Are we in denial about the wounds of the 60's?
Fri Apr 25, 2008 at 05:59:08 PM PDT
Harold Meyerson touches a sore nerve in his column Back to The '60s in yesterday's WaPO. Here I am, 72 years old, and wondering why so many people over 60 rejected Senator Obama's appeal in the Pennsylvania primary. To me the choice has become clear if we are to truly take a chance on change rather than vote for the same ol' same ol' establishment stuff again. Mr. Meyerson seems to be thinking along the same lines. Many of you were either very young or not yet born when the 60's we so often hark back to actually happened. Believe it or not we can learn something from that very different time in American history. Look below the fold to see why I say that.
Meyerson starts his column with these words:
Throughout American history, the Democratic Party has had one unhappy distinction: It has been home to more of the major fault lines dividing the United States than any other institution.
The Jacksonian Democrats of the early 19th century split into sectional branches over their inability to resolve their differences on slavery. (Abraham Lincoln was elected in 1860 because he faced three regional Democratic opponents in that year's election.) In the 1920s, the Protestant-Catholic divide turned the party into two rival camps: Catholic-dominated urban political machines and the white Protestant South. And by the late 1960s, the New Deal coalition had been torn asunder by the party's embrace of civil rights and the fight over the war in Vietnam.
The fault lines of the '60s persisted for decades, not least because the linchpin of Republican electoral strategy since 1968 has been to paint the Democrats as peaceniks of questionable patriotism and as cultural elitists indifferent if not hostile to the white working class. The divisions also resurfaced in the party's own presidential primaries, where candidates staked out their turf either on the side of such working-class concerns as protecting industry or expanding health care (as did Walter Mondale, Dick Gephardt and Tom Harkin) or on the side of the foreign policy and environmental concerns presumably more dear to the party's upscale professionals (as did Gary Hart, Paul Tsongas and Bill Bradley).
It was a Democrat about whom we chanted:
Hey!
Hey!
LBJ
How many kids did you kill today?
Even though the war ended up in the slimy hands of "Tricky Dick", the Democratic party had suffered deply as did the left as a whole over that war and the Six Day War in the Middle East.
I was naive enough to believe that the country as a whole had gotten over the deep divisions and ugly sores that were caused by that imperialist excursion of our National leaders. The Kerry defeat in 2004 showed me just how raw those sores still are. I guess I had been in denial for some time, living a relatively normal life compared to the traumatic and frantic life activists lived in that period. Deep as the divisions were then, they still seem more "honest" than what we are confronted with now. What the right has accomplished since then seems unbelievable except that I taste its bitter bile every day.
Meyerson's take is a bit different:
And as 2008 loomed, Democrats had every reason to think that this year's contest would be smoother yet. The multiple disasters of the Bush presidency had unified the Democrats around a more populist, activist economics at home and a more prudential, multilateral foreign policy abroad.
Programmatically, that unity is still there.
Here, where I live, the rural community that is rapidly becoming a rather mutant suburb is not reflective of that unity. Those of us who are progressives still tread lightly because not too many years ago democrats of any stripe were afraid to come out of the closet in places like this. This observation by Meyerson is no news to me living here:
But as the party staggers away from the Pennsylvania primary, it finds itself stuck inside some time machine that is dragging it back toward the divisions of the 1960s. Hillary Clinton's attacks on Barack Obama -- chiefly, that he's not going to be strong on national defense -- echo the accusations that Scoop Jackson and his followers leveled at the antiwar candidates of the '60s and '70s. Though the divisions between Clinton and Obama on foreign policy are small, Clinton's attacks are part of a larger assault on Obama's trustworthiness that she and the Republicans are both waging and that is designed to position Obama on the side of the elitist insurgents of the '60s. The newly suspect Obama had an angry old black pastor, doesn't wear a flag pin and served on a board with a onetime Weatherman.
We've heard all this before, of course, this Sixties-ization of Democrats: Bill Clinton opposed the Vietnam War and got out of the draft. John Kerry, according to people who made a career of vilifying him, didn't deserve his Vietnam medals and then had the temerity to oppose that war, too.
As I watched the county by county map of Pennsylvania Tuesday night, I could not help but feel I was right back there in the 60's wishing that this sick (thank you Reverend Wright!) country would grow up and act like a mature being rather than an adolescent looking for someone to dump on. County by county reflected the same racial tensions and the same distorted notion of patriotism that we faced in the '60s. How much has really changed?
Meyerson ends on a note of hope:
The Republican strategy for this year, which Clinton is abetting, is simply to keep the Democrats polarized, in the hope that white working- and middle-class voters will feel estranged from Obama (still the likely nominee) on the grounds of culture and race, and therefore vote for John McCain. The Democratic strategy is to remind voters that there actually are major issues in this election -- the war, the economic marginalization of the middle class, the declining power of the American economy -- on which Obama's positions make a lot more sense than McCain's. Democrats overcome their civil wars when the economy permits them to. This year, it just might.
A rather weak note of hope, I'd say. Maybe it is because where Meyerson is the same undercurrent of tension that has survived the lull after the '60s is as apparent as it is here. I have hope. We have changed this community and the Commonwealth of Virginia has been making progress. We have a lot of healing to do before I'll relax. Lot's of work ahead. Young people, you need to look at where this all comes from. One good source is the period of turmoil some of us old codgers lived through back then. Listen to me! When, at the age of 30 I was the leader of an umbrella anti-war/civil rights coalition that encompassed the greater Buffalo, N.Y. area, we looked at some of the old timers and called them "the walking wounded" I was too young and fiesty to ever think I'd be in that position myself. I have mixed feelings about the fact that this mess will be yours and I'll not be here. Good luck!
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