The neo-cons strike me as being in rebellion against the Sixties. Which pits them against a spent volcano, of course. Yet this brief episode in history, still largely misunderstood by neo-cons and others, is the modern conservatives' wellspring. And thus still relevant in understanding today's forces of reaction.
When you look back at that only socially dynamic decade of the past century, you grasp immediately that there had to be a counter-reaction to it. The intellectual tumult of those brief times was so great. Everything was up for grabs. We questioned everything.
We doubted our parents, the military, organized labour and organized religion. We condemned universities as upholders of an elite status quo. We wanted a more activist state, in promoting social justice, yet we loathed government as a warmonger.
If the decade had been marked only by a social-justice movement, in which Detroit was set ablaze in 1967 and Paris the following year, that would have been quite enough disruption for Nixon and France's "silent majorities" to cope with.
But no, we also had a sexual revolution (two revolutions, actually - a new, tolerant view of unconventional sexual behavior and a widespread rejection of the traditional role of women). We stopped trusting science, which inflicted us with its Thalidomide, pesticides and Agent Orange. We denounced the profit motive, materialism and advertising, and demanded consumer protection laws and the abolition of the venerable political machines in the great cities. We turned our backs on the Great American Songbook and embraced music that was in some cases nihilistic. We were exhorted to trust no one over 30, and some of the more belligerent youth leaders of the era implored us to be willing to kill our parents.
It was all too much, in a compressed period of time. And with mounting inflation and 58,000 body bags as the backdrop. What followed - after the confused transition of the 1970s - has been three decades of reaction against the 1960s relentless questioning of everything in that one intellectually liberated decade. And so today - 30 years later - we have David Frum and Ann Coulter, Sarah Palin and Rush Limbaugh, and the millions on Main Street and in the MSM who take their cue from those loudest voices of this era, still railing against the perceived anything-goes, nothing's sacred immorality of that fateful decade.
This seems a cruel trick of history. Why should progress be held hostage to a single, messy decade, still and always invoked now - though rarely overtly - as a reason to stop moving forward to a greater, more highly evolved humanity?
It seems a trick only to those caught in the grips of "presentism," when we assess everything according to the moment in which we're living. If we look back, we see that the tides of progress and especially of reaction have always been of long duration, certainly longer than 30 years. It has to be the prime hope of progressives that the current primacy of reaction will, in its turn, wear itself out.
Certainly it already is morally and intellectually vacant - and, frankly, boring. Taken to its logical conclusion, the neo-con ethic is a dead end, asking us to return to igniting fires by rubbing sticks together. Progressivism invites us to explore the furthest reaches of human thought and endeavor, to which there are no bounds.
The neo-cons would have opposed the American Revolution and, indeed, the end of colonialism everywhere. They would find the disruption too great. And the intellectual underpinnings of the American founding fathers - the radical liberal notions of the French philosophes - were unsettling in the extreme. Weren't those social-justice rebels - the Rousseaus and his ilk - always on the run from papal and civil authority? They must have been lawbreakers. There is always a fear of the new. And neo-cons - by whatever label - have always been in the vanguard of fear.
These were some of the thoughts that came to me as I read a 1975 essay by Michael Harrington, pictured above, a public intellectual of the 1960s and 1970s. He was founder of the Democratic Socialists of America, an essayist and NPR contributor. And, as it happens, the fellow who first coined the term "neo-conservatism," to describe the counter-revolutionary sentiment that sprang up to oppose the social progress he devoted a lifetime to championing.
If the neo-con wellspring is the supposed untethering of society from reality in the 1960s, Harrington wanted us to know, in a 1975 essay in New Republic, that the 1960s were not radical, as then and now imagined. That in fact very little progress was made.
The 1970s unwinding brought despair - not just disco, but Democrats who'd turned conservative. "When liberal governors like Jerry Brown in California and Michael Dukakis in Massachusetts start to popularize this very same theme" - that the Sixties were a failed experiment in throwing the people's money at social problems - "that is a more serious matter" than the predictable reactionary ways of Nixon and Ford, Harrington wrote. Harrington's essay came a year before another supposedly liberal governor came to the fore. Jimmy Carter, actually a conservative Southerner and advocate for urban renewal, was otherwise an upholder of a status quo that saw the gap between rich and poor widening. The New Frontier and the more ambitious Great Society had been calamitous, the new conventional wisdom held, and we dare not go there again.
