When liberals protested the war in the 1960s, it proved they hate America. In fact it still proves liberals hate America, even 40 years later. When conservatives boo on-duty soldiers in Iraq (via John) in 2011, it proves they love America.
Paul Ryan’s plan to make senior citizens use vouchers makes him a great American patriot, Elizabeth Warren’s support for increasing taxes on the wealthy by a few points makes her a America-hating radical, “too liberal for even Massachusetts”.
Will the 1960s ever end in this country? Will liberals ever cease to be dangerous subversives? Will conservatives ever cease to be brave defenders of Our Republic?
Jay C
No.
Next question?
tulip
No.
Geeno
Rats, Jay beat me to it
cleek
why should the narrative change? nobody on my TV seems to have any problems with it.
Southern Beale
SEE!!!! Both sides do it!
{ ducks }
wrb
no
Southern Beale
By the way, I’m reading the book “Brandwashed” and it seems to identify where a lot of this crap comes from.
BGinCHI
We haven’t even gotten over the 1860s.
NonyNony
@BGinCHI:
Almost VERBATIM what I was going to reply with.
daveNYC
Might as well be asking if The Party will ever capture Emmanuel Goldstein.
Chris
I’m surprised this didn’t occur to me sooner. You know all those stories you hear about liberals supposedly spitting on troops and calling them baby-killers back in the 1960s? Yeah… look who’s shitting on the troops these days. Openly and shamelessly.
It’s one of the oldest double standards around, but conservatives can essentially burn down a hospital full of newborn babies and the powers-that-be will simply shake their heads and chuckle about how boys will be boys, but every time a liberal holds a rally, the entire Washington establishment jumps like an elephant in front of a mouse.
Goes way past the sixties. The way the authorities ignored a hundred years of Ku Klux Klan terrorism while making life hell on earth for unions and civil rights movements that were supposedly full of dangerous radicals comes to mind.
Violet
No.
Liberals want to change things. Conservatives want them to stay the way they are. Change is scary. It’s easier to sell “the good old days” to people than “let’s change this, move this forward, expand these rights.”
Plus, Dems are crap at capitalizing on opportunities. If Dems were smart, they’d be selling, “Republican voters hate the troops” all over the place after that booing at the debate. They’d be pointing out that Republicans want you and your family to die on the unsafe bridges they won’t repair or replace. They’d make the observation that Republicans cheer people dying when they’re sick if they don’t have health insurance. The opportunities are legion. The Democrats don’t know how to place hardball.
mclaren
Shut up, you dirty long-haired body-pierced peacenik hippy.
Southern Beale
Remember when Bill Clinton being a draft dodger was a big huge honkin’ deal during his election, but George W. Bush being AWOL was hushed up?
Yeah.
KG
@BGinCHI: hell, I’m not sure we’ve gotten over the 1780s and the Constitutional Convention/Ratification process…
opal
The end of the Cold War left a hole in the conservative psyche.
It is vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big.
Adam C
From the link:
The consultant added “If I say she seems like a combination of Stalin and Castro, will you put that in the paper too?”
BGinCHI
@KG: Or the 5th century sack of Rome….we could go on and on.
I think human beings are broken in some essential way.
cleek
@Violet:
ah. but “conservatives” want to change things, too. they just pretend that what they want is to change things to how things were in a mythical past when everything was perfect and right and we didn’t have all of today’s problems.
they want to live in the sepia-toned world of their childhoods.
or whatever
Steve
@Adam C: That item was hackish even for the WaPo. Gosh, some guy working for Brown says Warren is a super-liberal, let’s pontificate about whether it’s true!
I’m pretty confident the reason Warren’s videos resonate with so many people is because she has such an excellent way of expressing the progressive ethic in common-sense terms, not because she feeds us a bunch of “kill the rich!” red meat.
Thoughtcrime
There are no
athiests in foxholesliberals in boardrooms.Linnaeus
The hate for 1960s liberals, both from the perspective of the time and today’s prospective is just another iteration of what’s been going on for years in this country – since at least the 1880s if not earlier. The villains may change slightly, and the form of expression may change slightly, but the fundamental antiliberal/antileft impulse is the same.
Stefan
Will the 1960s ever end in this country?
You know, I’ve said it here before, but I never ceased to be amazed at the continued hold of the 1960s on our collective imagination 40-50 years after the fact.
Was it like this before? Were there earlier eras that continued to have a hold on everyone long after most people who were active during that time were dead or very old? I mean, in the 1960s themselves I’m sure that people weren’t constantly going on and on about flappers, speakeasies, suffragettes and Herbert Hoover (though he’s oddly come back into fashion in this decade…)
Sad_Dem
Richard M. Nixon really did accomplish a lot. For example, he poisoned the national debate for decades, even after his death.
/silent majority
RareSanity
No.
There was/is/will always be, a deep pool of people, that will believe anything that someone tells them–as long as it reinforces one of their fundamental prejudices.
There are just too many (destructive) prejudices to pander to.
OzoneR
The 1960s is also when the Civil Rights Act passed and white people had to accept black people as their equals. Magically, all the white people suddenly stopped supporting the things they did in the 1950s.
just sayin’
Sasha
@Thoughtcrime:
Unless they need to be bailed out, then it’s socialism city.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@Violet:
Fixt.
BGinCHI
@Thoughtcrime:
Fixed for eschatological accuracy.
Chris
@Violet:
This. Conservatism’s less an ideology than a pathology, afraid of anything that’s new, different and unfamiliar.
