CJ..Thanks for this essay. I particularly appreciate you breaking down the whole ‘splintering’ notion, since that has in fact largely been the ‘blame’ for the disintegration of the CRM.

And yes, I’d always understood it to be what you’ve explained here, but couldn’t have articulated it as well. Identity politics by another name.

And, yes, the POWER machine has certainly taken advantage of that. Meantime, the poor and the permanently unemployed remain. And yeah, they are mostly people of color and a whole bunch of women serving double-duty stats in the group…poor, female, of color.

Thanks again.

That is a good analysis.

Dionne is mostly right. In most ways fairly obviously right in his assessment of what started to happen in 1968. He leaves out a couple things, however.

First, there is a difference between radical (no such thing as “radical” right, which is better described as reactionary right) and liberal. I think of King as a radical and not as a liberal, especially in later years, as were many others, including those remaining of the Old Left. Many members of the then New Left as well. Albeit, Johnson was a liberal. In retrospect, liberals could just about claim Nixon too.

Second, the economy didn’t start to head south until the mid- to late 70s. Meaning by “economy,” that for most folks, not that for the few who continued to do well through Reagan’s disastrous 80s and then Clinton’s equally disastrous 90s. Sure, a few more made some gains during brief booms (housing, dot-com, etc.), but not working class (including working poor, indeed largely constituted of people of color and women, also mostly of color). (As all know, the permanently unemployed don’t exist in America. Well, Except as a vague statistic that’s not accurate anyway.) Minimal gains, if those, were made by the largely white middle-class. The 50s, 60s and early 70s were comparatively prosperous times. “Prosperous” that is, within the context of a capitalist, racist, sexist “democracy.” Especially, compared to now, but compared to 80s and 90s too.

Dionne is right to blame liberals for their precipitous crash. He makes note of splintering of the Civil Rights movement. I’m not too sure about that being much of a reason. If that movement splintered, the left did so more generally. It’s worth contemplating whether or not it was the liberal left that started the Culture Wars, to which the right reacted, and then took power. As follows:

Splintering went and goes by the name: identity “politics,” which conflates culture and politics. The underlying assumption is that power can be impacted by working to change cultural attitudes. What really happens is that political movements become mere cultural movements that not only have little political impact but are easily co-opted by power. Indeed, power is glad for them as they are exploited as means by which power can disguise itself and/or justify (almost always selfish) ends by whatever (amoral) means necessary. The past 40 years are proof of this contention.

Into the political vacuum that resulted the right needed only to step. Not a lot of effort was required on their part. Being conservative or reactionary is fairly easy insofar as not much thought, never mind new thinking, is required. Really, really old ideas suit them just fine. Liberals are also mistaken when they give the right way too much credit.

“After hearing and reviewing the extensive testimony and evidence, which had never before been tested under oath in a court of law, it took the Memphis jury only one (1) hour to find that a conspiracy to kill Dr. King did exist. Most significantly, this conspiracy involved agents of the governments of the City of Memphis, the state of Tennessee and the United States of America. The overwhelming weight of the evidence also indicated that James Earl Ray was not the triggerman and, in fact, was an unknowing patsy… We stand by that verdict and have no doubt that the truth about this terrible event has finally been revealed.” —Statement of King Family on the Justice Department’s “Limited investigation” of the MLK Assassination, January 15, 2007

The assassination of Dr. King was one of the most devastating assaults on democracy and the rule of law in our nation’s sordid history. It came in an environment of FBI COINTELPRO harassment and surveillance of opposition leaders. It came as one incident in a string of assassinations which included Black Panther leaders, Malcolm X, John F. Kennedy and his brother Robert Kennedy. The telltale signs of government cover-up followed each of these events.

Continued:
[url=“http://crimesofthestate.blogspot.com/2008/01/was-dr-martin-luther-king-jr-murdered.html
“] Was Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Murdered by the U.S. Government?[/url]

Our Constitution had that slavery nonsense cooked into. It is as if “They” knew they needed that chaos generator to change the culture. Wars are terrific for cultural changes.

I suppose you found out that New Deal meant New Constitution.

...why anyone would put their trust and confidence in the two big parties, which at bottom are really just two wings of one big Statist party, dedicated solely to the perpetuation of the Status Quo. I personally have voted Libertarian the last two cycles, and I expect I’ll do the same this coming November.

I recall how the Weimar Republic had its own hippie movement, with free love and other bohemian ways. This is NOT new.

I remember how how Mort Sahl lampooned Bill Moyers for being out of touch with the anti-war movement. He couldn’t understand what those hippies out on the Whitehouse lawn were upset about.  Now Bill Moyers is feted by PBS as the inhouse liberal. I poop on Bill Moyers.

Old wine, new bottles. It is the eternal story of the phoenix bird.

Thanks, Bert!

Rereading Lapham’s “Tentacles of Rage” is well worth anyone’s expending the effort.

I was reminded about the essay, and its importance, by Lapham himself last week during a talk he gave at “City Lights” bookstore in San Francisco. During the course of a discussion of an issue of his outstanding new journal, “Lapham’s,” Louis made no small number of comments that were drawn directly from “Tentacles.”

