CIVIL RIGHTS WRONGS

Richard Thompson Ford offers some interesting, if painfully cautious, thoughts.

The gist of it is that “if we really want to fix inequality, it’s time for a new approach”.

So you can see why he’s painfully careful, picking his way like a rider taking a horse along a narrow, cliff-cut road that’s only a few feet wide and has a 500-foot drop on the other side. While acknowledging that racial inequality still exists, he thinks We need to move beyond the old civil-rights approach: “We should be more circumspect in blaming racism, and hidden racists, for problems with more subtle causes”.

From his lips to God’s ear.

But you can’t get a big mass-movement started, you can’t get a whole bunch of people interested, by discussing subtle causes and nuances and assorted complicated dynamics. For a mass-movement that’s going to provide some political clout and punch, you need big, simple, cartoon-quality images and ‘symbols’. Whether or not they really exist, well … refined sensibilities don’t get a lot done in this world, do they?

Fifty and more years ago, Ford rightly notes, there were such clear and vivid realities: the Southrons, in a previous incarnation as out-and-out racists, displayed for the cameras and the world the ugly underside of the American experience. Putting an end to such vivid and overt race-based violence was a good thing for the government to do.

Putting an end to ‘racial inequality’, and even more to ‘racism’, however … now that was a much taller order. And much more complicated. You couldn’t just send in a super-posse of US Marshals and the 101st Airborne to put an end to that sort of thing. The government was going to have to get into people’s minds and hearts, into their thoughts and feelings, and that was going to mean taking government to a whole new level.*

Ford goes on immediately to say that We “must be more ambitious in directly confronting the decline of inner city neighborhoods”. Well, OK. But it’s been forty Biblical years that We’ve been having this problem on the front burner and if it just keeps getting worse, then “ambitious” just barely reaches the urgency with which such a ‘confronting’ needs to be carried out.

Worse, when it started there were not only a larger number of stable black families, but the whole national ethos was supportive of the ‘family’, and of the matrix of habits, mind-sets, heart-sets, and even virtues that grounded the family commitment and the participation of the family in the wider society. All that’s gone now, and it was the following ‘civil rights revolution’ – gender feminism’s revolution against ‘patriarchy’, marriage, ‘males’ generally, and even ‘heterosexuality’ – that both invited the government into even more adventurous forays into the minds and hearts and hearths of the citizenry and also ‘deconstructed’ the entire matrix, the entire ethos, that supported a stable, involved citizenry. Oy.

Much of the ‘decline of inner cities’ now has to be ascribed to fatherless families, single-parent mothers (often very young themselves) who have been ‘liberated’ into desperately needing a job (or at least a paycheck).

“Ambitious”, to repeat, hardly reaches the level of urgency in all this. A mental ‘drive’ through the American ethos now will resemble nothing so much as Allied troops driving their jeeps through the rubble-strewn passageways between the rubble-piles that once had been German streets and cities. Did We not notice?

He impressively tackles what has developed now in terms of criminal justice and imprisonment: criminal law and imprisonment is seen, it would appear, as “a new Jim Crow”. That sounds a bit too much as if some folks are now thinking that ‘racism’ has retrenched and taken a new form, as an arbitrarily erected and enforced effort to discriminate racially.

But Ford acknowledges that as great as the racial disparities are in the numbers of whites and blacks incarcerated, “they can’t be blamed on the kind of deliberate bigotry that once fueled Jim Crow laws”. He’s right.

“Instead”, he continues, “they are the largely the result of the lack of opportunities for lawful employment”.

Well, that’s certainly part of it. But why, after these forty Biblical years and dozens if not hundreds of billions of dollars, is there such a lack of opportunity? His characterization is one that has been around as a standard ‘explanation’ for decades.

Of course, the changing international economic situation didn’t help – the abandonment of the ‘Detroit Consensus’ and the embrace of ‘creatively destructive’ neoliberalism.

In fact, it is one of the cruel ironies of American history that the Civil Rights movement succeeded in establishing itself in 1965 (with the passage of the Voting Rights Act), just as America’s postwar economic supremacy was coming to an end. And then within a few years, feminism, especially in its ‘revolutionary’ gender-feminist variant, launched an all-out sustained assault on the fundaments of American society and culture – precisely the job-providing society and culture that the Civil Rights movement was hoping to open up to blacks.

How did We miss that? Historians of this era will rightly believe that such complex oppositions should have been as clear as a bell to Us.

Nor can it be ignored, though Ford doesn’t raise it, that the Civil Rights era and movement was comprised of two verrrry different phases: the conventionally envisioned ‘Southern’ phase, symbolized by Martin Luther King’s nonviolence and his call for all Americans to unite in a rebirth of national integrity and virtue, and then the politely un-imagined ‘revolutionary’ phase of post’65, with the Black Power agitation, the black demand for racial separatism, and the assault on – if not rejection of – American values. (Before the gender-feminists went and 'deconstructed' them.)

Interestingly, when Ford reaches for positive civil rights imagery in his concluding paragraphs, he only mentions the Freedom Rides and the Montgomery Bus Boycott, both elements of the golden first phase.

The “civil rights focus on bigotry is attractive, even when it’s a poor fit [as an answer to the question and a solution to the problem] because it seems to offer a shortcut to consensus”. Just so. Nor can it be ignored that finding ‘bigotry’ behind every tree, and in every heart, opened up a new arena of paranoia, now racially based, that surpassed the destructive anti-communist paranoia of the late’teens and the 1950s. (And now layer over all that the gender-feminist sexual paranoia, wherein every act of relationship was either ‘harassment’ or ‘rape’ and every male was certifiably a potential rapist waiting to pounce … it is a frakking wonder the country hadn’t imploded by 2000).

But, as Ford indicates, it was easy to swathe everything in the golden cloak of that truly marvelous and awesomely impressive first-phase of the Civil Rights Movement, with genuine and clear good folks, equally vivid bad folks, and even some real heroes. And even the government came off looking good toward the end. For quite a few years, Americans heard ‘civil rights movement’ and simply figured ‘OK, it must be good then’.

But when that ‘wore off’, it was far too simplistic and inaccurate to write off skepticism and hesitation as nothing but willful and ornery ‘backlash’. After 1965 things got hugely more complex, there were numerous variables in a constantly dynamic and shifting national situation, and much of what the government (in the Dems’ desperate bid for ‘black loyalty’ at the polls, and then the Nixonian Republicans’ rival bid for it) was fixing to do would have given any sane drinker pause.

But ‘revolutions’ and careful calculation of consequences don’t blend well. And neither do glorious ‘rescues’- quick, successful, and with no bad consequences – which is the pose that the government was hoping to strike. **

So now ‘racism’ is no longer the only, nor even the main, problem. Nor is the natural hesitation any group of humans would feel toward major change any longer the main problem. After four decades of government action on an unprecedented scale, and unremitting indications that things are not getting better, there is more than enough legitimate doubt, uncertainty, and just plain tire-kicking skepticism among the citizenry.

Nor, as I say in the first Note below, is it a wise solution to simply replace the citizenry with folks who don’t recall any time when the government was held to some standard of efficacy in its actions, and thereby ‘erase the history’. This is a uniquely American variant on Stalin’s old scam of simply uprooting entire populations and moving them to the farthest reaches of the Russian landmass, where their ‘memories’ and obstructions would no longer trouble his ‘visions’ and plans.

Nor is it wise to ‘airbrush’ the history books, which is a tactic far more widely spread today than is often noticed, thus ‘erasing the history’ by keeping the young ignorant.

Ford has courageously raised a complicated set of questions. It remains to be seen whether We have reached that point, described by one Roman historian, where “we can tolerate neither the disease nor the remedy”.

Interesting times indeed.

NOTES

*Of course the other prong of that operation was to have government re-introduce race-discrimination, but ‘for a good cause’, in the form of ‘affirmative action’. Which promptly went and threw ‘equality before the law’ into a state of imbalance from which it has never recovered. Even more insidiously, or ‘subtly’, it threw out any confidence that the citizenry were each and all ‘equal before the government’, a not quite Constitutional principle the absence of which has had profound effects on Our politics. And one of the more insidious solutions to that problem has been to increase the number of citizens and voters who either don’t remember a time when there was such a confidence among the general body of the citizenry, or have never had an experience of a government where such a confidence would even be conceivable; if you can’t fix what has been broken, fill the room with folks who never knew the machine when it worked properly.

**Although with the exception of the 19th century fireman-into-the-burning-building type of rescue, most professional rescue-scene commanders have trained and equipped themselves to take careful stock in planning rescue operations, on the acute presumption that a hasty rescue attempt could most likely cause more harm than good.

WHEN DID IT GO WRONG?

Clay Risen has a new book out, “A Nation on Fire: America in the Wake of the King Assassination”; it is reviewed in ‘The Boston Globe’ by Daniel Akst on January 18th, 2009.

It’s an interesting take on things, dealing with “the pernicious long-lasting consequences of the riots that followed MLK’s murder”.

Well, certainly yes and yet no.

Dr. King’s murder was an abomination. I still can’t stop thinking that J. Edgar Hoover had something to do with it; if nothing else, there would be no thorough investigation. (If so, that same dynamic would have been in play two months later when RFK, Hoover’s nemesis, was assassinated.)