The good news, if you can call it that, is that if you can make your changes stick for long enough, conservatives will eventually be OK with them. The best example of that’s modern capitalism itself: in the nineteenth century, when it was still new, different and unfamiliar (compared to agrarian and feudal models people were used to), it sparked outraged opposition from rural, religious populists like William Jennings Bryan who thought it was corrupting their pure, old-fashioned America. Today, Bryan’s descendants quote Ayn Rand, worship at the altar of the Job Creators and denounce anything Bryan-like as soshulist and un-American.
GeorgeCarlinFromTheGrave
No. Why? “because the owners of this country don’t want that…they own all the big media companies, so that they control just about all of the news and information you hear. They’ve got you by the balls. They spend billions of dollars every year lobbying lobbying to get what they want…They don’t want well-informed, well-educated people capable of critical thinking. They’re not interested in that. That doesn’t help them. That’s against their interests…You know what they want? Obedient workers people who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork but just dumb enough to passively accept all these increasingly shittier jobs with the lower pay, the longer hours, reduced benefits, the end of overtime and the vanishing pension that disappears the minute you go to collect it.
Linnaeus
@Stefan:
There might be generational effects at work here. I don’t have any numbers handy, but I’m willing to bet that the generation that came of age in the 1920s was probably less numerous than its successors and was in a less prominent position culturally, politically, etc. Note that in the 1960s, for example, is when you see in significant numbers things like documentaries, dramatizations, etc. of World War II (which is not to say that you didn’t see these prior to the 1960s, only that they reached a certain level of prominence); this is indicative, I’d argue, of the ascendancy of the so-called “G.I. Generation”. Just a guess.
kdaug
The most heartening demographic of the tea party is age.
They will be dead soon.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@Stefan:
The English Civil War, Restoration and Glorious Revolution: 1640-1688
The US Revolutionary War (a civil war in disguise, on both sides of the Atlantic): 1770s
The US Civil War: 1860s
Anybody else notice the repeat inverval?
Kenneth, what’s the frequency?
The 1950s-1960s were about when the next Anglo-American civil war was coming due, but it didn’t happen. Instead we got the Civil Rights Movement, Vietnam, and The Backlash. It’s no wonder they left scars.
Stefan
Liberals want to change things. Conservatives want them to stay the way they are.
Nah, too simple for me. There are lots of long-settled, stable things conservatives want to change — the New Deal, a generations-old compact on the social safety net, clean air and water, civil rights for all, etc. We have all these things, to a degree, and it’s liberals who want to conserve them and conservatives who want to destroy them.
JoyChan
@BGinCHI: BINGO!!
BGinCHI
@Stefan: Conservatives want change worse than liberals.
They want to change progress into regress. Or, to put it differently, a conservative who is someone who gets power and instantly wants to keep anyone else from changing the status quo.
mai naem
Its never going to change as long as you have people who can gain a lot of money and power pimping for the already wealthy and powerful. Also too, Americans are in general low information people who are generally too lazy to look into nuances and anything that’s even a little complicated.
Axe Diesel Palin
I’m always shocked how often I see “Not Fonda Jane” bumper stickers on cars. I do not see them everyday, but I probably see one every few months. Certainly the car is not from 1970, but the anger is.
gnomedad
Considering a “Democrats Support ALL the Troops” bumper sticker.
beltane
@Linnaeus: Previous generations also lived their lives in the real world and not the TV world we grew up in. What television does best is to continually reinforce various stereotypes and to promote a mawkish, sentimental view of the world. Literacy rates may have been higher in the 60’s than in the decades before, but much of the benefit of this was neutralized by the power of mass media.
Linnaeus
@beltane:
That’s a good point, too. We can dramatize the past in more powerful ways now than perhaps we could before.
Thymezone
The answer, Doug old bean, is that if people who do not fall into the “boo the soldier” category, or the “cheer the execution” or “cheer the death of the uninsured” category … people who abhor these things, people like us …. don’t get involved, work, campaign, and vote, then no .. the sixties will never end. In fact the 1860s will never end. The morons and the lunatics and the ignorant will forever rule the day.
But if the rest of us work together, practice team politics, stop bitching about not getting personal ponies and catch on to the idea that the contest is between the morons and the rest of us and it’s a contest we cannot lose … then, maybe we can end the sixties, and end the reign of ignorance and meanness.
So that said, what does BJ have planned for the next critical year of politics in this country, to help get the job done? Whining like little girls over every shitty David Brooks column? Or some real hardass Dem team politics, and everything that goes with it?
Just wondering.
Chris
@Stefan:
I tend to simplify all politics into four categories
– Revolutionaries (who want to smash the system completely and build a newer, better one)
– Reformists (who want to change the system from the inside without having to wreck shit)
– Conservatives (who want the system to stay as it is)
– Reactionaries (the dumbest of the four, who want to bring the system back to “the way it used to be” in the mythology they think is real).
Republican politicians and activists fall into the “reactionary” category, but a lot of their voters are just plain old conservatives who’re afraid of change in any direction. (Which is why, as much as they WANT to privatize Social Security and Medicare, they find it damn near impossible to get enough public support for it every time they try).
beltane
@Axe Diesel Palin: I wonder what grudge the younger conservatives are going to bear, as Vietnam-era references will surely not resonate with anyone under the age of 50.
YoohooCthulhu
It will die when people who were alive during the 60s/70s are dead. Most people from my generation (I’m 29) find the liberal=dangerous radical comparison perplexing, since we’ve only ever seen conservative radicalism (McVeigh, antitax nuts, etc).
