Map of life expectancy at birth from Global Education Project.

Monday, October 24, 2016

The 60s


The death of Tom Hayden is a timely reminder of a previous turbulent time in our history. I was a teenager, and I just missed the Vietnam draft. (I turned 18 in the last year of the draft and had a high lottery number.) To me, and in my circle of friends and acquaintances, it as just normal and natural to view the U.S. as war in Vietnam as a crime against humanity, to see the government as largely an agent of plutocrats, the society as fundamentally racist, and capitalism as fundamentally exploitive.

I haven't really changed those views, but of course I'm more jaded now. The revolution never came, though we did make some progress. The 1960s left was male dominated and took patriarchy for granted; women were largely placed in a subservient role. As Hayden's obituary notes, he was part of the problem, and he eventually got slammed for it as feminism rose up within the left. Nowadays we see gender equality -- and gender equality going beyond the binary male/female categories we took for granted -- as being essential to progressivism.

George W. Bush got his illegal war of aggression but there was much more resistance early on than there had been to the Vietnam atrocity. We learned the hard lesson that the widespread resistance to the Vietnam war that eventually emerged was driven in considerable part by the draft that threatened middle class white kids. With no draft, the Iraq war, while controversial and ultimately repudiated by most responsible commentators and the public, generated far less passionate dissent.

Women and gender minorities have come a long way since the '60s, we did get Medicare and Medicaid, but the plutocrats still rule. In fact inequality has only increased. Racism is less socially respectable but I'd be hard pressed to say there is a whole lot less of it. The military-industrial complex is as entrenched as ever and we can't say the national surveillance state is less intrusive than it was in the days of J. Edgar Hoover. And what progress we've made on environmental protection faces continual rearguard action and we're pretty much neglecting the existential crisis of civilization facing humanity.

An extremist ideology has taken over one of the two major parties and managed to insert some false premises into the conventional wisdom, particularly that the national debt is an urgent problem and we need to cut entitlement spending, threatening the gains of the New Deal and Great Society. (Viz. Krugzilla.) Voter rights are under assault once again. I'm not sure whether Hayden looked back on his lifetime of advocacy with some small degree of satisfaction or if he felt essential despair. My own feeling is that progressive ideals generally have wider currency but do not have proportionate political effectiveness. I wouldn't say we've gone backwards but we're climbing the ratchet of progress very slowly.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Thank you for writing this. My views haven't changed much since the 1960s. My family was pro-civil rights and anti-war. My older brother got a student deferment, and my twin brother got a nice high number during the draft lottery. I remember driving back from Washington DC after a large rally protesting the murders at Kent State. I saw people tossing frisbees and goofing off, and I thought to myself... the movement is over. I agree with you that progressive ideals generally have wider currency, but not much political effectiveness. The very rich have won, and everything we see is an effort to maintain that power in the hands of those who have it. The planet is suffering our over-population and rapacious hunger for more of everything. And that ain't gonna change.

Cervantes said...

I'm a bit less cynical. I think wider currency can eventually translate into public policy. We're suffering a cultural backlash right now but that may blind us to the longer term trend.

roger said...

even if the longer term trend is toward better public policy, a financial disaster and/or a major disaster due to accelerated climate change may well happen sooner than any policy change can take effect. i do try to stay on the pessimistic side of cynicism.