "Silent Majority." Worse Nixon began the aligning liberal, sociaist, communist and leftist and even anarchists. The result was that calling someone a liberal was enough to stop all thought and debate.

Daniel A. Greenbaum

my perception is that the Left takes too much credit for ending the Vietnam War.

*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*

Bush and his radical administration have succeeded in bringing together a lot of people who otherwise differ greatly among themselves, but are united in their opposition to the Bush agenda and social outlook. And for the time being, many of those Bush opponents have been persuaded to vote for Democrats, because the Democrats are the main available institutional vehicle for opposing Bush radicalism.

Now, to be anti-wingnut does not strike me as an enduring foundation for a very deep movement. But it is some kind of movement. Some like to describe this movement as "progressive", but mainly because they can not think of anything else to call it. Otherwise its an incoherent mix of leftist, neoliberal, libertarian, green, and even traditional Republican outlooks. The movement inclines toward secularism, but also includes a lot of mainline religious people who do not go in for fundamentalism, dark age anti-intellectualism, heavy-handed religious paternalism and Christian jihadism. It is a temporary coalition that is likely to fall apart if wingnuttery declines as a threat, but might hold together so long as the radical right is perceived as a dangerous and powerful force.

To the extent that the progressive netroots phenomenon is just a machine for steering money to Democratic candidates, it is a very worthwhile thing. But I would be reluctant to describe it as a movement. A PAC is not the same thing as a movement. However, I don't thing the progressive netrooters are just a fundraising machine. There really is a lot of interesting discussion and writing. But as others have mentioned, the most interesting writing is not generally to be found on the sites that are the most concerned with activism and fund-raising.

Getting Democrats elected is a good thing. But a round of Democratic electoral success does not in itself signal the dawn of an era of progressive change if those elected Democrats are not united behind a program for change. And so far I don't see any indication that there is a coherent program for progressive change of any significant scope. Surely there is nothing choate that is close to matching the ambitious agendas enacted by the early twentieth century progressive era, by the New Deal or by the Great Society. Other than sweeping out the wingnuts, the agenda seems relatively modest. In fact, one might almost say the program is just a "return to normalcy" - a return to competent middle-of-the-road government, a mainstream opposition to fervant religious activism in the areas of science and education, a turning away from revolutionary foreign policy back toward a more typical bipartisan foreign policy, and a restoration of fiscal sanity following the radical Republican attempt to cause a fiscal trainwreck.

So my sense is that the progressive netroots, taken as a collective phenomenon, form a sort of counterrevolutionary movement in response to a radical right-wing movement. When you have a crazed right-wing revolution going on, counterrevolution is a fine thing. But it represents a very limited sort of "progress", and is not inherently progressive.

In my 60's Left experience: When the kind of stuff in Max's post came along from people who tried to organize us into their idea of a political movement, we avoided them like the plague. To us, they seemed contrary to the spirit of the times and part of what we were rejecting.
The real energy didn't come from academic theorists, although there were a few who were influential in the background, it came from the people. We may not have had a well-developed political analysis in the eyes of some of the intellectuals of the day, just as we don't have one in Max's eyes now, but we knew what we wanted and did the best we could in a chaotic world of rapidly cascading events and violence.
I hear Max's frustration, and we could all do with some deeper thinking, and especially knowledge of history.
In this Ground Hog Day movie that I'm in sometimes now, I think we may be approaching 1967, maybe even '68. I could hardly bear to read all the bizarre, disturbing news today, on top of all the flashbacks MLK day brought up for me yesterday. Peace

If it weren't sad, it would all be funny.

The old "new left" wasn't about Marx or the SDS.  It was an aggregate (not even a coordinated one) of civil rights groups and anti-war groups with a few feminists mixed in.  The feminists were never particularly left, still aren't.  They have their own issues.  After major successes of the civil rights era (and I know it is controversial to say there were major successes, but that is because most Americans today are either deliberately denying the past, or unable to conceive what it was like in the US as recently as 1960), the civil rights groups have broken up into a disorganized set of interest seeking advocacy groups, while what counts as a civil rights group has expanded to be all inclusive.  The anti-war groups were driven by the draft (a little bit of moral outrage, yes, but mostly the draft).  The draft is gone, so is the engine behind the anti-war movement.

The hippies were never the left, they were libertarians descended from the beatniks of the 1950s.   They appeared "left" because they rejected the Victorian morality of the right.  They also joined into the anti-war movement when it served their purposes.  But, at heart, they were extreme libertarians, which is more right than left.

By 1975 all these forces were pulling apart rather than together.  The war was over, the civil rights movement had moved from macro to micro issues, and feminists were pursuing their own issues.  The libertarian hippies went back to the earth, founded businesses and became republicans.