FlipYrWhig
It’s a very seductive “narrative.” First there was the Depression, then the New Deal, and then the New Deal got carried away and went gonzo, and that was the Sixties, when liberals and liberalism went too far. Then there was Reagan, and he brought things back into their proper channel. So ever since then the cold civil war has been between the Reaganauts and the hippies. The pundits all play along, too. Until this group with Matthews and Dowd goes the way of the Russert, we’re going to keep hearing about how Democrats need to remember and answer for the excesses of the ’60s.
giltay
@Southern Beale: Or remember how Kerry being a decorated veteran was no big deal. (ETA: Or that being in the near vicinity of Jane Fonda once was a big deal.)
Or who remembers that a certain “peanut farmer” helped save my country from a nuclear meltdown?
BGinCHI
@Thymezone: I vote for hardass politics.
But also drinking and some pet pics.
Also Netflix recs.
beltane
Maybe Peak Wingnut exists after all. It seems that Bill Kristol, Rich Lowery and others were very upset by last night’s debate, saying it made Republicans “look like crazy people”. http://dailykos.com/story/2011/09/23/1019619/–Republican-debate-reaction:-It-was-bad-Really,-really-bad?via=blog_1
Violet
@cleek:
I know that. You know that. But that’s not how it sells. Even the word “conservative” is based on “conserve,” which means “to protect from loss or harm” or “to use carefully or sparingly, avoiding waste.” It all sounds so sober and adult and thoughtful and protective. What’s not to like?
So even on the definition, liberals start a step or two behind. When you add our timid media to that mix, plus Dems inability to get a message right or take advantage of the other side’s stumbles, it’s kind of amazing we get anywhere at all.
joeyess
Southern Beale
So, Morgan Freeman goes on CNN and calls the Tea Party racist, at which point Fox Nation rallies to the Tea Party’s defense by … wait for it … hurling racist insults at Morgan Freeman.
Yeah, I know, no one is shocked.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@Chris:
Seems to me that today’s GOP is a mix of Revolutionaries, Reactionaries, and Revolutionary Reactionaries.
beltane
@FlipYrWhig: The Left also suffers from this to an extent. There is an accepted narrative that says the stock market crashed in 1929, things were bad with Hoovervilles, the Dust Bowl and all destitute waifs as seen in Dorothea Lange photographs. Then FDR was elected and overnight it was all “Happy Days are Here Again! Suck on this, Republican Scum!”.
No way Obama can compete with that type of magic.
Gilles de Rais
@daveNYC: We not only caught him but killed him. And yet, nothing has changed, has it?
Fucen Pneumatic Fuck Wrench Tarmal
lets not forget, the religious whackos, the teahadists, most of the 27%, they are the 60s liberals. the only difference is that 60s liberals had older, smarter people guiding them, and when that fell apart, so did they.
BGinCHI
@Southern Beale: Christ. Thanks for that link.
LGF is doing good work these days. Without blogs to chronicle this stuff, who would do it?
joeyess
@Southern Beale: Wow. How about that jagoff claiming that the KKK were all liberals?
Martin
@beltane:
Apparently they don’t care that they are crazy people, just that they don’t look like them.
opal
@Thymezone:
As long we get rid of the locker room poison, fine.
There has been far too much “play me or trade me” pouting, and it’s getting old.
joeyess
@Fucen Pneumatic Fuck Wrench Tarmal: I’m not sure that’s true. I have a sister that was no liberal in the ’60s and she is a teabagger prototype. She completely sat out the anti-war movement, said nothing in regard to women’s rights, never has advocated a single liberal position. I think she was really the feature of the ’60s not the bug. The anti-war movement was really smaller than imagined. Only after it spread to college campuses did it get any media play…..Most kids back then sat on their hands.
BGinCHI
@Martin: Martin, check out today’s xkcd.
http://xkcd.com/
Neutrinos!
Gilles de Rais
@Southern Beale: Best comment on that LGF thread:
“guys, the kkk were just a bunch of hippies who went too far”
Canuckistani Tom
@Southern Beale:
The teaparty: Cheering executions and a dying man, booing soldiers, and now insulting God.
Raven (formerly stuckinred)
@Fucen Pneumatic Fuck Wrench Tarmal: bullshit
Jay in Oregon
@kdaug:
Sooner than they think, if they get their way.
Linda Featheringill
@FlipYrWhig: #45
Fugum. We were right. They were wrong.
Raven (formerly stuckinred)
@joeyess: The “60′” generation is split in half. My cousins are 3-5 years older than me and are very conservative. I’d say the high school class of 66 is about when it split.
Martin
@Southern Beale: When does the boycott of Driving Miss Daisy start?
Linda Featheringill
@Southern Beale:
I followed the link and read the comments.
Sigh.
It’s just very, very sad.
Rita R.
@GeorgeCarlinFromTheGrave:
This is the real answer.
It’s easier for Republicans in power to get what they want and lots of media love because their goals are aligned with those who own this country — and who own most of Congress as well, Democrat and Republican. It’s much harder for Democrats in power to get their policies passed because the people with the money and the power oppose them. George Carlin was so right, and I always, always remember the scene in “Wall Street” where Michael Douglas tells naive little Charlie Sheen, “You don’t actually think we live in a democracy, do you?”
Fear of change and “those damn dirty hippies” might be used as tools by those in power to manipulate voters, but it’s not what’s driving those who are really in charge.
MTiffany
Hell, when will Vietnam end for this country?
“John McCain was a POW in Vietnam! Where was Barack Obama?”
“Elementary School.”
