In light of the fact that SDS and the Berkeley Free Speech movement catapulted Ronald Reagan into the governorship of California, and later into the presidency, was it really a success?
Is there something that could have been done differently that wouldn't have provoked such an extreme reaction?
In light of the fact that you said the other day that the various Bantustans of identity politics now militate against one another within the Democratic party, do you think that the various ethnic studies and women's studies departments are not isolating and creating an internecine political struggle within the left that are increasingly reducing it to impotence?
What do you think should be the goals of the left today? If Michael Harrington's attempt to get the early left of SDS to clearly differentiate itself from the Marxism of the Soviet Union and North Vietnam, and to renounce communism in all its forms was not successful (Tom Hayden among other leaders refused to do this), do you think that SDS would have been better off if it had not been so ardently radical and macho (Shapiro's photo that you put on your blog the other day is extremely macho and threatening, almost guaranteeing a counter-reaction).
Since the right is increasingly able to bring members such as Condi Rice and Colin Powell and Clarence Thomas and others to the top without making any fuss at all about their ethnic identity, is it not possible that they are doing something right, rather than the left attempt to focus so much on demographic criteria?
The move toward the Weather Underground and toward a bombing campaign is still somewhat lyricized in Michael Lally's comment in your blog. Do you think that there was something laudible about taking such extra-legal steps as Michael Ayres and his wife took? Do you think that terrorism can ever be a good thing? Do you think the Weathermen served the left well with its bombing campaign?
What is the role of poetry today in terms of political actions? What should be its strategy in creating political goals that you would support? How would this best be done without slipping into propaganda?
On many campuses today various "Bantustans" are in place in regards to the formation of identity politics. Do you think this is a strategic mistake for the left? Should they concentrate on some kind of conceptual framework that runs in some other direction, instead?
If the Republican party continues to be in step with Locke, should the Democratic party deliberately distance itself from any kind of Marxist identity politics, and focus instead on life, liberty, health, and property, using Locke as their avatar, since that would be more in line with classical liberalism, and more acceptable to the wide majority of Americans?
Just a few tiny questions. (Although I pose them to Ron Silliman, I also ask them of my own commenters and visitors.)
And two more: did you ever go to the national meetings of SDS? I note that there was one in my birthplace of Clear Lake, Iowa in 1966, and another in Pine Hill, NY, about 40 minutes east of where I sit, and which presently has a population of about 300, including a Pakistani family that runs a fabulous buffet for 12 dollars a head (children under 8 eat for free). Why were the meetings held in such backwaters? Can you explain the strategy behind this?
16 comments:
Dear Lutheran Surrealist,
I cannot even get past your first paragraph.
The free speech movement did NOT catapult Reagan to Sacramento and then to DC.
But before I go any further, I want to read what Silliman wrote. Would you be willing to post a link to the comments you are referring to?
Thank you.
WW
Native Californian
whose family (on both sides) goes back to the 1910's and 20' in California.
WW --
I think you'll find that reaction against the leftists of the SDS stripe is exactly what helped Reagan get elected -- often by insanely high numbers. The "ultra-left" of the post-beatnik, crypto-communist 1960s turned off a great many Democrats who threw their vote to Reagan.
GMP
whose family (on his mother's side) goes back to Florida in the 1800s
WW, on the right side of my blog page you'll see a link to Ron Silliman's blog. Just click it and scroll down to a posting about SDS and May 1968 (the post was meant by Ron to be a toast to the heady month of 40 years back).
You'll see a giant photograph of some protesters illegally occupying the office of a college president, and stealing his cigars to smoke them. Ron apparently still finds this admirable. I think it's just plain wrong, as did many of the voters of the day.
At any rate, my family goes back to the Mayflower on my mother's side, and we are Norwegian-Americans settling in Iowa in about 1880 on my dad's side.
If you look up SDS or Reagan it seems that he actually ran on a platform that promised to "clean up the mess at Berkeley." So in a sense the hippies and weathermen really helped Reagan into national office.
Kirby -- Do you know what the last name of yer Mayflower folks were? Allegedly mine came on that boat, too but the evidence is a bit shaky (unlike the Florida stuff).
:)
M
Ron responded to me in part on his own blog,
"Kirby,
SDS was virtually irrelevant in the Bay Area, its one viable chapter, at SF State, little more than a front for the Progressive Labor Party.
I was in the New American Movement (NAM) in the 1970s until it joined up with Harrington's Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee (DSOC), to form the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), which still exists. I met Harrington through that process as well as through my work with the Socialist Review, where I was the executive editor from 1986 through 1989 & on the West Coast Editorial Collective up to right before my kids were born."
At any rate, I haven't heard of many of these outfits that Ron names. I was never in the far left though tried to read my way through their texts at times (I especially liked ot read anarchists since they attacked socialists and yet still had standing within the left) but was always a Lockean liberal believing in the process of the law, and never willing to go outside of the law.
Some of this may have to do with where I grew up. I grew up largely in eastern Pennsylvania in a fairly small town with small town values. My dad was a Republican who taught phys. ed at the local college, my mom was a Democrat who taught 2nd grade in a small schoolhouse.