It is not by accident that we’re continually bamboozled with rightist codswollop.

Gary

•  “It’s not even liberal vs. conservative: It’s raw control and wealth and they will not be denied.”

And, I don’t think anyone has been hollering socialist/communist-style ‘even distribution’.

It’s never been about that, because that is an impossibility in an economy based on capitalism, and that isn’t likely to change. Ever.

So no, the realistic argument has never been a question of ‘even distribution’ because there will always be those, AT THE TOP! (yeah, obviously that puts somebody at the bottom as well).

So, the wealthy among you have never needed to ‘fear’ that as much as you obviously do.

However, ‘more even’ could be something ‘more like’ what we’ve had in the past, (albeit many decades ago at this point), when the CEO’s were earning maybe 3 or 4 times as much as the highest paid laborer, as opposed to 30 or 40 times more. (plus bonuses stolen)

And yeah, workers had enough money themselves, (even the lowest paid among them) to….SURVIVE, and at some point, even increase their own comfort level, based on that old and quaint ideology (that never applied to the ENTIRE population anyway) that if one worked hard enough, and saved their money, and spent wisely, and blah, blah, blah, that one could actually manage a ‘piece of the American Dream’.

That so much greed of the few has so thoroughly destroyed whatever possible reality there ever was in that, has ALSO so totally destroyed the balance, that even the “almost but not quite’ at the very top are crashing now as well.

Unless there’s some sort of balance restored, even the fattest of the cats (dogs actually) are gonna crash. But then, we knew that. And, we’ve known it for several years now. Wonder why they didn’t?

Foreclosures Come to McMansion Country
  By Andy Sullivan
  Reuters

Leesburg, Virginia - Million-dollar fixer-upper for sale: five bedrooms, four baths, three-car garage, cavernous living room. Big holes above fireplace where flat-screen TV used to hang.
  The U.S. housing crisis has come to McMansion country.

  Just as the foreclosure crisis has hollowed out poorer neighborhoods, “for sale” signs are sprouting in upscale developments so new they don’t show up on GPS navigation screens.

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/040708T.shtml

Then there’s this:
Huge Job Losses Set Off Recession Alarms
  The Associated Press
  Saturday 05 April 2008
  Washington - It’s no longer a question of recession or not. Now it’s how deep and how long. Workers’ pink slips stacked ever higher in March as jittery employers slashed 80,000 jobs, the most in five years, and the national unemployment rate climbed to 5.1 percent. Job losses are nearing the staggering level of a quarter-million this year in just three months.

  For the third month in a row total U.S. employment rolls shrank - often a telltale sign that the economy has jolted dangerously into reverse.

  At the same time, the jobless rate rose three-tenths of a percentage point, a sharp increase usually associated with times of deep economic stress.

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/040608C.shtml

And this:
The Iraq War, for $100 Month
  By Bill Adair
  The St. Petersburg Times
  Tuesday 01 April 2008
Sen. Barack Obama says the war costs each household about $100 per month. We do the math and find he’s right.

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/040708G.shtml

But, there’s also this, which tells us that the thugs aren’t planning to leave Iraq, even if they DO leave the White House.

Secret US Plan for Military Future in Iraq
  By Seumas Milne
  The Guardian UK
  Tuesday 08 April 2008
Document outlines powers but sets no time limit on troop presence.

  A confidential draft agreement covering the future of US forces in Iraq, passed to the Guardian, shows that provision is being made for an open-ended military presence in the country.

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/040808K.shtml

That’s where it all got so confusing demo. When the repugs turned to dems and back to repugs. Or, was it the other way around?

It’s like jackpine savage said..neither of these parties represents what their alleged principles are.

While i think you oversimplify/overstate some things, i certainly won’t disagree with you outright. (I’m not a Democrat, so i’m not offended.)

I only wish that the Republican Party acted/governed as true conservatives…then i could vote for them sometimes.  Bush II is so much like Wilson that it isn’t even funny.  And between the two parties, i’m forced to choose between tax and spend or borrow and spend.

When i say “conservative”, i’m not using the dictionary definition so much as the principles that the party theoretically stands for.  But neither party actually represents what it theoretically stands for.

Expat,

Point well taken.

Hard to believe it’s been 40 years since the Demos put all their ‘superdelegates’ in a room full of cigar smoke and decided, while beating anyone who didn’t like it-including seated delegates-to a bloody pulp, that VP Humphrey was gonna be the guy despite the will of the voters and the anti-war movement embodied by the droves of McCarthy and Kennedy supporters. The betrayal of McCarthy in Chicago (after winning the Illinois primary), the Dailey SS troops turning the streets into a war zone, then throwing away the general election and four more years of Vietnam/Cambodia is starting to look like a big deja vu. Obama is the McCarthy that will be Judased by the Demos this time. Don’t think for a minute that winning a few primaries or having a delegate lead going into the convention will get him through the nomination. Wrong answer. The superdelegates, the unseated delegates that are going to suddenly get counted, the deals struck, he is outta here. NO antiwar candidate gets elected in this country. EVER. There is no money in it, and the Democratic party is run by elitists who are every bit as sleazy and greedy as the GOP. Obama has NO CHANCE, and Clinton doesn’t either once they snatch defeat from the jaws of victory by hijacking the nomination to this new Hubert Humphrey for the new millenium and run her against the warmonger fossil McCain. This is not rocket science people. Your votes mean NOTHING.