“Draft dodger! Just like every Democratic President since Bill Clinton!”
Villago Delenda Est
@Southern Beale:
smintheus
Ryan’s plan has always seemed like nothing so much as an S&H Greenstamps benefits program.
Martin
@BGinCHI: That’s pretty good.
I really feel bad for the experimental guys. They go and spend decades writing grants, getting a billion dollars to build some monster piece of equipment, get a result like this, and by next week some theoretical guy who never has to stray far from his cappuccino machine will chime in and say ‘oh, yeah, if you just take the first derivative of this over here you’ll see that result’. And that’ll be the end of it.
The Snarxist Formerly Known As Kryptik
Did the 1960s ever end? No. Why the hell do you think the term ‘hippie punching’ is in use the way it is? The hippies are the GOP’s windmills, and unlike good ol’ Mr. Quixote, they get the world to tilt with them and agree that ‘THOSE REALLY ARE FUCKIN’ HIPPIES!!!’
Martin
Liberals conspire against the 2nd Amendment by introducing gun laws!
Liberals conspire against the 2nd Amendment by not introducing gun laws!
Can’t win for trying.
priscianus jr
@FlipYrWhig:
Sly
Yes. When the Baby Boomers are dead.
Gin & Tonic
Easy to be pessimistic. And yet, DADT went away with no fuss, the POTUS is a black guy with a weird name, who is doing his best (IMO) to draw us out of a protracted and expensive war. How much of that would be possible in the 60’s? I prefer to be optimistic. Change is incremental, often too slow, but it happens.
I’ve worked for a long time for a medium-sized company in a very stereotypically conservative line of business. I’m basically in IT, which is more than half women. Several of the very top managers are gay or lesbian (some more open about it than others.) One of the clearly “rising stars” at the company is a gay black man. I had nothing to do with this, so I’m not polishing my own knob here, just pointing out that things which were inconceivable in the 60’s are completely unremarkable now. Things are changing for the better.
Southern Beale
Hey you’ll never guess which Clinton Jared Bernstein was hanging with in D.C. today!
Fucen Pneumatic Fuck Wrench Tarmal
@Raven (formerly stuckinred):
lets be real, the activism of the 60s was only working when the boomers had no other role but to show up. as long as leading, planning and strategy was in the hands of older folks, things worked. well worked to a degree less profound than some would like to remember it, nostalgia has a way of exaggerating.
more to the point, most of the liberal radicals were pursuing a piece of ass more than any other kind of peace or ideology.
thus, in an vacuum of leadership, the concerns became about turf, and credit, and the protests became vanity concerns about what type drinks were in the fountain dispensers in the cacafeteria.
no doubt this is why the boomers spawned the religious right wing, the tea party, the reagan revolution. its the same generation, responding to the same culture, loving the beatles all the same.
the 60s will be over when boomers take their profits and get the fuck out of the way. they had a great economy, as they took it over, it turned to shit. they had the best chance to earn a buck as anyone who ever lived, the schmucks who got left out, are the real schmucks, but they would have been schmucks no matter how things turned out.
the 60s liberal got old, most of them are now conservatives. they will exploit and ridicule the myths they know. it only works, still because it is truly a myth.
for progressives to win they would be well served to not accomodate their elders sense of nostalgia, and pick up the game as it is, because it never was what it was supposed to have been.
James E. Powell
@Stefan:
The Civil War. Still relevant and ‘controversial’ after all these years.
Also too, anything having to do with the founding fathers.
Southern Beale
@FlipYrWhig:
True and yet the stereotype of the ’60s (which largely really took place in the ’70s) was anti-establishment youth who didn’t trust the government, their parents or anyone over 25, and a big chunk of them decided to “go Galt” and ditch the consumer culture and live off the land, since there were no jobs in the cities anyway. First oil shock and all.
So now we’re supposed to be surprised that a generation which grew up distrusting the government is now a bunch of old people who… distrust the government?
beltane
@Martin: It is a massive conspiracy, a massive conspiracy to deprive Wayne LaPiere of the financial contributions of paranoid wingnuts. Until Obama introduces as gun control bill, the NRA’s only means to enhance its revenue is to frighten people with Hillary Clinton and the UN. (I can’t count how many times they’ve called my house over the past three years with this same UN bullshit. It gets old)
Southern Beale
@James E. Powell:
The Great Depression. My mother, God rest her soul, hoarded food, string, plastic bags, etc. to her dying day. And she was just a kid back then.
harlana
the truth = fiery rhetoric
Fucen Pneumatic Fuck Wrench Tarmal
@joeyess:
most who came, came for the party. the hippie thing, was a magnet for psychotics and sociopaths, so even if you got it going, it wasn’t going to last.
antimaterialism, antiestablishment, it was fashion too, and no one was more prone to fashion and fad than the boomer. they still are, even when they are old.
just like the beatles, the 1960s was a marketing success first and foremost.
Southern Beale
@Martin:
I saw that on ThinkProgress. There is no loon like a gun loon.
This should be a good lesson for all Democrats. The right will say whatever they want about you, facts be damned. Obama lowered taxes and every fucking wingnut still thinks he raised them.
Short Bus Bully
@BGinCHI:
If it hasn’t been said already… This comment wins the thread.
Murakami
@Violet:
It’s not just that the Republicans don’t care if the bridges are safe. Republicans voted, without controversy, to send billions to rebuild the infrastructure of Iraq and Afghanistan. They balk at spending a dime to repair the infrastructure here.
Democrats should really make this a common talking point.
MikeZ
It couldn’t happen without a lot of help from the press; the only group that is more useless than republicans.