They didn't agree on a lot of political issues but it never came between them. My mom wants Hillary to win the nomination. My dad is presumably for McCain.
One place that they nevertheless agree is that they both think that OJ is innocent on all charges of murdering his ex-wife and Goldman.
But we never talked about politics at our house.
And still rarely do.
It's not an emphasis. My dad is focused on sports, as are most of my brothers, and my mom is focused on the arts.
I'll look up Silliman's post, but Reagan was about taxes and money (and not paying for the housing and care of the mentally ill). The SDS is hardly the sole cause, and I would argue the not the major cause, of Reagan's rise.
As far as saying my family goes back a ways in California is to point out that I was there, as were my parents, etc. during the Reagan era.
My father's family can ultimately be traced to the Mayflower as well...through the name Whitaker.
Geee, maybe we're related. :)
hahaha
WW
Y'all:
You have all given me some good things to think about. As to whether someone else's extreme liberalism helped get more conservative folks into office, well, that does ound plausible to me. But I'm still thinking.
I have a very tenuous connection to California at best - my mother and father met there. I personally have never been there. We can, however, trace my mother's side of the family back to 1738 in Virginia and my father's side back to either 1808 or 1794 in North Carolina (my great-great-grandfather's birth-date is disputed, and with not the best records being kept on slaves of African ancestry at that time, we don't know for certain which one it is).
My fiance can trace part of his family back to 1600's Germany, however.
-Nicole
Dear Lutheran Surrealist,
I read Silliman's post and tried to comment, but I think it went into cyberspace.
Anyway, I still say Reagan was only about money.
If memory serves me, tuition at University of California was free, or at least very inexpensive to the student when Reagan was elected Governor. He changed that.
Under Clark Kerr (President of UC), enrollment at UC was +400%, operating costs were +260%, and capital expenditures were +260%. The growth in population in California during the same time period was roughly 40%. And 50% of the UC budget came directly from the State of California, aka the taxpayer.
Although Reagan is credited with firing Kerr (who was also criticized for not cracking down on student protesters), the UC Board of Regents were 14-8 in favor of firing him.
I would agree that Reagan used the free speech movement towards his own end....cut the budget.
But I distinctly recall many in California being outraged at the protests, sit-ins, and burning of effigies for two main reasons...they thought it was anti-patriotic, and they didn't feel they should have to fund those activities. Don't do it on the taxpayer's dime and then call it education.
You're really from Iowa? Maybe we are related....my father's side is from Iowa too.
WW
WW,
I was born in Clear Lake, Iowa on September 16, 1956.
But I lived as a boy many places: two years in Eugene, Oregon, several years in Champagne, Illinois, about 5 years in Warminster, Pennsylvania (a suburb to the north of Philadelphia), in Arlington, Virginia for a couple of years (mid-way into 7th grade), and then in Stroudsburg, PA from 7th through 12th grade. My dad was going from university to university. He ended up as the Dean of Physical Education at East Stroudsburg State College (now East Stroudsburg University) for the last twenty plus years of his career.
My lineage on my mom's side is much better charted than on my dad's side. My mother's family were Bancrofts (linked to the famous 19th century Calvinist historian George Bancroft), and from there back to John Alden, who was a go-between for Miles Standish (?) and Priscilla, and to whom Priscilla famously said, "Speak for yourself, John Alden."
My uncle Tom Wilson did most of the lineage work on that side. Most of the family were either pastors, newspapermen, or farmers, or teachers. The newspapermen and the pastors and the teachers did best. We weren't very successful at farming. I think we've always been readers, and the story is that my grandfather didn't like farming. He collected and read philosophy books when he should have been out farming.
On my father's side not much is known. My father's father died when he was only 2, and my grandmother had been his maid, before he married her. He was part of a large family that lived in the Clear Lake, Iowa area and they tried to cut her out of the will, and so stopped talking to my grandmother after my grandfather died. So we don't know them. She remarried, and I knew my step-grandfather and his family, instead. There is apparently some American Indian in my paternal grandmother's family, but again, no one seemed to care about lineage on that side, so maybe this was just speculation. She mentioned French and Indian and Romanian when I stayed at her house after high school for a couple of nights on my way west with my high school pal Jake Powell.
And the Norwegians succeeded in cutting my grandmother out of the will, I think. My dad was so little he doesn't remember any of it, and isn't at all interested in the past. I asked him once about his childhood and he said, dismissively, "That was in the past." I can't understand this, but he just isn't interested in history at all.
I'd like to find out about what my ancestors did in the Civil War. Most if not all of them were northerners, and maybe there is a journal left somewhere. There is a book called Trace Your civil War Ancestors which I have, but it seems like a lot of time to throw at the topic, and it may have to wait until retirement. I know there were Norwegian-speaking regiments that fought for the north, so perhaps there is some distant relative that did that -- but my understanding is that the Norwegian relatives came relatively late -- 1880s -- in response to some crisis in Norway.
They were mostly Puritans on my mom's side and Lutherans on my dad's side.