To the extent that many 1960s bids for social progress fell short of ideal, they were, after all, experimental. Edison claimed a thousand failed experiments preceded his light bulb, but we are not so patient or forgiving in public policy innovation. Most of the progress with which FDR experimented also failed. Failed until the persistent FDR's experimentation led him to social advancements that worked, like Social Security, the right of workers to organize, and the rural electrification that made a robust economy possible in the then wasteland of Texas.
What truly failed in the '60s bids for social progress, Harrington insists, was political will. The will to ante up sufficiently, to throw more money at solutions to entrenched social injustices. And the record does show that Kennedy and LBJ, each products of the establishment, were men of half-measures. Which is not to condemn them. At least they tried. We see what happens today to presidents who try. They are called "Hitler" or "Stalin."
Here's Harrington in 1975, eerily relevant today:
To the degree that federal programs [of the '60s] did generate new problems while pretending to cope with old ones, these failures occurred not because Washington acted too radically or too prodigiously, but because it acted too timidly, following corporate priorities even as it spoke in populist rhetoric...
The welfare state as it emerged out of the '60s is not, and never was, a free-spending system of radical innovation. About two-thirds of its funds are devoted to the income and medical needs of the aging {the advent of Medicare, principally], and that is money well spent, even though it is not nearly adequate. The 'radical' departures like legal services for the poor and community organizing never did get much money, and the truth, therefore, is as Daniel Patrick Moyniham described it in The Politics of the Guaranteed National Income: 'The social reforms of the mid decade [of the '60s] had been oversold and, with the coming of the war, underfinanced to the degree that seeming failure could be ascribed almost to intent.' Leaders of the '60s talked a bold game, declaring 'unconditional wars' on poverty, proclaiming a 'Great Society.' But there were neither vast expenditures nor structural changes.
America did not 'throw money' at problems in the '60s. Chiefly, it purchased an increment in decency - not enough, but with some success - for people over 65. Fiscal 'experts' should be asked to meditate on a rather simple proposition: that problems of people who suffer from a lack of income can indeed be solved by 'throwing money' at them. Ask anyone on Social Security.
We know that the government-subsidized public education, libraries, railways and irrigation systems of the 19th century laid the foundation for the middle class that would be, and remains, America's core strength. That the postwar G.I. Bill greatly expanded that middle class, creating the greatest consumer society in history - the first largely self-sufficent economic superpower, a people buying and selling among themselves, with little reliance on export revenues. We know that Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, SCHIP and Head Start freed up consumer income for spending on non-basics, a dynamic spur to the domestic economy.
All this the neo-cons oppose on principle. It is a bankrupt principle, to be sure, but deeply held among those, like Jefferson, for whom "That government that governs least governs best." That adage was no more true in Jefferson's time than ours.
Without a U.S. Cavalry to make white settlement possible in aboriginal lands in the Midwest and Western territories; a government-built Erie Canal to connect New York City with the Great Lakes and transform the Empire State into an economic dynamo; U.S. Mail contracts to make viable the early airlines; and a federal treasury willing and able to finance the destruction of fascism in the Pacific and in Europe - there would be no America worth pledging allegiance to, if it survived at all.
In researching Harrington, I note that Arthur Schlesinger Jr. once called him "the only responsible radical in America." To consider the likes of Harrington radical - "responsible" or otherwise - is confirmation enough of how deeply conservative and averse to social innovation America is in comparsion with other advanced countries.
The romanticized American Revolution itself was a commercial proposition - or more accurately a tax revolt. Virginians and Pennslyvanians expected British taxpayers to continue indefinitely picking up the entire tab for law and order in the colonies, for trade subsidies for their cotton and tobacco exports, for Redcoats to protect them from marauding Indians. The colonial merchants - Tea Partiers, they fancied themselves - who made history in Boston harbor are no different than today's variety, seeking something for nothing. It is a hypocritical founding ideology on which to build a country, but there it is.
Recent Comments