Somehow, this analysis leaves out the other questionable left group, the Trustfundies.  You know the Trustfundies eventually went to their own interests, just as the ones in the Netroots will.

This leaves the core people who pursued progressive government with a goal of improving the lives of the less well off, without every last one of them becoming a Mother Theresa.  In the era of Reagan anti-government, just holding a public job was a moral victory, something the Netrooties don't seem to appreciate.

I seem to be unable to stop.  Max is too extreme, the left is not, and never has been, about remaking America in the image of Marx.  It is about social justice and human dignity.  The right sees their own privilege and assumes it is justice rather than luck.  The religious right is too busy preparing for an imaginary here after to realize they are being screwed today.

Dan K's statement on limited progress in the netroots and lack of an inherently progressive identification is balanced and helpful. I apologize if I misinterpreted him before as saying that progressives, liberals, Democrats, leftists, whatever, period, have no philosophy of economics, society, or anything else. I like to think some of us do. Then again, I'm old enough to have read most of those books Max mentions and old enough, too, to know how little I learned.

I'm sorry Dan G. had so personal an experience with the Weather Underground, but he seems to have come to awfully sweeping conclusions from it. There was more to the 1960s than that. Indeed, my own associations with the SDS were of violence, but then I read the Port Huron Statement and am still impressed by it. I don't mean the way I'm impressed by Lenin's "State and Revolution," "Imperialism," and "What Is to Be Done" as intellectual achievements with genuine insights but also sadly dangerous and mistaken. I expected something like that and was wrong. I mean it's pretty much a good thing.

John

http://www.haberarts.com/

Thank you; it is especially so to me, although I'll be interested to see how it resonates. Perhaps I go too far back in political science classes, but I always regarded socialism as an economic system, not necessarily a means of providing benefits. Wealth distribution to achieve equality is part of it, but not necessarily wealth creation.

I think we agree. You stated it well.

--
Howard

*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*

Reece:

One of the recognized problems with social science is that it is not predictive, at least not predictive in the way that the physical sciences are. In so far as it is reactive and not predictive, it might be difficult to use any such inquiry to actually affect the world.

Karl Marx was a social scientist, yes?

Neoboho

No, Marx was a philosopher. He used some quasi-scientific data, but at bottom he was not a social scientist. In any case, Marx's predictions were by and large incorrect.

I'd like to pick up on this issue of betrayal.  In my recollection (and I must be very close to the same age as you), I never expected the established party to be very supportive of my objectives.  What I did expect was the larger movement of public opinion to drive out right and shift the center closer and closer to my way of thinking.  What a shock Reagan was to me! 

I think back and see the cynical use of MIAs, the grab for the hearts and minds of the generation a few years younger than us.  Of course when children of MIAs thought that the rightwing government supported their hopes to find their missing (not dead) parents, they went over to that view.  It became verboten to discuss the atrocities of war or to suggest that the anti-war movement was heroic, because that might offend the lone child of a MIA in the room.

How unprepared we were for the continuing struggle.  By 1975 we thought we had won some major victories.  We had forced the end of the evil war, after all.  And the anti-war movement believed it had forced Nixon from office.  It was a *new day*.  How wrong we were.

Nixon was sacrificed from the right, to prevent a real shakedown in the power structure.  Ford pardoned him for the same reason.  By the next election we were back to normal.  With Reagan's election we had moved radically to the right.  We had won nothing.  The Democratic leaders were not challenging the radical right, they were holding onto their own power and compromising with the devil-himself.   There was a shift, but in the wrong direction.

The hippies won (we are far more libertarian today than in 1975), but the progressive left was shut out in the cold. 

Another Dylan lne from "Brownsville Girl".  

 "If there's an original thought out there I'd like to hear it right now.

Now now. I never said anyone should be excluded, nor that there is any required reading list, nor that professional credentials of any type are required. But reading something should be required.

You seem to be at cross purposes with other critics of my post who claim the netroots are well-distributed over different age groups, something I don't dispute. Matt and Markos, by contrast, are each only one age.

I'm aware of no evidence as to the occupations and hobbies of former "60s people." Some have gotten rich, most have not because duh, most people in any age group are not rich. I drive a '96 Chevy. I am not rich, and I don't drink lattes.

Max B. Sawicky

http://maxspeak.org/mt

max@maxspeak.org

Chancellorsville, or more specifically Hazel Grove? Wasn't that more of an example of mobile artillery, evolved over Frederick the Great, than hey-diddle-diddle-right-down-the-middle of entrenched batteries and rifle pits?