It’s courageous to start talking about the consequences of the riots of that era. For quite some time the shrewdly camouflaged and highly effective ‘blaming the victim’ ploy suppressed all discussion along such lines. But if there’s any good news at all these days, perhaps it’s that some of the old Political Correctness (that insidious, monstrous Leninist invention) has started to wear away.

And by placing the MLK riots at the core of things, Risen nicely pre-empts any ‘hurtfulness’ that might stem from any inference that the black riots were gratuitous or even irrational, without any immediate cause, and in view of long-term black interests, horribly counter-productive, and doing the cause of American blacks great harm. And doing the American polity great harm as well, but let me not get ahead of myself.

In the Post ‘Sweet Land of Liberty’ from last November 26th, I had commented on Thomas J. Sugrue’s book “Uncommon Ground”. Sugrue’s thesis is that there was a first and Southern phase of the Civil Rights movement and then a second and Northern phase. The latter has received almost no consideration, Sugrue says, and he is right.

But it’s even more complicated than that. Whenever We think of the ‘Civil Rights Struggle’ We imagine the long lines of those nicely-dressed Southern black youths (and the even more numerous black adults), facing, along with an impressive number of white ‘Freedom Riders’ the assorted slings and arrows of the assorted Southern law enforcement agencies, such as they were at that time. It was very much the film and photograph images of those brave souls, and as contrasted to the chimpery of the Southern police and a disconcerting number of Southern citizens, that – I strongly sense – convinced Americans that this sort of thing had to stop or be stopped right now.

But that was the Southern phase. After the signing of the Voting Rights Act in July ’65, and mostly unimagined by the electorate, the ‘struggle’ moved North (into what Sugrue calls its second phase). This was the world of the Northern urban black population (I think it would be condescending to call it a ‘community’, nice as that sounds). And Sugrue points out that it was a whole different kettle of fish.

This, in Risen’s approach, is the vision that exploded onto the nation’s screens and into its consciousness in April of 1968 when the city of Washington, D.C. was pretty much attacked from within. Nobody who had reached the age of reason by ’68, recalling manned, sand-bagged machine gun emplacements on the steps of the Capitol and armed patrols of combat vehicles on Pennsylvania Avenue, can forget that; more recent breezy assertions of Unitary Executive powers and ‘sweeping powers of detention’ and ‘Northern Command’ can’t but stir up awareness of what a country looks like when the military starts driving around the streets. What this country looked like when that happened.

It was a shock to the majority of non-black Americans, who had been carrying about in their heads images of the Freedom Marches and sit-ins of the early part of the decade, and that marvelous moment on the Mall in August of 1963, to see what appeared to be a different black population altogether, and in many ways, as Sugrue enumerates, it was.

Risen does some enumerating of his own. “It disrupted the momentum of the civil rights movement and undermined white support for it; it hollowed out cities and accelerated the flight of urban whites to the suburbs; and it enabled the coalescence of a powerful new political force opposed to government initiatives on behalf of society’s less fortunate”.

He’s right. Although it also indicates that ‘racism’ as the all-purpose cause of those phenomena was never sufficient or wholly accurate. Fear of having a city explode like that around you; concern that any further “initiatives” (nicely and so vaguely put) would actually spark more such explosions; perhaps even a lingering suspicion now that the Southerners, so vigorously and soundly trounced by the Federal Government, a Federalized National Guard, and the US Army itself, might have had a very prudent reason for ‘keeping the lid on’ all those years … these are not the thoughts of visceral, hate-besotted racists. They may themselves be incomplete, but there was a great deal of legitimate concern.

And there is the darker fact that the riots in the black urban settings did not start with the MLK assassination riots of April 1968. They had been going on for three years by then. The first of the Sixties’ ‘black riots’ or, if you prefer, ‘inner city riots’ was – stunningly – just a few days after LBJ signed the Voting Rights Bill into law, in July 1965. Following that catastrophe, LBJ was unable to get even a paltry $60 million for housing assistance out of Congress. It marked the end of his ability to achieve anything more for ‘civil rights’ through the standard political processes. It was surely the end of the ‘classic’, first, Southern phase of ‘civil rights’.

That, no doubt, helped fuel the ‘Northern’ black infatuation with ‘revolution’ and ‘Black Power’, with ‘rage’ and the gun and the bomb and the riot, although MLK was starting to see his leadership and his nonviolent, American-ideal-regeneration model of civil-rights be nibbled away by the ‘urban’ and ‘revolutionary’ approaches even at that early date.

It was a terrible synergy: the sense that somehow – after the riots – ‘democratic process’ wasn’t going to be able to accomplish much more for blacks in quick, large, easy steps; the infatuation with ‘revolution’ and revolutionary methods that by definition was hostile to and wholly incompatible with, democratic process; and the concomitant urge away from ‘integration’ (ah, that takes me back) and toward ‘separatism’ – which later went to college and emerged as ‘identity’, and spread like toxic kudzu throughout the American polity.

The Democratic Party, as noted, was desperate for reliable voter constituencies. Whatever its constituencies ‘came up with’ became the ‘policy’, but prettified and rendered almost ‘inevitable’ by the combined dynamics of Political Correctness and advocacy ‘packaging’, assisted by supportive ‘scholarship’ and friendly media looking, increasingly, for reliable ‘consumers’ of media product that makes them ‘feel good about themselves’.

It’s not hard to imagine why Risen preferred to focus on the MLK riots: that choice provided at least an implicit semblance of ‘justification’ for the violence, although not quite for the jaw-dropping orgy of urban black violence that destroyed its own home turf, a sort of comprehensive infrastructure-suicide.

From watching those earlier riots of ‘65-‘67 on TV – and in color by the mid-Sixties – it can hardly be surprising that many Americans wondered just what the frak was wrong that at the moment of such a stunning success, and hardly ‘symbolic’ but rather quite palpable, the response would be so self-destructive and self-defeating. There can be little doubt that Political Correctness had as one of its first tasks the suppression of any discussion of this profound dissonance, this utterly disconcerting fact and whatever connection it might have to ‘civil rights’ and ‘black rights’ and the general capacity for stability among urban blacks, if not – though an inappropriately arrived-at conclusion - American blacks in general.

Probably, the hyper-emphasis on black ‘rage’, generalized, so often backward-looking, and apparently unappeasable, was part of this technique and strategy of the distraction and suppression of public discourse. (And this gambit would become a tool for all of the follow-on Identities, the Second Wave of Feminism not least among them.)

The Democrats, alas, having written off the white vote of the South, couldn’t afford any such public discussion. Their urgent need to maintain electoral viability required them to simply apply more pressure to ‘nurture’ what they had decided would be their replacement constituency. That decision was to have powerfully negative (and hardly unpredictable) consequences for democratic process and the democratic ethos: what came to be known as Political Correctness was applied here, and for the same reasons that it was applied in Russia after Lenin took power: to prevent the ignorant but still uncontrolled masses from wasting time discussing (and disagreeing with) what the vanguard elite of the Party had already determined was to be the national policy.

To their dismay, when applying this beyond the South in that second, Northern phase, the Dems began to alienate white Northern voters as well (the Republicans watching the whole thing, taking copious notes). This resulted in the Party swinging wildly in search of yet more replacement constituencies, and adopting ‘women’ – not in the sense of all American females, but ‘women’ as represented by the cadres of Second Wave Feminism, not a few who aped the Soviet – or at least East German – approach themselves. So that by 1972, when the Democrats gushed and brayed – almost incomprehensibly – that they were “the Party of women”, on top of being clearly perceived as the Party that somehow was still trying to enforce its ‘visions’ and ‘dreams’ in regard to matters racial … well, that just layered a new Political Correctness on top of the older, 1965-8 version.

For while the Southern, first phase was cast – and not simply through the efforts of Dr. King but by its many participants – as a hearkening back to the American ideal, the second, Northern phase was tinged with the elitist assertions of European experience: revolution and overthrow, ‘A-power vs. B-power’, elites and vanguards, those who ‘get it’ and those who are the lumps who ‘just don’t get it’.

The Second Wave Feminists, of course, never had an equivalent to the Southern Civil Rights first phase, the call to the great American ideal; they went straight to ‘the revolution’, much as their now-horrified political enablers tried though with no small success to put a happy-face on it: it was justice, it was rights, it was equality, it was something you just had to ‘get’, it was progress, it was good, it was what it was, it was here so get used to it, it was not to be looked at critically because that would simply be re-victimizing the ‘victims’.

And so, huge and wrenching changes were force-pumped into society, with no thought as to consequences – intended or unintended, easily forseeable or subtly veiled – small or large. Kinda like the Iraq war and all its pomps and all its works. So this baaad methodology ‘migrates’ from one area of national affairs to others.

And in addition now to the matter of race itself, there entered the concerns of those who were made greatly uneasy by the ‘revolutionary’ consequences of this or that ‘initiative’; that even without considering the ‘content’ of this or that individual government ‘initiative’, the simple fact of so many ‘initiatives’, all at once, interacting in positive or negative ways without serious oversight or critical assessment, was enough cause for grave concern. Gerald Ford burbled in 1976 that one of the ‘great’ things about America was that it could entertain many revolutions all at once. Not hardly. It’s like having committees of self-serving doctors assigning what amounts to be dozens of drugs to the same patient, with no thought as to the individual drug’s effects or to the cumulative effects of all of the drugs interacting and acting upon the same patient.