Linnaeus
@joeyess:
Yeah, it’s worth remembering that the 1960s that gave us Students for a Democratic Society also gave us Young Americans for Freedom.
srv
I think the republicans will get over punching hippies before the center-rightbaggers do.
Uncle Clarence Thomas
.
.
Will firebaggers ever cease to be dangerous subversives? Will balloonbaggers ever cease to be brave defenders of Our President?
.
.
Mike in NC
The 60s will haunt us until all the people who worked for Tricky Dick, like Roger Ailes and Pat Buchanan, are rotting in Hell where they belong.
Southern Beale
Okay, Star Wars fans! You’ve been waiting for this … this never-before-seen battle scene, swept up from the cutting room floor and secured in the Lucas vault … now available for your viewing pleasure for the first time!
Omnes Omnibus
@Fucen Pneumatic Fuck Wrench Tarmal: As a person born in the last year of the demographic Baby Boom but a couple of years into the sociological Gen-X, i.e., 1964[FN1], I am going to enjoy ever so much watching inter-generational insult hurling. Thanks. Thanks a lot.
[Fn1] FWIW I would self-identify as Gen-X. Boomer cultural touchstones have no real effect on me. Gen-X ones do. That should be the qualifier for those on the margins.
Seebach
Wrong question. It’s not “Will the 1960s ever end” it’s “Will the Civil War ever end”?
agrippa
Will the 1960s ever end?
The death of that generation will, pretty much, put the nail in the coffin of the 60s.
Linda Featheringill
BTW, the voters in Massachusetts can decide for themselves if a candidate is “too liberal” for them. They don’t need other folks making that decision for them.
It’s called democracy.
Swellsman
Wait a minute. Andrew Sullivan promised me – back in 2008 – that if we elected Obama the country’s cultural fixation on dividing itself between 1960’s hippies and straights would magically vanish.
That didn’t happen?
pluege
Will the 1960s ever end in this country? Will liberals ever cease to be dangerous subversives? Will conservatives ever cease to be brave defenders of Our Republic?
break up Big Media and the problem goes away. Liberals stop being evil and the majority of Americans get their wish to have strong effective government to protect them from their enemies and overreach and abuse by corporations, provide secure retirement, effective healthcare, quality education, privacy, state-of-the-infrastructure, equality under the law, and equal opportunity.
opal
@Uncle Clarence Thomas:
Speaking of brave defenders…
agrippa
@Fucen Pneumatic Fuck Wrench Tarmal:
# 83
There is a lot of truth in that post.
ruemara
Who wants to sign a petition to collect revenue on American leased resources and reserve portions of oil collected for the American market. You do!
https://wwws.whitehouse.gov/petitions/fb/petition/petition/pass-deepwater-law-httpottabalawblogspotcom201008oh-boy-dead-dinosaurshtml/Ll6VqgG7
pls?
MTiffany
@ruemara: Oh, you mean demand the federal gov’t start enforcing the law that’s already on the books that requires private corporations to pay royalties on the mineral wealth they extract from public lands?
Omnes Omnibus
@agrippa: A lot of bullshit as well.
James E. Powell
With limited exceptions, the people who actually brought about the changes to the country in the 60s are all gone to the great beyond. By the time hippies were featured in Life magazine and on the evening news, the Great Society changes had already been enacted. The great achievements of the 60s were accomplished by the so-called Greatest Generation.
And let’s get something straight: the protestors did not end the Viet Nam war. Nearly two years after the anti-war riots of 1968 helped elect him, Nixon expanded the war into Cambodia.
What ended the war was the evaporation of middle-class support for it due to the failure to “win” and a nasty inconvenience known as the draft. The changes to the draft in late 1969, the lottery system, the end of student deferments, and others, exposed a large swathe of American families who had been protected by their wealth or status to actual involvement in combat.
ruemara
@MTiffany:
No. Not exactly. It’s modeled after Chinese collection efforts that assure them a cheaper source of Chinese resources and with a revamping of royalty laws and operating laws.
Linnaeus
@Omnes Omnibus:
Yeah, I’m also not particularly enthusiastic about intergenerational insult-hurling. For one thing, I know that just as I can throw such insults at others, they can also be thrown at me.
Chris
@beltane:
Send ’em this article, specifically number four on the list.
cat48
Well, is Obama too Liberal? He ran & won on the same Tax Policy that the Senate refuses to pass.
opal
@srv:
Sorry if I spilled scotch on your Che Guevara t-shirt.
The late 2000’s were turbulent times.
Omnes Omnibus
@Linnaeus: Get off my lawn! Old people suck! My current age is and always will be the perfect age to be (either that or 10).
soonergrunt
@Southern Beale: My Grandmother, who was in her teens at the beginning of the Great Depression hoarded all sorts of stuff her entire life. After she died, we were going through her stuff. We found six sets of cooking pans, two of which had never been used.
OzoneR
@cat48:
Obama is too liberal and that he won shows he had to abandoned the stuff he campaign on because he won states Bush won.
Seriously where were you on Election Night?
DFH no.6
@Fucen Pneumatic Fuck Wrench Tarmal:
Yeah, I gotta go along with Raven and call bullshit on this, having grown up in the 60s myself and all.
At least half the people in my general age group who I went to school with in the 60s and 70s, for instance, were fairly conservative even in high school and college.
Boomers really were (and are) a politically-divided demographic.
Sure, some of them “switched sides” in the intervening years (I have a brother-in-law exactly my age who I went to HS with who was all “peace/love/anti-Vietnam War/looked like Art Garfunkel” in those years who is a raging, Randian, racist, fascist nutcase now).
