Does it all go back to the sixties?
Maybe the generation of the sixties is to blame, with our naīve paeans to peace and love, even more naīve idealizations of people like Fidel and Che, Ho and Mao, the antiwar demonstrations that as I think back on them eerily resembled prep rallies before high school football games, and sophomoric maxims about doing your own thing and not trusting anyone over thirty.
Maybe it is me. Maybe I should have read less science fiction and more Marx. Maybe if I had gotten into Ayn Rand when I was in college, but I made it only a few pages into whichever of the big books I picked up, Atlas Shrugged or The Fountainhead, finding the prose turgid, the arguments ham-fisted, and the ideas facile even to my not terribly sophisticated critical eye.
To be honest I kind of looked down on the business majors, thinking that to major in business was to look at college as a glorified vocational school. One majored in business because one was in school to get a job, not an education. The joke was on me there.
Cool people wore tie-dyed t-shirts and colorfully patched jeans, tossed Frisbees in a haze of marijuana smoke, and dug “Desolation Row,” “Layla,” and “Return of the Grievous Angel” booming from a stereo I could never have afforded on my job in the college library’s order department, which with some scholarship money was how I paid my way. That the difference between these kids and the ones in madras shirts, khaki trousers, and Bass Weejuns sans socks was mostly on the surface seems almost self-evident now, though I would not have thought in those terms then, when I was young and sophomoric and thought I had a clue. It is a safe bet that only here and there among the hip were a few who found consciousness expansion not in drugs but in Parmenides and Plato, Bergman and Fellini, Dostoevsky and Nietzsche, an intellectual tradition I came to embrace, and for all I know there may well have been a kindred few among the business majors too.
Hedonism and narcissism are part of the generational stereotype alongside political activism against the Vietnam war, for racial justice, against environmental degradation, for equal status for women, all that revolt against materialism and hypocrisy. It is considerably more clear now how self-righteousness tends to go hand in glove with the conviction that one occupies the moral high ground. How it all morphed into the embrace of libertarianism and laissez-faire capitalism is subject for a tome I am not prepared to take on. Instead, let’s turn to Michael Tomasky’s recent essay in The New York Review of Books, whose title (The Elections: How Bad for Democrats?) nutshells the situation, although the question could be extrapolated to “How bad for the country?” From Tomasky:
What Democrats have typically not done well since Reagan’s time is connect their policies to their larger beliefs. In fact they have usually tried to hide those beliefs, or change the conversation when the subject arose. The result has been that for many years Republicans have been able to present their philosophy as somehow truly “American,” while attacking the Democratic belief system as contrary to American values. “Putting us on the road to European-style socialism,” for example, is a rhetorical line of attack that long predates Obama’s ascendance—it was employed against the Clintons’ health care plan as well.
But now consider the specific problems facing Obama, a mixed-race (but visibly black) man with an exotic name and a highly atypical biography for a president. Add in also the greatest economic crisis in eight decades, and governmental responses to that crisis that, to an energized and organized right wing, seem to smack of socialism. One result is that we have a new faction, the well-financed Tea Party movement that has been able to arrogate to itself practically every symbol of Americanism and to paint the President, his ideas and policies, and his supporters as not merely un-American but actively anti-American. In a Newsweek poll released in late August, nearly a third of Americans actually agreed that it was “definitely” or “probably” true that Obama “sympathizes with the goals of Islamic fundamentalists who want to impose Islamic law around the world.”
In the face of all this, it seems not to have occurred to a single prominent Democrat, from Obama on down, to say something like: We love our country every bit as much as they do, and we believe patriotism means expanding access to health care, protecting the environment, and imposing effective new rules on Wall Streets. Democrats have thus crippled themselves by adapting comparatively limited ideas of legitimate political action, and by ceding to Republicans the strong claim of love of one’s country.
The approach Tomasky proposes is reasonable, although it seems doubtful that any argument could pierce the veil of ignorance blissfully donned by those who buy that the centrist, pragmatic Obama is a socialist, much less the sheer nuttiness of the belief that he sympathizes with the goals of Islamic fundamentalists. Even so, I would like to see Obama and the Democrats make a case something along the lines of that suggested by Tomasky. It could hardly be less convincing or effective than the lame campaign rhetoric employed to date almost across the Democratic board.
postscript
Does the ascendence of libertarianism and laissez-faire capitalism represent a 21st-century counterrevolution against 20th-century progressivism, however partially realized progressive ideology may have been in practice? Or are libertarianism and laissez-faire rather logical extensions of certain tendencies of the sixties, suspicion and mistrust of authority, the kind of anti-intellectualism that gave birth to New Age goofiness, and even the hedonism and narcissism for which today’s rightwingers assail the generation of the sixties?
David :: Oct.17.2010 :: House Red: Politics & Current Affairs :: 3 Comments »