Congress, which might have been presumed to provide some sort of comprehensive overall assessment and supervision, turned itself into Santa Claus to the interests groups, corporate or advocate. Until it became so addicted to PAC money and so fearful of examining the consequences of its pandering binge that it refused to do any serious and responsible work at all.

Lots of ‘symbolism’, photo-ops, and spin though. After all, you can't afford to actually let The People examine your changes, because it could quickly become obvious that those changes aren't really working so well at all. So you have to show that they look like they are working, and hope that after a while folks will get used to them like old furniture - the Israelis call it 'establishing facts on the ground'. It's shrewd, intelligent, and manipulative - thus hell-and-gone from open, honest, democratic process. It's a plague bacillus to the polity.

What a frakking hash. Congress wasn’t ‘duped’ or ‘blind-sided’ by 9-11 and the Bush push for ‘sweeping powers’; by that time Congress was so used to giving in to whatever pressure was brought upon it that pols voted for the Patriot Act without even bothering to read it. Nor, when Bush insisted upon ‘immediate’ passage of the massive Bill, did they demand at least a few days to do so. Let somebody else take the hit for slowing things down. The buck no longer stopped at Congress – and there went the core of the Constitutional vision of how the government would operate. Hasta la vista.

Generations of kids are grown up now, unaware of such complexities, and far too many of them now insufficiently schooled in the vital citizen skills of deliberation and critical thought to really understand.

Let me be clear: I am not speaking here in the accents of Nestor, about ‘times’ that have ‘changed’, pure and simple. Something, some things, went very very wrong back then, and as an indicator that ‘things’ are still not working right in Our polity I offer the two terms of the Bush Administration whereby a sleazy witless unripe not only was considered acceptable Presidential material but was elected (as the term is understood now), and was then elected (ditto) again.

And add the plight of the urban blacks, made so much worse by the Second Wave Feminists’ ‘deconstruction’ of family and fatherhood as part of their strategy for supplanting the ‘male’ with the ‘female’ as a source of societal and cultural identity. The two ‘revolutions’ – the Black Power and the Feminist – began to interact, in ways not only harmful to each other’s purported constituencies, but to American society and polity as well. A situation that has not ‘receded into history’ in the ensuing three or four decades. Not hardly.

We are sinking. As a Republic, We hit a rock on the starboard side in 1948 when the National Security State decided it had to instill enough fear in Us to power the Cold War; but then the Left simultaneously thrust the Ship of State against even more jagged rocks on the port side, and began to undermine democratic process in the service of ‘revolution’ (revolutions-plural).

And nobody could stop this vicious feedback loop because, according to Political Correctness, it didn’t exist. Everything the Democrats were doing was for ‘liberation’ and everything the Republicans were doing was for law, order, and enrichment, so nobody was doing anything wrong. Except the other Party. And the ‘necessary enemies’ raised up to fuel the next ‘initiative’ … ‘men’ and so forth.

Nor can it be realistically imagined that the ensconced elites of the Left are going to let go of the power that has, in great part because of their forty years of effort, been drained from The People and hoarded (and then squandered) in the dark, marbled alcoves of the Beltway.

We need to become The People. Again, I’m not implying that there was some ‘wonderful’ time in American experience when the citizenry functioned perfectly in that task. The ‘destiny’ of Our present generations is to write an entirely new chapter to the history of the American concept of The People. This hugely expanded government, this greatly unbalanced constitutional contraption, requires not less of The People but far more. It requires more Peopling, not less.

And President Obama is going to need that help, if he is ever to avoid the fate of becoming just another one of the Beltway banditti or the first black Jimmy Carter (whose services to the country since he left the Presidency have been exemplary, it has to be noted).

And if We are to avoid the fate of looking like those peoples of Europe of a century or 70 years ago, in those old newsreels, staring blankly into the camera.

Or, worse, cheering madly as the Leader’s motorcade goes by.

FIRST RECTIFY

Over at ‘The American Prospect’ Ann Friedman is running a play with which We should all be familiar. (“Don’t Call it a Culture War”, here).

Her specific topic is “LGBT rights”. Specifically, she doesn’t think it’s the right way to proceed – letting the issue be ‘labeled’ as (just another) front in the “culture war”. After all, quoting Peter Beinart’s illumination over at ‘The New Republic’, “culture war no longer sells”.

So what We got Us here is a problem in ‘defining’ and – perhaps in essence – marketing (Goebbels got much of his propaganda theory, We recall, from the ground-breaking American marketing whiz, Edward Bernays). The stuff has since gone to college – or to Academia – where it has been washed, waxed and re-badged as ‘defining the narrative’ or ‘defining the frame’. To maintain control of the narrative is a primary objective of all ‘Advocates’. The product itself – the idea, the agenda, the grounds for the idea, its workability, its costs, its consequences, and – increasingly – its performance over time … all these are secondary, if not utterly irrelevant. Packaging is all. Sort of like how Detroit (a large city in the upper Midwest, known in happier times as the seat and capital of the American and the world auto industry) has been conducting its business for a couple-four decades now.

This has been a major milestone on Our road to serious disconnection from substance and reality and, in consequence, from real, life-giving politics in a democracy. It’s all a matter of defining and keeping-up appearances. After a while, it was theorized, people would ‘get it’, or at least ‘get used to it’, and so – now a familiar piece of the national furniture – nobody would think (or dare) to object. The agenda will have established itself as a ‘fact on the ground’ – that’s worked so well for the Israeli ‘realm’ these past sixty years.

Our own thirty or forty-year experience with the thing, on multiple ‘fronts’, has shown the theory to be somewhat insufficient to account for events. But We aren’t supposed to notice that; consequences are ‘oppressive’ insofar as they ‘limit’ or complicate what should be clear as a bell to any correct-thinking citizen. Vietnam and Iraq – wars that destroyed far more than they accomplished, in the recoil as well as in the projectile – come to mind, by perverse coincidence.

As I’ve said before, the solution to that problem involved the upbringing of numerous cadres of children and youth who don’t remember how democratic politics are supposed to work, and who – worse – have been taught not to think and to analyze but merely to hold the ‘correct’ opinions and direct their still molten emotions only at ‘correct’ targets. And it also involved the importation of far too many immigrants who never knew, whose own original political experiences make anything here look ‘good’, and who are simply happy to be ‘here’ and are willing to let it go at that.

Oy.

She proposes to her readers that “we’ll continue to lose until we can successfully relabel LGBT rights [as] a civil-rights issue [italics hers] situated firmly within the context of other civil-rights struggles, not an issue mired in the culture-war swamp of moral controversy.” She immediately adds, parenthetically, that “(To a lesser degree, the same goes for abortion rights.)”

Well.

She brings out clearly and succinctly the problem that has bethumped Us for lo these many decades since about July 10, 1965. The first-phase of the ‘Negro’ civil-rights movement was significant in two ways. First, there was and had been general national public consensus (the Southrons and the Klan-minded excepted) that “all men are created equal”; the Founders had only grudgingly accepted the continued existence of race-slavery as the price of getting the country Founded at all, Congress had outlawed it in the early 1800s, and then there had been that Civil War thing. In the late 1950s and early 1960s national attention and a long-simmering outrage was focused on effecting the political rights that had been ‘won’ in that Civil War, only to be undermined over the course of the next 90 years.

Ensuring that ‘the Negro’ had full civil rights as had been promised was to bring to fulfillment a long-standing commitment that the country had made, had bled copiously for, and had – with too much moral lassitude – allowed to be undermined by Jim Crow. Just about ‘everybody’ agreed on that.

Second, Martin Luther King’s ‘southern civil rights movement’ (see my immediately previous Post) was a unitive call to all Americans to fulfill a national commitment and in doing so to participate in a restoration, a ‘rebirth’ and ‘rededication’ to what had been the spiritual integrity of the American ideal.

It was a powerful and life-giving national experience.

Indeed, as even Richard Rorty points out in “Achieving Our Country”, the ‘old Left’ of the 1930s and prior appealed to a ‘fraternal’ unity, and the efforts for workers’ rights, as even the Progressive legal struggles for child-labor laws, were unitive (the employers being the only objectors). And King, as noted, appealed to not only a common American-hood but to a spiritual and ideal communion in which all Americans might come together (the Southrons excepting themselves).

This is hell and gone from what has been the standard tone of the post-’65 Revolutions of the Identities. Even where – as Friedman’s article exemplifies – a connection is drawn to ‘civil rights’, it is a tactical ploy, and precisely does not call to any broad and deep American unity, and precisely does not seek to speak-forth its agenda and cause, but rather seeks to clothe them in misleading euphemisms and impose their objectives by ‘spin’ and stampede and end-runs around that American unity which to the Identities does not exist and cannot exist in the first place. This is not a democratic movement in any substantive sense of the word. Some serious rectification is in order here.

That follow-on phase of the civil-rights movement embraced i) a negative, demanding and divisive agenda (not a little redolent of ‘ressentiment’) and ii) a de-facto revolutionary method of getting those demands met, a method which by definition (‘revolutionary’) eschewed the slow consensus-building of a democratic politics for an immediate and imposed submission to their will and program.

Nor did the demands of that program enjoy any wide grounding in public awareness.