--
Howard

*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*

LOL...well I enjoy reading Max, even if what I read isn't germaine to what is being discussed here.  I guess my favorite authors are Twain, Coleridge, Poe and Hunter Thompson.  But I did just pick up "Assassin's Gate" by Packer, based what I read about it here, and plan on reading it in the near future.  But even if someone doesn't read it doesn't diminish what they have to say in the slightest as long as their opinions are sound in terms of having an intellectual foundation.

If you read my post (which I am sure you did) I tried to make sure my criticism of "your generation" wasn't a criticism of you personally.  You are here.  You are still fighting the good fight.  And I respect that.  Many more are not anymore.  But for some just trying to live is a noble enough fight.  My beef with you was about your scathing critique of the current state of affairs in terms of progressive activist movement.  We are the ones still fighting the battle, whether we are 20-something or 70-something, as not all of the 60's activists are.  But instead of taking it to the streets we have a much more powerful platform to spread our progressive ideas...cyberspace.

Will there come a time to "take it to the streets" again.  Absolutely!!!  And that time might be closer than we realize.  But responding to an attack on you, perceived or real, like you did by lashing out at much of the netroots I feel is counterproductive for the progressive movement.  Not all of the netroots agree with Stoller's take on 60's style activism.  To use a cliche (as Ellen hates when I do), don't lose sight of the forest for the trees.

That's pretty thin, Reece.  Google "marx social science" and read it and weep.  Also, you made the claim that social science can't change the world.  Whether or not Marx was incorrect or not is completely beside the point.  But nice try. ;-)

Neoboho

Googling "marx social science" wouldn't prove very much. There are plenty of marxists in the social scientists, and there are marxist interpretations of every social science. What you need to prove is that Marx himself was a social scientist. And he wasn't.

Wikipedia's entry on Marx seems pretty good to me. I can't say that I've read a biography of the man, so for me wikipedia will have to do right now.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_marx

While the entry notes that he was a political economist, if you read the section regarding his views of political economy, it appears generally philosophical. My copy of the Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy states that Marx was a "social philosopher, economic theorist, and revolutionary." (In contrast it states that Max Weber was a "social theorist and sociologist.")

I seem to recall that Marx had actually written some on factory conditions in Britain, but I'm not sure that alone makes him a social scientist. Exposing the conditions of Chicago's stockyards did not make Upton Sinclair a social scientist.

I didn't make the claim that social science can't change the world. I said that it might be difficult to put social science to "world-changing" purposes, because social science--science in general--does not itself aspire to those ends. The fact of the matter is that science helps change the world everyday, and has for a long time, but it doesn't change it in a specific direction. The change that science affects is not itself purposeful. Science at its best is a theoretically agnostic process.

[duplicate duck]

Thought-provoking post, as it left me balancing competing thoughts. I have no disagreement that the sort of racism you describe was a societal phenomenon and needed a very broad approach, as opposed to the more focused objection to GWB's military adventures and Constitutional challenges.

On thinking further, there may be a trend, over multiple presidencies, to a more global challenge to the idea of checks and balances. Nixon clearly, but also Johnson, played fast and loose there.

More clearly societal, however, is something that I'll call social democracy. I'm fully aware that while this term seems generally accepted in Europe, it really doesn't convey much in the US. It is definitely not socialism, which is an economic model in which the government owns the means of production and there is an emphasis (thank you Daniel) on equality of income rather than on liberties.

I'll come back to the liberties aspect. While I have a personal disclaimer to make, I believe the presence of the social democracy "safety net" actually supports traditional Republican, as well as current Democratic, principles of encouraging small business. Certainly, true new job creation tends to come from small business, and a good deal of societal innovation in general. Things like universal acccess to health care, flexible work hours, job sharing, etc., encourage the risk taking in small business, a quintessinally capitalist idea.

Personal disclaimer: I have had to game the healthcare system, having had employer-based coverage disappear when layoffs forced me to contracting, and being of uninsurable (below Medicare) age combined with medical history. To put it in fairly blunt terms, my pacemaker battery will run out in a couple of years. With regular monitoring, there will be adequate warning. If that battery is not replaced, I can reasonably predict I will die in my sleep not long after -- I have a cardiac abnormality in which my heart "forgets" to beat, for increasingly long intervals, only during sleep. This obviously makes healthcare access an utterly critical and personal issue, and this is not my only chronic medical issue. With those medical issues handled, however, I am quite productive and an economic contributor.