And no doubt many people know someone who had been, say, pro-Nixon in the day, but who is now on the side of light and truth.
But, just as most Boomers who were conservative when they were younger are likely still conservative today, most Boomers who were liberally-minded as young people are not Teahdists today.
I am absolutely surrounded and inundated by teabaggers at work and in my neighborhood here in Joe Arpaio County. Not only are they not all Boomers or older (at least half of them are Gen X) almost all the Boomer teabaggers I know were never liberal at all.
David Horowitz is an outlier, not an avatar.
Southern Beale
@soonergrunt:
We grew up reusing Baggies. Seriously. My mom would save them and rinse them out and dry them and reuse them.
Yeah, we all laughed then. These are skills we need in the New Great Depression.
Southern Beale
It used to be a piece of conventioinal wisdom that you got more conservative as you got older, and seeing all the Teanuts in their Hoverounds it’s hard to dispute that BUT I know plenty of 60 and 70 year olds who are bigger DFH’s than I am.
So you just never know.
DFH no.6
@Fucen Pneumatic Fuck Wrench Tarmal:
Go fuck yourself.
You’re as fucking bigoted as any racist I’ve known (and I’ve known many).
Your view of history, and of an entire generational cohort of people, is as twisted as anything the fascists dream up.
You speak of “myths”. Goddamn, you should know – your mythologizing here is grade-A.
Again, seriously, fuck yourself, asshole.
OzoneR
@DFH no.6:
in a way, he’s right. Younger voters were much more Republican and conservative at the time, they were far more supportive of Vietnam.
But it’s true that 18, 19, 20 years old were not. I’m talking those from about 25-45. The youngest and the oldest, most of whom came of age during the Great Depression, were the left coalition in the 1960s. We lost the oldest because of Civil Rights.
Now that 25-45 age bracket are today’s senior citizens….the tea partiers
Samara Morgan
yes, when the demographic timer goes off.
next question?
Omnes Omnibus
@Samara Morgan: You realize that the hippies of the 1960s thought that they would be that change. Don’t put too much faith in your demographic timer. And read some history.
Linda Featheringill
@DFH no.6: #119
liberals and conservatives as they age:
I really don’t remember names and titles but:
In our last book club, the author of the book referred us to a study that tracked down political opinions after a few decades had passed. This study found that most of the liberals from the 1960s and 1970s [the hippies] were still liberal in the 21st century.
DFH no.6
@OzoneR:
Nah, Fucen Fuckhead is completely, wildly off-base in his bigoted bullshit.
“…the religious whackos, the teahadists, most of the 27%, they are the 60s liberals” is utter horseshit.
Shouldn’t even pass the smell-test for anyone with half a brain.
A weird hatred for Boomers has this poor bastard all fucked up.
Like I said, this asshole’s description of history is as twisted and wrong as anything the fascist racists on the right invent.
Thymezone
@agrippa:
Yeah, I am afraid that post #100 pretty much puts the lie to this assertion. The only place you can still listen to Civil War participants is on True Blood but we are still fighting that war.
Omnes Omnibus
@Linda Featheringill: Anecdata: My parents, born in ’41 and ’43 and thus pre-boomer, were ’60s liberals who were on the edges of the early hippie “movement” and they have certainly not moved one iota to the right.
Omnes Omnibus
@Thymezone: You mean the English Civil War, right? We still haven’t worked out many of those issues.
opie jeanne
@Linnaeus: Thank you. I’m only 61 and in no mood to be told to just die already.
OzoneR
@Omnes Omnibus: I know of the opposite. I know of 60s hippies who are tea partiers now.
My dad’s best friend worked on McGovern’s campaign, he’s a right wing loony tune.
9/11 moved him.
eemom
@Omnes Omnibus:
hmm. I was born in ’62 and I thought Gen X was like, waaaay after that.
Thymezone
@Omnes Omnibus:
Well, you haven’t.
Omnes Omnibus
@OzoneR: My guess is that some people were “of the left” in the 60s because it was fashionable. Others were on the left because of beliefs. My guess is that one can tell who was who by looking at current views.
Omnes Omnibus
@Thymezone: Excuse me?
DFH no.6
@Southern Beale:
Since I’ve decided to be the self-designated Boomer defender here, let me puncture another myth, if I may:
Those prototypical teabaggers in their Medicare-provided Hoveround scooters? The ones so skillfully-skewered by Matt Taibbi in that Rolling Stone article?
They aren’t fucking Baby Boomers. They’re older than that.
The very oldest Boomers are just now – just this year – eligible for Medicare.
Almost all of us are still slaving away at our meaningless jobs, hogging them all up in fact, undeservedly getting all the good pay and keeping the younger generations from being promoted. Being on the gov’t dole, and getting around on gov’t provided scooters, is some years off yet.
As some here apparently wish, we can’t die soon enough, I guess.
And if you think my point here is that it’s not Boomers who are the problem – no, it’s those even older farts, yeah, all those retired fuckers, fucking greedy old bastards – then you aren’t paying attention to what I’m saying and think, wrongly, I’m as bigoted an ageist as Fucen Fuckwit.
SiubhanDuinne
@giltay:
I’m so glad you posted that! The article’s author, Arthur Milnes, is a friend of mine, and he and I were both involved earlier this year in a celebration of Carter and Canada.