Worse, other ‘movements’ – Second Wave Feminism the primary one – embraced the same revolutionary method, seeking also – as the later phase of the black civil-rights movement – to establish without delay their own demands, most of which did not enjoy broad public acceptance. And especially prominent among those ‘demands’ was the right to ‘abortion on demand’ (as it was first known and as, alas, it is now being plumped these many decades later); and this ‘abortion’ was cast as a ‘civil right’, as if it were ‘merely’ a follow-on to the rectification of black civil political rights around which the King movement had coalesced, black and white together, male and female, Americans all.

As Confucius would have advised, one must first accomplish a ‘rectification of names’: the issues have to be correctly identified before any rational assessment could be made as to what might be reasonably accomplished in regard to them. This is akin to Sun-Tzu’s advice and to general military strategy and command principles that you have to know what you’re facing before you engage in any action (Vietnam and Iraq anyone?).

But ‘rational assessment’ and ‘reasonable accomplishment’ through the processes of a democratic politics were not the route selected by the second-phase black civil-rights movement, nor any of the follow-on movements. Instead, imposed-action-from-above was embraced, with a concomitant democracy-dulling ‘valorization’ of political correctness, foregoing public deliberation and debate, out of a fear of being labeled (labeling, again) ‘insensitive’, ‘racist’, and later ‘genderist’ and just plain stupid enough to not ‘get it’.

Rectifying names was not on the menu; ‘real’ liberals didn’t do it, nor did ‘real’ citizens.

Thus the matters of more-than-political equality, matters of just what the government would guarantee and how much the government could guarantee and how far the government could go in enforcing such guarantees – all huge questions worthy of and in need of great, wide, careful deliberation – were simply ‘imposed’, as Lenin had done, by ‘elites’ who very much did ‘get it’. The choice presented to the citizen was ‘you’d better get-it, or you’re going to get it, and if nothing else just shut-up and mind your own business’. It was clearly not a programme designed to enhance or respect democratic process. And how it came to be the standard operating procedure of ‘liberalism’ in this country is a book crying to be written.

Certainly, the phrase and term ‘reproductive justice’ makes no sense on its face, nor the associated mantra of ‘full equality’. They are obviously ‘names’ in dire need of rectification. But that is precisely what the proponents of those phrases don’t want to happen. After all, that could lead to swamps of ‘moral’ controversy – and that’s not only going to slow the revolutionary achievement down, but it’s – did We not know? – useless to mention ‘morality’ because that’s a private thing and the civil-rights of having one’s ‘reproductive justice’ and ‘reproductive freedom’ is a public thing. Anything less or otherwise is simply ‘oppression’. And a ‘denial of civil-rights’, just like – We are meant to unthinkingly infer – slavery and Jim Crow were a denial of the civil rights of America’s black population.

And the fact that forty-years of imposition has not dulled public doubt? And the fact that decades of this and that ‘plan’ being imposed and still not working even unto the present day? And the fact that there appear some very possible unforeseen consequences that have undermined and deranged the very fundaments of Our democratic politics?

Correct-thinking ‘liberals’ do not allow themselves to be distracted or detained by such matters, it would seem.

And in consequence of the ‘liberals’ having become something else indeed – whether they intended to or not – the Republicans and ‘conservatives’ cobbled together a Frankenstein’s monster of a coalition uniting greed-crazed corporate wealth and God-haunted fundamentalists and Southern-besotted militarist ‘patriots’ . The wealthy were allowed to pull all their old tricks to enrich themselves on the backs of the national peasantry and create an oligarchy; the Fundamentalists saw themselves as subjects of King Jesus for whom a ‘democracy’ was merely a polite and traditional form with no substance; and the militarists saw the citizen’s only true role as being to support the military exploits of the nation. Something for everyone: the wealthy controlled the military-corporate complex, the Fundies could baptize and deputize the military into God’s righteous right-arm; and the militarists would be given benefit of cash and clergy by the other members of the axis.

Now I don’t know what LGBT ‘rights’ are at issue here. I can agree with Richard Rorty – but only for a very short distance – that the past decades have gone some way towards making the country less “sadistic” (his term, not mine); it is incumbent upon a Citizen to respect other Citizens. Whether and to what extent ‘rights’ are involved is a legitimate – and pressing – matter for examination.

But Friedman proposes that the label ‘civil rights’ “is less divisive … the very act of involving the term ‘culture war’ signals that we think something is controversial when, in fact, equal rights should be the furthest thing from it.” What this constitutes is an effort not to rectify the name but to use a deceptive name in its place. Just what “equal rights” means is something that has to be explored.

As best can be gleaned from the abortion movement’s dictionary, “equal rights” means that the government is bound and beholden to cancel out the male ‘advantage’ – imposed, as it were, by evolutionary Nature itself – of not having to be ‘stuck’ with the results of having sex. Now that’s quite a bit to digest; is even the U.S. government in a position to be doing such a thing? Is it even wise? But then on top of that, it turns out very quickly that the means of ensuring such “equality” is by letting the female abort the human life she carries if she so decides – which for quite some time was considered a primitive and uncivilized act in most of the world’s advanced civilizations.

I am not taking a position on the matters here; but I think it can be clearly seen that these matters require a huge lot of thought and deliberation. There are monstrous questions here, not excluding Our regressing as a civilization and a society. A little attention must be paid, surely.

Is the denial of ‘civil rights’ worth the wait? Well, I’m not sure We’re dealing with ‘civil rights’ here – certainly I don’t easily equate a black citizen’s right to vote and to be not-lynched with a female’s nullification of evolution’s plan for sustaining the species. I’m open to learn more, but please don’t try to stampede me and to do it under the false-name strategy that it’s not a stampede but rather a long-delayed redress of civil-rights.

So this is not quite so simply a matter of “fundamental civil-rights” as opposed to “a minor culture-war skirmish”, as Friedman sums up. Although her tone reminds me of Justice Scalia’s recent plaint that folks should just forget ‘Bush v. Gore’ and ‘move on’. Surely Mussolini, Goering, and Al Capone sought to make the same sort of case on their own behalf – and Bush, Cheney and a raft of others may do yet. Although not the captain of the ‘Titanic’, who had the decency to accept responsibility for his stunningly fatal frak-up; he, lest it be forgotten, was a ‘male’ and raised as a ‘Victorian male’ at that – such a fuddy-duddy, whose example – some might bray – need not detain Us here. I would disagree.

And I point out – not irrelevantly – that We have yet to experience the full consequences of the damage done to Our integrity and viability as a moral society by indulging in the falsely-labeled invasive war for WMD, and further by subjecting Our troops for so long to a soul-shredding darkling frakfest reeking of failure if not outright defeat. When those troops come home, as they inevitably will, what profound wounds will they bring into Our midst, unseen even more than clearly observable, which will rightfully demand Our attention even as they present profound challenges to Our traditional sense of Ourselves as a decent and civilized society and culture? Our too-easy and too-quick actions, taken on the basis of hugely un-rectified ‘names’, now promise vast and unseen consequences.

I will do everything in my poor power to respect – as fully as possible – LGBT citizens and female citizens. But I’d like the respect of being allowed to find and evaluate the truth, and deliberate as to what is workable. I do not want to see ‘them’ penned up like cattle and treated like sheep; I would expect in return not to be stampeded like cattle nor treated as a ‘dumb’ sheep.

And We all will see what can be done.

Which, nowadays, is a very pressing question on so many levels of Our common life and weal.

SWEET LAND OF LIBERTY

Thomas J. Sugrue has written a hefty 700-page tome with the above title, reviewed by Alan Wolfe of Boston College (“Uncommon Ground”, November 9,).

Sugrue has undertaken – and at great and useful length – to expand awareness of the black civil rights movement.

He first points out that he wants to focus especially on the Northern civil rights movement. This is fresh and valuable. Though perhaps not for the reasons he wishes.

It has to be said right off that at the time, the ‘civil rights’ movement had been largely understood in the country to pertain to what Sugrue is calling the Southern civil rights movement. And he limns clearly that for a number of ‘activists’ the signing of the Civil and Voting Rights Acts were simply the end of – as it were – ‘phase one’. OK. But that is not at all how the rest of the country understood it.

Further, the nation was looking for an opportunity to rest from the alarums (worthy though they were) of the exertions of the Southern civil rights struggle that ended in ’65. No doubt more than a few were hoping to get on with the ‘business’ of figuring out how the country was going to meet the changing situation in the world economy, where America’s postwar pre-eminence was coming under challenge, with much more challenge on the horizon.

Prior, I guess, to this past summer, the ‘correct’ response to that would have been to say that ‘civil rights’ is the country’s ‘business’. But at this point I believe that the present economic situation will of itself refute any ideas of defining metaphorically the nation’s ‘business’. It may yet be that the nation’s pre-eminence, its very economic viability, and its public maturity – the maturity of its citizenry, will all have been demonstrated to be seriously compromised by the exertions and impositions of the past decades of ‘rights revolution’, both the black and then the follow-on ‘revolutions’. (And I'm not hereby presuming that 'civil rights' and 'the rights revolutions' as currently construed were simply and wondrously about 'civil rights'; they were also other than that, and they were indeed revolutions, and those things are hugely fraught, and should never be undertaken without a reely reely lot of serious thought.)

Because if the ‘rights revolution’ was going to be implemented, then to ‘achieve’ so much in a very short time would not simply invite the frisky metaphor of ‘revolution’, but would require the all-too-real revolutionary imposition of ‘achievement’ by fiat, by elites, and by a congeries of academic authorities, media and government agencies all collaborating in that purpose. And that sort of thing never ends well.