Shifting hats slightly, I regard universal healthcare access as the first line of defense against both covert bioterrorism, and what epidemiologists call "emerging infectious diseases". H5N1 avian flu is the popular example of the latter, although it hasn't shown much evidence of breaking into a human pandemic. SARS was actually closer to breakthrough, and there have been some worrisome outbreaks of viral hemorrhagic fevers (a recent outbreak of Angola of Marburg, a close cousin of Ebola) that had to be contained -- there's no real treatment. HIV in Africa (especially) is going to have a societal effect eventually on the world at large.

--
Howard

*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*

Luigi...

Do you really think that the passage of the Civil Rights Act in itself was complete and total victory?  I viewed it as a important first step but not victory unto itself.  And in fact all I have seen since then is backsliding with the courts striking down many of the remedies to racial (and gender) discrimination.

I'm a wannabe radical?  I don't feel my views are radical at all, I view myself as a realist.  There is still widespread voter disenfranchisement of African Americans.  There are still societal roadblocks in place keeping African Americans and other minorities "separate and unequal".  Are women now getting equal pay for equal work?  I gave much credit to Max and the activists of the 60's.  They fought some key battles and won some significant victories but there is still a long way to go.  And if you think that racism has been defeated all one needs to do for a reality check is remember Katrina and NOLA.

If you want to say the victories of the 60's "resolved" those problems that is your call Luigi.  I look at America and see the same problems existing today that were there in the 60's and before.  Plus many more...

Seriously, still trying to re-live the bogus 'glory days' of the 60's? "We took to the streets!" We? Hehe. Yeah, African Americans certainly accomplished nearly impossible feats by doing so during the 50's and 60's. Whitey-ass self-congratulatory "leftists" who sneer at people who haven't read enough silly socialist dogma to pretend to have a conversation about how important it is was or should be are not exactly the most accomplished bunch of people. You can't take a select handful of people from the 60's who had the right idea and then extrapolate onto that whole generation extra credibility because you imagine them all to be as well informed as those people. Come on, the hippies, 95% of them, were just having a big party. That's it. And the people who wasted their time sitting around, talking about Marx accomplished even less than that. Except further alienating the middle of the country by being so god-damned holier than thou. Kinda like this post. Get over yourselves. The "60's" was no more or less revolutionary than any other time in history. The only difference between then and now is that there is no draft. You want to get people talking about class again? Draft. Other than that, really, get the hell over yourselves. You didn't do the generations that came after you any favors.

I'm all for universal healthcare. But I don't regard it as a moral imperative, as was the civil rights struggle. You can be a well meaning person who doesn't support universal healthcare, for a variety of reasons. There is no reason, on the other hand, to oppose civil rights except bigotry. As much as I would like to see universal healthcare enacted -- and next to the frightening state of our news media I think it's the most important issue we have today -- it pales in comparison to the civil rights struggle or WWII in the number of people it would (will?) positively impact.

I'll address your assertion that the only difference between the 1960s and now is the absence of the draft.

I graduated from HS in 1967 and I can forcefully submit to you that the society of my childhood was one of conformity and hypocrisy--and that included all of the institutions of the day (and the political parties are an institution). Problems of injustice and inequality only started with the African-American experience but stretched into areas of child abuse, sex abuse, spousal abuse, wage and housing discrimination, birth control, sexual predation, acid rain, bald eagles and condors disappearing, rivers that burst into flame, American leaders who were assassinated with the acts on our television screens and on and on and on.

Did we solve all of this stuff? Hell, no. But now the problems are on the surface and not buried under hardened lumps and not admitted to. Today's fundamentalists who do not admit to these problems were not a minority in my childhood--these folks were EVERYWHERE. They ran every institution, and these insitutions were engaged in active coverup or were just silent partners in the coverup. Both political parties, the churches, schools, elected officials, and government bureaucrats were complicit in sweeping any and all issues under the rug.

I ended up suspicious of every organized group, including 1960s-era hippie groups younger folks want to jam me into. I found that more of us showed up to protest and weren't members of any organized group. And we pushed for LAWS that would force governments and companies and even party officials to open up and fork over information.

Now, I will work through the Democratic Party so I can, as someone else wrote, finally drive a stake through the heart of those who are imperialists. If the Democratic Party will not provide that death blow, then I will work to found a political party that can deal it. I want to a death blow to imperialistic Social Darwinists no matter what direction they reside it--it isn't just the right who calls folks "sheeple", now is it?

I don't appreciate the holier than thou junk no matter who delivers it, itsbenj. Bush delivers enough of it with his "what Americans need to understand..." which is just code-speak for the idiots don't get it. What is truly annoying is now far this Social darwinism and sense of elitism extends into our society...it is a form of hubris and entitlement that needs to be eradicated from our society.

I hated every SDS presentation I ever saw. They were always dreadful.

But the Port Huron Statement was still pretty good.

AC