Thymezone
@Omnes Omnibus:
Uh, it was a yolk. Maybe I incorrectly calculated that your reference to the clash between Parliament and kings was tongue in cheek. I thought we sort of made the king deal moot with that revolution thingy over here, and all. But hey, I am just a Lancaster, what do I know?
Omnes Omnibus
@Thymezone: Interesting… I am a Yorkist. So there.
SiubhanDuinne
@Raven (formerly stuckinred):
That’s interesting. I was HS class of 1960 and have become increasingly liberal-progressive-lefty with every year that passes. My cousin and three younger siblings were in HS classes of ’63, ’64 and ’65 and they are all quite conservative and getting more so each year.
(I think my sister voted for Obama, but she is by no stretch of the imagination a Democrat.)
Thymezone
@Omnes Omnibus:
War!
Jenny
When the Boomer die off.
Really, that was it is, a Boomer thing.
Gen X and the Millennium generation could care less about the Beatles and Hard Hats. But Boomer have always been catered to, and it will only get worse (politically) as they enter Senior-Hood, as they will make them the largest and most frequent voting bloc.
SiubhanDuinne
@Southern Beale:
After my father died I came upon a cupboard that contained a hu dred or more of those little squat glass jars that pimientos come in.
I always knew my dad loved pimentos. I never knew why he hoarded the little glass jars.
SiubhanDuinne
@Southern Beale:
::waves madly:: I’m one of them!
Omnes Omnibus
@Thymezone: Well, obviously.
LanceThruster
o 9/11 may turn out to save the Republic itself. There’s a possibility that a new respect for empiricism may emerge. A famous gentleman who shall remain nameless wrote a brilliant piece on propaganda. He noted it should be aimed at the masses (the Joe 6-pack of his day) because there’s not a high enough % of braniacs to focus on (he called them intellectuals and academics). Morons and blockheads are responsible for the mess we’re in, and it’s going to be us dum-dums that help get us back on track. You want to beat a bunch of unscrupulous idiots, you got to think like an unscrupulous idiot…but maintain your scruples.
To those crafting an argument for anything that seems lacking in common sense by cloaking it in complexity meant to obfuscate rather than illuminate, say “Explain it to me like I’m an idiot”
The forever remembered battle cry of 9/11 FOR ALL OF US, should be the same, for everyone, everywhere, at all times, with all things.
Just give me some truth. All I want is the truth.
Because ask yourself, and I hope your answer would be the same in all cases, in situations where accurate information is the basis for rational decisions (cheating spouse, financial investment, integrity of associate, friend or political leader, etc.)…
Would you rather have the facts, no matter how painful, no matter how great the potential shift of what you perceived as reality, or are there areas where soothing falsehoods could be argued as preferable?
I’d love to see a debate of dueling experts arguing whose soothing falsehoods are justifiable because I’d cut that thing short and ask,
“What are you, an idiot?” because I’m just some guy and not an expert and even I can see that.
SiubhanDuinne
@Omnes Omnibus:
Your parents are exactly my cohort (I was born in ’42) and despite being raised in a pretty conservative family, I get more libprog every year.
Emma
@Thymezone: how much money have you raised? because this group puts its cash where its mouth is regularly. Several here are actual, feet-on-the-ground campaigners. Many write their congressmen and senators on a regular basis.
What have you done? What have your planned?
Betsy
I intend to do everything I can to prove that Elizabeth Warren is most definitely not too liberal for Massachusetts.
DaddyJ
I think it is important to point out to folks who didn’t live through the 60s, and perhaps some who did, that the actual number of hippies was very small, probably far less than today’s Tea Party/27 Percenters. I remember watching Mort Sahl on the Carson show take an index card and a paper punch, punch out five or six paper dots onto the studio floor and then tell the audience: “That’s how many hippies there are in America, folks.” I think he was probably right.
But the idea of hippiness sure got under the culture’s skin, didn’t it?
Jenny
Doug,
You didn’t think the Village wouldn’t fight back, digya?
You didn’t think the Village would just be “objective”, digya?
You didn’t think the Village would take our side, digya?
You did!? – That’s so cute!
OzoneR
@DaddyJ: Well the election results at the time sure proved that point. What did George McGovern get, 39% of the vote?
Corner Stone
@Emma: Sheeit, that dude’s been working the D since Lincoln was giving his speeches.
DaddyJ
@OzoneR: You’re asserting that everybody who voted for McGovern was a hippy? That would be a wrong assertion.
Jenny
After reading the WaPo article I have to say this isn’t about the 60s, or Boomers, or culture wars.
It’s about WaPo’s corporate/Village/establishment/elite/rich/masters of the universe editors or owners ordering one of it’s reporters (Rachel Weiner) to do a hatchet job on Warren.
It’s about some greedy Galtians angry with Warren’s middle class populism.
I’ve seen the movie before, in 2003, when the Village (WaPo in particular) savaged Howard Dean.
Buckle up, the media is gonna strafe Elizabeth Warren day and night.
PanurgeATL
@Jenny:
No, I think GenX cares VERY VERY MUCH about Boomers. If it weren’t for having Boomers there to complain about, GenX wouldn’t know what to do with itself. GenX are the hard-hats’ best friends, because they made hippie-bashing cool as well as What You Do If You Know What’s Good For You.
PanurgeATL
@DFH no.6:
I somehow can’t think Boomers can somehow be blamed that they keep working at jobs they need to, you know, eat. What are they supposed to do? Will GenX ever “get out of the way”? (Considering the hold punk has on Western popular culture even now, I think we know the answer to that.)