The Southern movement – what is usually considered the ‘civil rights movement’ – was “The story of a freedom struggle … fundamentally a morality play, one that pits the forces of good (nonviolent protestors) against evil (segregationist politicians, brutal sheriffs, and rednecks). It is a story of suffering and redemption … Through protests and moral suasion – a call to conscience – activists reinvigorated the ‘American Creed’, a belief in the fundamental equality and humanity of all people that is supposedly enshrined in our nation’s founding documents.”

That “supposedly” sticks in the craw a bit: I sense beneath it the almost-sneering assumption that an incompletely fulfilled ideal is a false ideal – in which case every decent cause in the world, this world of incompleteness and even failure, is irrelevant if not feckless or even mendacious from the get-go. It is a conceit of all the following “social movements” of the Sixties and subsequently that they had to resort to a politics of end-run-around-careful-deliberation-to-reach-consensus because such democratic efforts were, by the mendacious unreality of their grounding ideal, misbegotten to begin with.

I’ve written before of the indispensable value of ‘ideals’ to Ground and to Trellis and to Boundary human activity. Absent any ‘higher review’ by ‘ideals’, anything might be justified – and that is a dark and bloody road humanity has been down before, and not so long ago.

The Northern civil rights movement that took the foreground in the mid-1960s, by contrast, involved “rioting, embracing a divisive identity politics, and sparking a white backlash against an alleged consensus in support of racial equality.”

He’s right there. On a couple of counts: there was a Northern version of “racism” (although I caution all of Us that the word is now so over-used and expansively defined as to be treacherous as a conceptual tool for aiding in understanding). It was far more societal, less a matter of clear-as-a-cancer-lump Jim Crow laws and in-your-face redneck lawman macho assertiveness. Far more subtle.

Of course, a disease or problem that subtly intertwined would prompt a competent physician to consider hack-and-cut ‘heroic’ surgery to be ill-advised: it probably wouldn’t ‘get’ all the bad tissue out, and the shock of it might well be lethal for the patient. But America is a place where ‘if one stick of dynamite works good, twenty sticks will work twenty times as good and as fast” – which is a recipe for catastrophe whether you’re doing some excavation on the farm or seeking to effect deep society-wide change. But it was the Sixties. And the Democrats needed to restore some electoral heft reely reely fast, in light of the intensifying mess in Vietnam and now the Southern Democrats bolting for the Republicans (via their own home-grown third-party ‘new Confederacy’ sort of stuff).

Second, there was indeed a “backlash”. But again, I caution against a too-easy wielding of this word as a conceptual tool. It lumps together i) I hate (x)-iggers, ii) I’m not sure this is a good idea, iii) I don’t want to change or see my neighborhood change, iv) I don’t’ think this solution is going to work even if they mean well, v) can I get some more information about this whole plan? And vi) can we talk more about all this and make sure we’ve got it all straight before we start trying this? And vii) this is a good idea, but let’s go easy and slow so as not to stampede everybody.

‘Revolutions’ don’t have the patience for the democratic process, don’t believe they can wait, don’t believe they have to wait, and are often run by visionary or ‘committed’ souls who figure that if it’s done Big and Quick, then it’ll all be over before folks can get riled up and – anyway – folks don’t deserve peace and quiet any longer after all that’s happened.

And this is a recipe for all sorts of “mischief”, in the quaint Founding-generation understatement.
The same is true and has to be considered when reading “white denial became defensiveness”, and for the same reasons. It might have been i) guilt at what was done and being done to black folks, but it might also have been ii) a horse-sense that the ‘bridge’ over which the public stage-coach is supposed to go at the gallop is not sturdy enough for the plan. Surely, after 35 years of school-integration, say, reading about the state of schools doesn’t indicate that bussing has ‘worked’ in any sober sense of the word. Now there may be many reasons for that, but it is highly inadvisable to just up and figure that if a plan hasn’t worked after three-plus decades and huge amounts of public treasure and uproar, then the failure is merely and utterly and totally due to ‘racism’.

(Let Us not here be side-tracked by the eerie similarities to the ‘justifications’ for continuing in Vietnam and Iraq: it has worked, it is working, and if we stay longer it will finally work).

Sugrue most perspicaciously and usefully points out that the Northern civil rights movement was not about ‘morality’; it was about “rights”. This is a hugely valuable insight: I think it explains the difference in tone and in substance between the ‘first’ 1960s (up to about July 10, 1965) and the ‘second’ 1960s (apotheosized in 1968). The ‘morality’ (of that ‘American Creed’) underlying the Southern movement, led by Martin Luther King, simultaneously invited all Americans of goodwill to a reaffirming project to establish the highest ideals of that Creed and also invited all to a participation in what has to be considered the spiritual life of any who are committed to Justice and Right. King cast the movement as a powerfully unitive spiritual experience, open to all Americans and indeed all humans “so conceived and so dedicated”. Powerful stuff – and powerfully positive for all (except the truly Klan-minded).

The Northern movement didn’t go that way at all. There were questions of separatism – that ‘whites’ didn’t belong in a ‘black’ movement; of ‘black power’ that didn’t invite general participation but rather demanded ‘respect’ from whitey or else; of demands for sweeping societal and structural changes rather than the removal of laws clearly unconstitutional; of immediate action satisfactory to the few rather than the building of consensus among the many.

And of vast relevance to Us today is Sugrue’s marvelous little discussion of FDR’s “Second Bill of Rights”, enunciated in 1944. Whereas the original “first” Bill of Rights was ‘negative’, and limited the government as to what it could do to citizens, FDR committed an expanded government to doing more for citizens: enforcing “positive” rights to “a useful and remunerative job, to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation, to a decent home, to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment”. Sugrue goes on to sum up: “the twin pillars of these newly enumerated rights as President Roosevelt defined them were ‘equality’ and ‘security’. This became, he caps it, the basis of the “rights revolution”.

Well. The book suddenly veers toward a text on constitutional policy and American political affairs. And that surely is a valid and necessary project. It’s a splendid array of promises and goals. It echoes Teddy Roosevelt and Wilson as well as looks forward to LBJ (in 1944 making his way up the political ladder).

Far more than the ‘New Deal’ of 1932, this almost-forgotten Second Bill of Rights limns and bodes the great changes in government’s role. It deserved a lot more public discussion than it has ever gotten, in schools or in public discourse.

The devil, of course, would be in the details – but that’s par for the course in this world and should have come as a surprise to no one; but it was the Sixties! Sugrue is right to note that “such expansive notions of rights came into conflict with more traditional understandings.” I have no doubt they did, nor that they would – anybody could see that just by looking at the list of thorny questions: “Did a black’s right to a decent house trump the property rights of whites to sell to whom they chose? Did the right to a decent, remunerative job override the employer’s prerogative, long recognized in American law, to hire and fire at will [or for good cause]? Was there a right to welfare? Was there a right to equal education? Were rights restricted to the lifting of negative restraints on an individual’s freedom – or were they to be expanded to include equality of results … ?”

These are monster questions. And it’s an indication of how improperly their ‘answers’ were handled that even now it feels and no doubt appears somewhat ‘incorrect’ merely to be asking them. Good for Sugrue that he has done so.

But he is at no risk of losing his union card because he includes them only to then say that “black activists and their white allies kept them there [i.e. in the center of national political debate].” Which isn’t quite so. Through the imposition of Political Correctness – a phrase borrowed from the Leninst-Stalinist playbook – a stunningly illogical and immature rhetorical sleight of hand was introduced into and imposed upon national discourse: if you disagree with ‘us’, then you must be ‘our’ enemy and one of the bad people. And that evil spawn then leaped from its cage and ran amok. Like a backfire ineptly set to slow the actual wildfire, it leapt its setters’ bounds and plans, and spread all over the place. As We have since seen.

Nor was there overmuch political debate, since any politician who objected publicly or disagreed or simply demurred was certain to become the target of an agitprop demonstration, greedily gobbled up by the increasingly-immature news cameras and ‘press’ – a politician came quickly to see that while he couldn’t solve the problems to general satisfaction, he could lose his career in an afternoon. [The fact that politicians can even be said to have ‘careers’ is another issue that deserves a book all its own.]

But there can be no doubt that what was now developing was a huge change – and a decent respect for the opinions of the citizenry, and a constitutional respect for that stage of the process, should have dictated a broad and deep phase of public deliberation, including education and suasion by all concerned.

Such was not to be. An ‘identity’ was formed as a base for creating a politics. And the method chosen for achieving the goals was not ‘advocacy’ in the sense of a concerned individual or individuals trying to inform and persuade others among the citizenry. Instead, ‘Advocacy’ became a deliberate and sustained effort to manipulate public opinion (‘symbolism’ and telegenic moments of ‘outrage’ or ‘pride’ became major elements in political calculation and in ‘news’) and – wherever possible – outright direct subornation of politicians. It was something ‘revolutionary’ alright, no doubt about it.

Thus it is being too too nice when Sugrue allows one ‘advocate’ to declare that ‘identity politics’ was just a way of ‘speaking out’. That is theoretically true of all politics – an individual or small band of individuals speaks out to the other citizens to inform and persuade. But Identity Politics in capital letters is big-business itself, and a manipulative, kinda shady business it is. And if anybody wishes to point out that the forces of opposition were also kinda shady, I won’t completely disagree – but to saddle the American polity now with both ‘sides’ behaving in a shady and manipulative fashion … surely some bad things could have been expected to follow from that.