Dear Lutheran Surrealist,
Most of my family in Iowa were farmers. So probably no connection there, although I emailed my uncle to get the genealogy just for fun.
I seem to recall that we traced our family back to Susanna White from the Mayflower. And definitely to the Revered Alexander Whitaker, whose claim to fame was converting Pocahontas.
Fun stuff.
WW
Kirby/Skittles:
Interesting stuff.
There were a couple of members of my mother's side of the family who fought in the Civil War - on the Confederate side. I also have a great uncle rumoured to be a Klansman.
This is the same side of the family that also has Cherokee - my mother's mother's mother. Which makes me 1/8 Cherokee. Interestingly enough, I had an aunt who denied that there was any Indian blood in the family. She denied this up until at least my senior year of high school - after that I didn't speak much to her. Yes, Kirby, this is the same notorious aunt I've told you about.
Talk about your contradictions.
And as for my fiance's family, well...that same branch of the family I mentioned in my last post used to be Mennonites, at least in name and tradition. Then they turned into Lutherans after one of the men married a Lutheran. And another man in that same family was "born again" and wanted to be a preacher, but he died before he could finish seminary; but his younger brother goes to Wittenberg U seminary, graduates, gets ordained...and the rest is history.
-Nicole
I was Born in California...and even though I only lived there for a year and a half, and my family has no real connection there except some good friends my parents made...it still means I'm the second-most-California-connected of us all, and therefore have the second-highest-authority with which to discuss Reagan's ascension to power.
I'm also related to someone who signed the declaration of independence, and Lew Wallace (who wrote Ben Hur et al. and dealt with Billy the Kid) and William Wallace, who was awesome, and a big-shot engineer for Ford who led the team that invented an engine that gave us air superiority in WWII and also had a design for a 60-70 mpg car engine that Ford wasn't interested in, and Ray Swanson, who invented a safer dumpster so kids wouldn't get hurt playing on 'em, and a 19th-century alcoholic Lutheran minister who was caught up in some scandal with a member of the church choir and he was either murdered or committed suicide, but no one knows for sure.
And I, I am writer with quixotic aspirations, as well as being the greatest camp counselor the world has ever known!!!
Brett, I suppose you are happy that Obama got in still. Do you want Hillary to be his vice-prez?
What do people think of this?
I'm not extremely enamored of any of the major candidates on this round. I had wanted Giuliani to be the Republican nominee, but he decided to be the hare, while McCain played the tortoise.
McCain won, just as in Aesop's Fable.
I like Sarah Palin for McCain's VP.
She's the present governor of Alaska.
She made a ruling to give gay couples the same rights as married couples in terms of benefits, but is otherwise a conservative. She has a child with Down's Syndrome that she didn't abort even though she knew the child would be born with Down's.
I would like to see her as VP.
I don't think either candidate will be as bad as the other sides claim, but then I don't think the Shrub was anywhere near as bad as anyone said he would be.
I have a faith that all Americans could basically do the job of president. It's not the big deal that it seems to be.
Still, how many of you want Hillary to be the VP?
And does this mean that Bill would now be the Second Lady?
I'm gladdish that Obama officially won the nomination - I was never very anti-Hillary, or very pro-Obama, and in the first place I wanted Bill Richardson (unfortunately, though he's got the experience-set to be president, he's not a very good campaigner).
I've become more pro-Obama as I've begun to recognize that he's more than a vessel for lofty sentiment and identity politics - he knows how to manipulate people, which sounds kinda negative, but in reality is a huge part of being president.
And, of course, I think he wants to manipulate things, generally, in the same direction I'd like to see them manipulated.
I'm ambivalent about Hillary being VP. She's smart and Does know how Washington works and could help 'get stuff done.'
In terms of electability, it goes both ways - she would help with women, the elderly, and hispanics, but she would also excite the Republican base (something which McCain himself is not great at).
Having started out a mildly-interested Bill Richardson fan, I would like to see him get the nod - And the governor from Kansas seems like she might have some of the positives of HIllary without the negatives.
And Bill Clinton being the Second Lady would be awkward - much more awkward than being the first lady. Especially with his recent tendency to go off the hook, he could be a campaign liability...and it is weird to think how the power dynamics would play out with him around in the white house 'wandering around with nothing to do,' as Romney put it.
I still don't really see what anyone can say Bush has done well...From the economy to the war on terror, Iraq didn't go like he said (and planned) it would, Osama's still at large, attention and resources have been diverted from Afghanistan, our standing in the world has diminished, and we've hardly done anything to actually attack the energy problem.
He's done a few good things - I think he increased the size of the peace corps and invested in some good programs to help out Africa and the like - but overall, he's pretty deserving of his approval ratings.
I guess some people think he's kept us safe from Al Qaeda, but more people have died under his watch from terrorist attacks than any other administration...
McCain's an interesting case - he's sold himself as having integrity beyond just following the party line, but now he's reversed his stances on a number of issues to play to the conservative base, so the independents' former love for him is going to dwindle.
I doubt if anything can stop The Obama Nation.
Brett,
Your first comment was very, very funny!
WW
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