Jenny
I just looked up Rachel Weiner (the person who did the hatchet job on E Warren). She started blogging at WaPo a year and a half ago after blogging for Arianna and before that Talking Points Memo.
Now how could a nice young Jewish girl from New York (of all places) who recently worked at HuffPo and TPM criticized anyone for being “liberal”…. unless being ordered to.
PanurgeATL
@DaddyJ:
The point was that they were all young. They were going to be an integral part of the shape of THE FUTURE. But something happened between ’75 and ’80 (which would make a book in itself–Rick Perlstein’s probably working on it right now), and here we are.
Jenny
@PanurgeATL: I was wrong. I posted that comment before reading the linked post.
edit: WaPo’s hatchet job wasn’t about Boomers or the 60s. I apologize.
It was about WaPo’s Galtian editors/advertisers ordering a young reporter to savage Warren.
This is the start of the corporate media “Gore-ing” of Elizabeth Warren.
PanurgeATL
@joeyess:
It may look like that, considering who has power today. But of course the conservatives (in the larger sense, which includes many liberals) and not the hippies would wind up gaining the power. Why would those in power hand it to hippies when the time came to do so? After all, lack of power is a kind of invisibility; just because people don’t have power that doesn’t mean they aren’t out there. And post-’60s liberals just keep actively running away from constructing a narrative that works in their favor–apparently some need to look mature and realistic and Not Like Hippies or something…
PanurgeATL
@Fucen Pneumatic Fuck Wrench Tarmal:
That’s because you don’t know what fashion really is. Most of the GenX value system is fashion, too–GenX didn’t have to abandon it because what they are doesn’t come nearly as much into conflict with the Establishment as what hippies are does. Why would the Establishment have a problem with a generation whose prime attribute is hippie-bashing?
OzoneR
@DaddyJ:
no, just that every hippy voted for McGovern.
Thymezone
@Emma:
Pm me at [email protected] and I will fill you in.
Not here.
thx,
TZ
DaddyJ
@OzoneR:
Maybe, of those hippies who voted. But many hippies had a “voting is buying into the system” proto-anarchist bent. Now some of those hippies turning to the Tea Party in later life…that I can see.
El Cid
@James E. Powell:
That’s an odd standard — if protests did not end the US war against Indochina, it had no role worth mentioning.
Second, once again I like the emphasis on the anti-war protesters’ role in electing Nixon — after all, if it sounds like that’s how it was argued Nixonland, that’s how it happened. The events and contexts driving the Democratic Party apart were quite larger than anti-war protesters, not least of which included (besides the grand movement of the Democrats of the right wing South) the lack of faith any more among Democrats that the leader who massively escalated the war would be trusted to end it.
Good lord, it’s not like the US public dissociated war protesters from all sorts of other new protests and cultural and ethnic revolt. Nor can liberal hippie protests be blamed for the massive weakening of electoral support for Democrats (including weakness of turnout) among the African American community, whose youth were being slaughtered in the war and whose representatives were being barred from Democratic Party activities. It’s not like it took a bunch of hippies to point this out to them.
Nor was it as if the wider black community only responded to MLK’s (and other black political and activist leaders’) fierce denunciation of the war and its effects on the black community in ways which retrospectively we’d like to imagine would have been in the public, disciplined long-term struggle fashion of the CR movement. Disheartening and feelings of being let down on this issue weren’t conditional upon our retrospective conclusion that the black community was a bloc ready to fulfill our liberal ideals of how an MLK-led anti-Indochina war black movement would have been.
The escalation of LBJ’s bombardment of rural Cambodia against faked allegations of Communist weapons movements to astoundingly genocidal levels was not exactly the sort of thing subject to public debate.
Nixon in large part ran on the claim he would end the war — and his policy of “Vietnamization” was a version of undercutting more widespread opposition to the US’ role in the war, because in his view when fewer US troops were there, the US population would give far less of a shit.
Nixon was extremely alarmed by the various sources of dissent under his regime. He mobilized a much more intense covert attack on all levels of political and cultural dissent, and was repeatedly quoted as being paranoid about the threat represented by, say, blacks agitating for political power. COINTELPRO wasn’t a policy Nixon spontaneously fell into by accident, nor was it some personal crusade unsupported by a repressive establishment.
Protests haven’t ended any US war, but the weird retrospective distaste for those students and others who protested given an entire political establishment which didn’t seem to give too much of a shit for the longest time about a war killing millions of Indochinese and tens of thousands of Americans is pretty impressive. What do people do, wish for a non-existent fantasy movement to arise to copy the CR movement, when no such thing existed any more, and conclude that people should have just always chosen grassroots work to elect more Democrats?
This isn’t an endorsement of any particular strategy nor a misrecognition of the conflicts and often dismissiveness of protesting students toward the wider American public — who also faced harsh and brute prejudice themselves by that wider white working class public for diverging from rigid cultural standards — or an over-estimation of that group’s role in ending the wars, but a frustration with the smug dismissals here, the same dumb overgeneralizations as blaming the single factor of the anti-war movements as making Humphrey lose and thus bringing in Nixon.
I can wish all sorts of things about how large groups of people ‘should’ have reacted and acted in the 1960s, or ’70s, or whenever, and not just liberal protesters — it’s not like they were the only group who existed who possessed agency and the responsibility to determine the political impact of their actions. It doesn’t mean that this is some sort of intelligent historical or sociological or political research model.
Elias Isquith
If you follow Cillizza on Twitter you find—and he’s a good representative of his entire class—that these people are simply shallow, mediocre, and dull. It’s not even an intentional bias against liberalism, they’re just doing what they think everyone does.