And he quotes a historian to the effect that what is needed is “the history of a ‘long civil rights movement’ that … was continuously and ferociously contested, and in the 1970s inspired a ‘movement of movements’ that defied any narrative of collapse’.”

So much in this plaint. If it was ferociously contested, then unless the dynamics of national life be cast purely in terms of a Manichaean ‘good versus evil’, there must have been a wide and deep doubt as to some aspect or other of the ‘war’.

And if on top of the black civil rights movements (admittedly huge and fraught) there then arose – as there did – in the 1970s a "movement of movements" (what I have always called the 'Revolutions of the Identities'), then the stresses put upon the communal discourse in this country must have been (and were) immense, dangerously and perhaps lethally so. Surely, Our present sad state of political discourse – so easily blamed on ‘Bush’ and on ‘the Republicans’ (and not improperly) – had far deeper roots in recent American history.

Interestingly, he immediately moves to choke off the implications of what he has just discussed. He challenges, he states outright, “the tired clichés of recent books that fixate on the 1960s as the fundamental turning point in the history of race in modern America. Many prominent analysts of race relations argue that the ideal of a color-blind society met its demise in the destructive 1960s. The nonviolent vision of Martin Luther King gave way to the angry rhetoric of Malcolm X. Blacks wanted too much, too fast. Whites recoiled at the angry militancy of black power. When the cities exploded in race riots, the ‘silent majority’ gave up all hope of racial reconciliation. In the aftermath of the bloody summers of the late 1960s, minorities and their well-intentioned liberal supporters embraced a pernicious identity politics that deepened America’s racial divide and destroyed the integrationist dream of a land where character, not skin color, mattered most. This story is powerful for its simplicity. It has been influential in shaping national politics. It is also terribly incomplete.”

Well.

It seems to me that the ‘story’ is not so much a tired cliché, but a perennial and accurate assessment. It would stand to reason that ‘radicalism’ and ‘revolutionary’ agendas were going to create more than a little push-back, whatever their specific agenda might be. The explosion of the cities indicated either that something was out of control or that something was part of the agenda that created hugely uncontrollable political dynamics – and that says something greatly disturbing about those who made the agenda and those who supported it.

Such broad agendas – and demands – could not be implemented ‘fast’ without doing great damage to the process of deliberation, debate, and building consensus that should have been clear from the outset. After forty years the government is less color-blind than ever before; indeed, under assorted banners such as multiculturalism and diversity, government 'distinctions' - if you will - have been erected into a Plan that is Good. The concept of ‘character’ was ‘deconstructed’ by a subsequent Identity and its movement [see below]. And Sugrue himself, after his long indictment of the ‘story’, accuses it not of being wrong, but only of being ‘incomplete’.

In other words, the ship is heading for the rocks, a certain command philosophy has been guiding the ship all this time, but Sugrue doesn’t call it ‘wrong’, just ‘incomplete’: Let’s not focus on the rocks, let’s talk about how nuanced and complex the philosophy is. It is either quintessentially American or quintessentially ‘academic’ that it is presumed that the great ship will not soon hit the rocks with all the attendant destruction.

The historian quoted is looking to ‘control the narrative’, which is spin control – and whence did Atwater and Karl Rove ever discover that American politics would offer richly manured fields for their own fetid crops? There is a truth to it: different passers-by, blind, may each ‘construct’ a different elephant as they try to understand it with their hands – the sharp tusks, the long sinuous trunk, the huge ears, the monstrous legs, the mountainous flanks, the thin wisp-like tail. But the elephant is there, independent of their efforts. What We see here is the beginning of a disconnection with reality, and a dependence on symbol and appearance and story and ‘perception’ and ‘spin’. Thus did Our substance trickle away.

And after all this, We have to put this all into context – a context that Sugrue alludes to as ‘a movement of movements’. The black civil rights revolution – and it called itself that – not only posed the problems that a revolutionary content and process would pose to a democratic politics, but it also broke the path upon which the feminists of the Second Wave would march. Within a couple of years of 1968, there was another full-blown ‘revolution’ blazing, and this one not basing itself on a few measly centuries of oppression, but on millennia of premeditated, malicious oppression, spanning continents and epochs, dwarfing any previous historical conspiracy: ‘men’ and their ‘patriarchy’.

And this new revolution – far from simply demanding action on the basis of its grievances – deployed copious philosophies not only in support of its own agenda, but to destroy the coherence and integralness of American society – that host of patriarchal oppression.

And within those few short years, the same liberalism that decried lynching as barbaric was touting abortion as liberation.

No wonder those large swaths of citizens not initiated into the mysteries were both puzzled and cautious.

And still are, decades later. For which they are blamed as being divisive and obstructive and oppressive and just-don’t-get-it Lumpenvolk.

Sugrue has done a great service in this book. It may not reveal precisely what he wants it to reveal, may not lead all of its readers precisely where he wants them to be led – but that’s democracy for you.

What’s left of everything now is anybody’s guess. Maybe this whole chapter of American history will stand merely as a warning for some other Republic yet to come, that may arise to carry on the Founding vision: Here’s some serious mistakes to avoid.

But I think there’s still time and still enough in The People to hope that We can simultaneously work for a fuller realization of the American ideal while working together to bind up the nation’s deep wounds and steer Our ship away from the rocks. Or, at least, ease her off the rocks, and limp along until We have effected repairs. The common experience of pumping out and repairing the damage will do Us all some good.

NO SHORT GOODBYES

In the current edition of Harper’s (October 2008) Arthur Krystal has a review (pp.81-88) of a book on the 1960s entitled “The Sixties Unplugged” by Gerard DeGroot of Harvard. It isn’t available online yet.

Some thoughts occur to me.

Krystal quotes Casey Hayden and Mary King from 1965: “Sex and caste: There seem to be many parallels that can be drawn between treatment of Negroes and treatment of women in our society as a whole”. Well, sorta not exactly. This was one of the key derailment points of the Sixties where things started going off the track even as they sped up so fast that they probably were never be going to be able to stay on the track.

The feminists got it into their heads that ‘women’ (and as always, when I refer to ‘women’ here I am referring to the not-necessarily existent entity or entities hypothesized and asserted by Second-Wave Feminism – 2WF; I hold no brief against those very real individuals among Our citizens who happen to be not-male) were in pretty much the same position as ‘the negro’ (and among themselves would quietly opine that they were actually in worse shape and had been for several millennia longer, and for a far more fundamental reason than just ‘race’) .

The travails of the ‘negro’ community – including slavery and then the far more insidious post-Reconstruction constructions designed to sustain their continuing oppression – were generally understood to be baad by all Americans except the Southrons. And the impressive efforts of the 1955-1965 civil rights era won over large numbers of Americans of decency and good will. How could they avoid it, with Martin Luther King grounding the entire civil rights movement in the very heart of the American ideal, drawing on Scripture, American theology and religious thought, American history and America’s historical ideals, and the remarkable concatenation that was the Lincolnian sensibility.

Indeed, for many Americans the full scope of the darkness imposed by the South upon Negroes was only brought home in the newsreels and television: police dogs, clubbings, fire hoses, and the peculiarly repugnant chimpery of numerous Southern lawmen of the era combined with American idealism and sense of decency to generate a powerful wave of revulsion, amplified by anger at being hoodwinked: hadn’t this all been settled by the Civil War?

It was when LBJ – already starting to get ahead of the country – made his speech at Howard University in June of ’65 – that certain straws appeared in the wind. The Civil Rights Act (of ’64) and the soon-to-be-signed Voting Rights Act were fine. But they were not enough. After all this time, the ‘negro’ would need to be specifically singled out for government assistance. Part of the problem, he said, was simply the “inherited, gateless poverty” that also entrapped “many whites” as well, and at which education and medical care programs of the Great Society initiative would be aimed. So far so much common sense based on a consensus of observation and analysis. In addition to the actual Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts, few were going to begrudge help to prime the pump, as it were.

But then LBJ immediately went on to assert that there was also a “special nature of negro poverty”. Worse, he started to get fuzzy: “We don’t know why this is”, it is “much more difficult to explain, and “negro poverty is not white poverty”. He named it as “the devastating heritage of long years of slavery and a [subsequent] century of oppression, hatred, and injustice”. And immediately, to head off a potentially logical but politically unpalatable line of thought, he insisted that “these differences are not racial differences” but instead “they are solely and simply the consequences of ancient brutality, past injustice, and present prejudice”.

He made sure the whole thing was given the politically correct spin by adding “For the negro they are a constant reminder of oppression. For the white they are a constant reminder of guilt”. Whether he meant Southern whites or all whites, he did not trouble to say.

So the seeds were laid for the end of the first civil rights era, and the beginning of something else indeed. For where the first era had drawn its moral and social legitimacy and strength – including its remarkable power to unite all Americans of decency and goodwill – from a wide common consensus, LBJ’s limning of the (almost entirely new) problem of ‘special negro poverty’ and its fuzzy but forcefully imposed explanation of the causes for it really got ahead of any consensus whatsoever. Indeed, it got ahead of any facts. And then immediately sought to impose a single interpretation on what was in effect an unclearly envisioned problem with even less clearly asserted causes.

And of course, the seeds of what the government would first call – in a huge Freudian slip – “affirmative racism” were sown here. Not only was there no consensus on the shape and causes of the problem of ‘special negro poverty’, but there was a certain shock and no small sense of being hoodwinked: after a long decade of King’s splendid but demanding struggle for civil rights and voting rights, suddenly – just as the long hoped-for victory was going to be achieved – the government asserts that there is a whole other problem, even worse and even larger, just beyond it. [I guess it sounds very similar to the American citizenry’s situation at the end of World War 2 when they suddenly found themselves facing an even larger and reportedly more dangerous enemy than the Nazis and Japanese militarists they had just defeated.]

And of course, this would lead to the fateful solution whereby the ominous control-seeking impositions of the National Security State were now to translate themselves into the civil-rights field, creating the proto-ground for the National Nanny State: because the government’s solution – just when it seemed wise to give the entire country some time and space to start coming to terms in its myriad incarnations of town and city, county and state, with the implementation of the huge changes just enacted – was to impose a top-down “affirmative racism”, a program that itself encompassed all manner of micro-management not only of actions, but of thoughts, opinions and the expression of opinion, and the deployment of the federal criminal enforcement power as well as regulatory power in the service of a particular group. Oy.

Nor did it help that immediately after The Glorious ’65 (which pretty much ended in early July of that year), the ‘negro’ movement itself simultaneously shocked the nation with the Watts riots and then fractured, as Dr. King’s approach of non-violent social justice for all (he started to oppose the war in Vietnam and talk of that ‘social justice’ that in this country had always been painted with a ‘pinko’ brush) was itself overcome by an impatient, cocky, youthy, violent, revolution-minded ‘black power’ mania that sought not a common cause with other Americans but rather a purifiying separation from ‘whitey’ and an immediate and outright ‘piece of the pie’ that had been for so long with-held.

Enter thus 2WF, just starting to hoist whatever sail it could stitch together, sensing that the wind was up and it was now or never. It absorbed not only French ‘deconstructionist’ theory and Marxist analysis and the Leninist revolutionary praxis (plus Nazism’s brilliant propaganda playbook as well as communism’s agitprop); it also sought to have the government do for it what the government was doing for the ‘negro’, while also spackling itself up with the brass-hard dampdreams of the Black Power movement.

And if the ‘method’ was thus hostile not only to the status quo but to a democratic and deliberative communal resolution to the problems, then the actual content and shape of the ‘problems’ that purportedly constituted the ‘emergency’ did not enjoy anywhere near the clear consensus as the public consensus about the situations that had for centuries bethumped ‘the negro’. Historically, the main American concern had been to give women ‘the vote’, and suffrage had already been bestowed (and Prohibition – most unhappily and ominously – had been imposed in short order, as not a few grown-ups in ’65 would have recalled).

But here was a long list of complaints and ‘outrages’ and demands that were hard to wrap the mind around, let alone come up with any workable solutions for. And it seemed that having the citizenry actually try to ‘think’ and ‘deliberate’ about the long lists of stuff was exactly what the 2WF and its enablers did not want to have happen; and Political Correctness was embraced in order to impose the ‘correct’ answers upon the citizenry forthwith; that is how ‘revolutionary’ enlightenment works – as opposed to Enlightenment enlightenment, which requires the individual to think carefully and confer seriously with other thinking individuals.

But the idea that the 2WF’s best move was to model itself and its agenda on the ‘negro’ and ‘civil rights’ model (with some Black Power revolutionary in-your-face stuff thrown in to spice up the stew) had taken hold. And before long, there were two forest fires burning, and burning toward each other. Presided over, alas, by the Democrats who had started out figuring that it would be greatly in their political interests to sort of clear demographic fresh ground with a ‘controlled burn’. Now they had two, before long there would be even more, the ‘burns’ were burning toward each other so as to promise a conflagration, and the average citizen was beginning to wonder if the government really knew just what the frak it was doing.

Before long, numbers of such citizens were hoping that ‘the other Party’ might be able to at least do a less bad job. And so here We are today.

[It is taken for granted that during all of the decades since the Sixties, the American postwar economic pre-eminence is slipping away, the ‘malefactors of great wealth’ and the malefactions of great wealth – once caged by the two Roosevelts – are slipping out of their cages since there is so much brouhaha and everybody is distracted, and before too long hit upon the marvelous treachery of passing off their own increasing enrichment as ‘evidence of economic productivity’, dragooning in the process the hapless politicians, who had no stomach for the political hard-work of actually addressing the shrinking productiveness of the American economy, and who were now becoming dependent on their corporate betters not only for PAC contributions but for any semblance of an American economy at all. The best the pols will manage to do is to try to pass out more frosting to the little people even as the essential cake has rotted away; credit becomes the ‘proof’ of America’s success and wealth, and as the actual vitals of the economy go into late-stage atrophy, even home-ownership has to be showered upon the little people to keep them ‘happy’. I hold no brief for the malefactors or malefactions of great corporate wealth.

But even if all of the corporations were somehow suddenly brought into line by some magical political combination of will and competence, the damage done to The People – especially the intangible damage to mind and heart and soul – whether directly or indirectly – by corporate chicanery and depredation would still exist, independently of its origin.]

There was indeed an ‘ethos’ to the Sixties (defined as post-’65 and lasting til say ’73, when the Vietnam War’s active phase more or less ended). If there was a youthy lustfulness looking not only to be liberated but to declare itself to be the very definition of ‘freedom’, there was also a youthy impatience at the slowness of ‘the establishment’ (defined as not just the government but anybody ‘over 30’, thus ‘grown-ups’ in general) to accept the ideals and visions of the young and to implement them forthwith – because if an ideal is ‘good’ because we feel it is, man, then it can only have – like - good consequences, right? And anyway, man, worrying about ‘consequences’ is just what old people do to avoid having to change – everybody knows that, right?

The ‘young’ are the most dangerous age cohort, contra the World War 1 insights as to ‘old men’ who sent young men to die; the youngsters actually signed up in their millions at the outset, and got the thing off to its monstrous start, after which nobody could put it out until it had burned through its awefull course. The young are self-assured though inexperienced, impatient of complexity and nuance, and certain that they have a ‘way’ that will get everything set right if older people – who screwed things up to begin with – would just stop trying to thwart them.

There’s a reason why they were valued as ‘infanterie’, the kids who would make the most enthusiastic cannon-fodder when the time came to charge the enemy, and the most implacable and callow killers when the battle-rage was on them. Hell, they were half-crazy before the battle and its rage even started. Experienced special-operations leaders don’t look for teens and early-20-somethings; they’d like less energy and a little more experience, because what’s needed is not lotsa shooting, but sure single-shot shooting. Kids do ‘burst’ better than ‘single shot’. What they do as ‘voters’ is a still insufficiently appreciated ‘unknown unknown’ that you’d think would be at least a ‘known unknown’ – but like so many of Our problems these days, that one will have to await the historians’ post-mortem, I expect.

“Disorder cannot shape historical narrative”, Krystal notes. No, though it can do a hell of a job on events themselves. Deconstruction and revolution – embraced by the Black Power folk and the 2WF, to no small degree – seek Disorder; indeed they require it, in order to pry open some space in the citizenry’s minds and to weaken the ‘established’ narrative by the terms of which the majority of the citizenry understands and evaluates its experiences and its challenges and any change. So ‘disorder’ became an objective, and the ‘establishment’ and ‘whitey’ and ‘men’ were soon to find themselves both tagged and attacked with no regard for ‘facts’ or ‘truth’ – and that became the new meaning of ‘politics’. And here We are.

But ‘disorder’ would then also have to migrate into the individuals’ interior sphere, because that’s where conceptions and judgment are located. So a certain interior Disorder was also the order of the day – so to speak. As if kids needed disorder to be ‘valorized’ on top of the whackery endemic to that stage of life. But that’s what happened.

So on top of the soul-squashing effects of corporate employment and consumerism, Americans were subjected to a ‘planned disorder’ that would render them more amenable to the Identities’ demands and visions. It would also, alas, reduce the citizens’ already frazzled ability to think for themselves and thus to function as The People, the utterly indispensable and vital struts that alone anchored the massive power of the Branches in the constitutional system. Nor can anybody now claim in stab at self-exoneration that such a consequence was unforeseeable; any more than the surge-induced collapse of the New Orleans levees was unforeseeable.

Krystal rightly faults DeGroot (born in 1955, only a young teen in ’68) for claiming that the Sixties were not that “special”. They were very special indeed. They were ‘speshull’ in the sense that the ideals and practices and characteristics of a mature adulthood were replaced by the values of an age not known for or defined by its ripeness and its readiness for primetime (and we’re talking college-students in the Sixties; now it’s high-schoolers – which statement on my part of course must be classified as an ‘age-ist’ if not also an ‘elitist’ assertion, but here I stand and damn the PC torpedoes!).

They were special in that they created the first incarnation of the National Nanny State, which would come to be as order-and-purity obsessed, as impositional and as directive, as the National Security State. Indeed, up until 9-11, vast tracts of damage that the National Security State would have liked to impose but which American tradition would not permit, were imposed by the National Nanny State under the rubric of ‘concern’ for ‘victims’, ‘the children’ and other handy shields that could be manipulated so as to provide a cover for what was really going on: the engorgement of the police power of the state. And as We have seen with both the Violence Against Women and sex-offense legislation, at great cost to the integrity of Constitutional protections and jurisprudential praxis that had been built on them over the course of centuries.

In an ominous by-the-by, Krystal observes that “to some it seemed as if the country was more divided at that moment than at any time since the civil War”. But of course. Because both the Black Power and the 2WF movements had become hugely tainted with actual revolutionary thought and praxis, their dangerous shame only barely covered by so gauzy a fig-leaf as ‘radical democracy’. The fact that gunfire – with only few exceptions, among the Black Power and other such types – was not deployed does not make the movements less dangerous.

In fact, given that they were revolutionary in content and method, the lack of gunfire helped conceal their actual nature from the citizenry; there was a naïve American assumption that if there’s no shooting then democracy is somehow working. But none of the ‘movements’ was looking to participate in a democratic politics; they were looking to get their particular revolutionary visions imposed by the fastest and easiest (and most ‘efficient’) route, and that was surely not by way of engaging The People in deliberation and debate. Krystal is more accurate than he may realize: A second Civil War did indeed start in this country in the 1960s, and while there was no shooting, there was also a far greater semblance to the revolutionary civil wars of 19th and early-20th century Europe and Asia than to the American Civil War.

So who can now be surprised that Our constitutional ethos and Our societal and cultural unity is in shreds? We’ve been in a ‘civil war’ or several (as the Identities increased, creating more fracture-lines) for decades now.

And what then is really holding Us together any longer? Just what can be left of the content of Our common ‘memory’ such that a Lincolnian appeal to its “mystic chords” could have any effect whatsoever? Try to answer that one.

Consequently, Krystal is spot on when he notes that 9-11 was a single, almost simple, event, compared to “the assault on the senses” that was sustained throughout the Sixties. There was in the actual late-‘60s “one gut-wrenching event after another, one crescendo hardly dying down before another began to build”. These were the birth-bangs of the Identities, and each one arrived with a scream of outrage, a list of ‘oppressions’, a designated enemy, and a list of demands – on top of an implicit or explicit accusation of bad faith thrown at American polity, American culture, and American society.

Some of the outrages – such as the jaw-dropping consistency of the treachery and bloody violence deployed against the Indians – were accurate enough; other such lists were not, and their issuing Identity sought to mask its conceptual weakness with loud and immediate squalls that would preclude any rational assessment whatsoever. It was by then ‘how the game was played’; and ‘the game’ had now become a Fact On The Ground. So ‘just deal with it, dude’ and ‘get over it’. Hitler, once established, wished the same fond thought upon the German volk, not all of whom quickly accepted his visions and demands; they say several of the Supreme Justices, Scalia especially, just wish We would ‘get over’ Bush v. Gore. Yah.

But Krystal uses the right word: “assault”. It was a purposeful and deliberate violence – although emotional and political rather than physical and military – deployed in the service of an objective and as part of a strategy.

And it was indeed deployed against the ‘senses’. ‘Common sense’, especially. It became one of the ‘holy water’ words (phrases, actually) that could stop any demanded ‘agenda’ in its tracks; hence – have you ever watched the 1985 movie “Fright Night”? – the vampire took great care to make sure that all ‘holy water’ was gotten rid of before serious vampiring was begun. The trusting citizens – too decent and too socialized to imagine that any creatures would actually seek to destroy their world – get rid of the ‘holy water’ as a gesture of politeness to the vampire’s ‘sensibilities’. See where that got them. But then, who in their right mind in America of 1966 would have imagined that revolutionary praxis and persons utterly dedicated to an identity other than being ‘American’ would actually enter the national forum and seek to overthrow everything by means of purposeful conceptual and societal and personal destabilization and imposed alterations to long-established tradition (rather than through the more obvious force-and-violence)?

And now that some practitioners are urging that We ‘get over the past’ (and accept what’s been done) and just ‘move on’ into broader and sunnier uplands … well what say We to that seduction? That some would say that good ideals or at least good intentions were co-opted … well, I for one am not sure that the ‘ideals’ were so ‘good’. But even if they were, the implementations demanded were clearly fraught with consequences, yet they just went on and brayed and bawled until the Dems and then the Republicans too tried to shut them up while making or at least not-losing as much political capital as possible. Sorta like the current Wall Street catastrophe, by curious coincidence.

Krystal notes that “The Sixties may be gone, but they’ve left a bad taste: identity politics, political correctness, the collapse of the nuclear family, a perversion of sexual mores, a decline in civility and disrespect for the law”. I’d say he’s wayyyy too nice, understating the effects (and consequences) of the foregoing as merely ‘a bad taste’ in Our mouth. We have been – as a society and as The People – pretty much ‘deconstructed’, and it was deliberately done to Us (and We let it happen). That the ones who started the forest fire had only intended to clear themselves a better patch and maybe make Us ‘better’ at the same time – that’s not hardly enough of a justification. No wonder the politically correct don’t want Us watching Western movies any more; there was a way of dealing with this sort of thing in the Western movie; and the best you’d get out of the townsfolk was a good meal the night before they hoisted you up the flagpole.

Kyrstal himself puts the beginning of ‘the Sixties’ at August, 1964, with the passage of the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, that authorized LBJ to wage what would become the Vietnam War. From what is finally now known about that ‘attack’ on US Navy destroyers from declassified materials, it’s clear that there was huge doubt –even then – if anything even happened at all; not even the destroyer commanders were sure that they were firing at anything out in the dark night (although specifically tasked with electronic intelligence missions, their radars were not altogether operational, if you can imagine that), and the jet pilots sent to aid them weren’t sure they saw anything out there beyond the destroyers themselves, but fired off some rounds just to let the float-boys know they were sympathetic to the problem.

But Johnson needed ‘an attack’ and he browbeat and manipulated and selectively accepted just the details that would give him his ‘attack’ (he would do just the reverse when another Navy ship, the USS Liberty, was attacked repeatedly by Israeli jets and ships in June ’67 in broad daylight over the course of hours, while flying an American flag more than a dozen feet long in a stiff breeze). Reading the Tonkin thing, and seeing that a President can also make it work in reverse – that’s how much power he can exercise over the military and intelligence services in the short run – it’s hard not to wonder if Bush and his darkling band didn’t do the same thing in regard to the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, using LBJ’s slick moves as their guide.

Some thought is given as to just what happened to the generation of the Sixties – now in their sixties – that helped cause all this.

The Western movies and TV shows come in for accusation. In their vivid restatement of (or fantasies about) the American “myth of national origin”, “dominated by violence and personal freedom, male aggressiveness and daring, geographical mobility and restlessness” was a model for Boomers as kids to later stand up for ‘justice’. And there’s something to that. Although having accepted what was in essence a ‘revolutionary’ definition of justice, then the Boomers stood the old West on its head and became not so much cowboys as cadres. Ach, the hell-hot ironies. But they meant well.

Some of the blame lies with otherwise acute social criticism that saw the dangers of the 1950s’ conformity (which I’d say stemmed as much from lots of military experience and a general relief that the war was over as much as from a bowing to the pressures of corporate employment and group belonging). But the criticism, while acute, was feckless in its proposed solutions: where ‘conformity’ was bad, ‘insubordination’ was good and led to ‘freedom’; where too much “Enlightenment” emphasis on rationality was suffocating emotions, an embrace of emotions and passions and even primality were the path to ‘liberation’ (the current-day philosopher Susan Neiman makes a good case that the Enlightenment actually had such a respect for the fragility of ‘reason’ and ‘reasonableness’ in the human being, that it urged the highest levels of humility and circumspection before deciding that one ‘knew’ something with complete accuracy).

The problem with so much of the social critique was that its conception of the Life Space was insufficient, and so its proposed remedies were thus greatly weakened from the get-go. Human beings interiorly possess a capacity for growing, a Verticality if you will. And they seem most consistently (stubbornly, if you wish) to believe in some sort of Beyond, a dimension beyond this dimension. Thus in addition to the Life Space of the Horizontal, of the Surface and the Appearance, and of the Exterior, there is an axis of Verticality and Interiority, and quite possibly a Beyond. Hence, to presume only the Flat world of the Horizontal, of the Surface and the Appearance, and of the Exterior is to wage ocean war with an 18th century conception of the Battle-Space: only horizontally around your vessel, and to a range of a few hundred yards. Below you, above you, out to a distance of hundreds of miles, utilizing radio and radar and sonar, and all at the speed of computers … well, you see the problem with relying on an outmoded conception of the Life/Battle-Space when trying to achieve something. Or recommend a course of action or solution to somebody in rather pressing need of a good one.

But things are wrapped up with the observation that the Sixties are over now, “except, that is, for the political and cultural residue they’ve left behind”. And from what I’ve noted above, that’s a hell of a lot of ‘residue’. And it’s not just lying on top of the surface of the national pool, like so much inert scum, waiting for the national pool-boy to scoop it away so the party can start in earnest. It’s now a toxic brew of corrosive elements interacting with each other in the water itself, waiting to go to work on whatever goes into the water. “Welcome to fright night, for real” the vampire snidely joked, as he unsheathed his choppers and wagged them at the now-trapped guests. Our only hope is faith and holy water, but We’ve been nice enough to forego those so as not to re-traumatize anybody with delicate, if loudly asserted, sensibilities.

Will this be the end? Who will tune in again next week to see?