RE:  In “Tentacles of Rage,” Harper’s editor, Louis Lapham

Great post GaryA. As I read through all of the posts I was beginning to wonder if anyone would lay out what many historians are now saying about this period.

I had read the Louis Lapham Harper’s article before and found it to be probably the best analysis of the period and the changes it wrought I have read to date.

You write a great summary of it.

I remember when rading the article this part (as summarized by you really struck me.  - “Historians revisiting in tranquility the alarums and excursions of the Age of Aquarius know that Revolution Now was neither imminent nor likely…..”

Thank you for reminding me of this and for the links. It will be good to read again.

Thanks.  You were right.  I knew how to copy and paste a link but didn’t realize that there was some magical thing, I guess, in TD’s site that turned what I typed in black to red once it appeared in the post. 

I just had a brief discussion w/ my step-son about a 60-min. story on sending astronauts to Mars.  He’s all for it and I’m firm against it.  I guess if a magical cyberspace that turns things red that were typed black comes out of this sort of ridiculous misplacement of priorities then maybe it can’t be all that bad.

Thanks again for the info.

DR. Knowitall,

I’m trying to understand what it is that you wanna do with the links.

Are you trying to get one to fit into your own posts here? Because it looks like you did it with this one. The link to the slate piece came through fine.

Is that what you meant?

You mentioned ‘red’ but the color itself is arbitrary. For instance, if you were on a different thread, (like ear to the ground or AV booth) the actual color of the text in the link could be grey or light blue.

So, it depends on what you’re trying to do, but it seems like you DID manage it in this most recent post.

Let us know if you meant something else. As a general rule, you can ‘copy’ the link from any page on the Internet, (as it appears in the www address bar) and then ‘paste’ it anywhere else you want.

Once you’ve done that, the link will be accessible to anyone, just by ‘clicking’ on it.

Hope that helps.

http://www.slate.com/id/2106548

Here’s the link for Jack Shafer’s take on “Tenacles of Rage”

Interesting to get the other side, flawed as it is.

P.S. Being relatively illiterate with a computer, can someone tell me how to get up those neat red colored links that you can just click.

If this ascendancy started in 1980, here are some of the fruits of conservatism;
Fired Air traffic Controllers,
Deregulation,
Crash of 1987,
HMO scandals,
Michael Milliken,Ivan Boesky,Frank Lorenzo,Jeff Skilling,Andy Fastow,Dennis Koslowski, etc.,etc.,
Drexel, Burnham, Lambert
Waste Management,Inc.,
Arthur Andersen,
Keating 5,
Resolution Trust Corp.,
Savings & Loan Scandal,
Subprime Mortgages,
Hell, there’s been so many I can’t remember them all. I don’t really recall stuff like this before 1981, so if this represents the genius of conservative capitalism, I wonder If Raul Castro would let me defect.

Thomas, I think we’re talking about, correct me if I’m wrong, two time periods.  The ‘hippies,’ flower-children…of the ‘60’s and early ‘70’s - the ‘cabin trashers’ I spoke of - grew into the self-absorbed me generation of the ‘80’s - the I’ve-got-mine-and-I-don’t-care-about-anybody-else bunch. Fascists?  Sure, why not.

My point was what moved ‘middle’ America to so readily follow and support the, if you will, fascists.  (Remember, middle America elected a man, Reagan, president who hardly had their best interests at heart.)  Why?  Because ‘middle’ America had turned against the ‘long-hairs’ early on and they saw Reagan as being one more nail in their coffin - and as it turned out one more nail in the coffin of liberalism. 

I was attempting to account for what turned people against the ‘long hairs’ in the first place that the right was able to get away with tagging them as liberals. (Interestingly, it was the pseudo-flower child who grew into the fascist.)

I stick to Nam as being the source of the rage.

^ and the me generation didn’t have a clue; they were just selfish and clueless.  The moneyed powers that are, recognized the value of planning and organization and planned and organized since the 50’s.  It’s not even liberal vs. conservative: It’s raw control and wealth and they will not be denied.  Short of an open rebellion (as in REBELLION/not going to happen) we will continue to be “guided” in our political “choices” to support the status quo.  Our “freedom” ended shortly after Eisenhower’s famous speech about the “military industrial complex”.  The rise of the “conservative/serious money” movement has been constant and unrelenting.  While the left was distracted by everything “left” the conservatives moved forward with their agenda.  The term “Conservative” is only important because it appeals to the broadest range of the citizenry.  It’s not a conservative movement; it’s a movement driven by the captains of finance and all one needs to do is follow the money to know who is in control; it’s not us.  The Bear/Stearns deal should be proof enough of that.  We have truly lost all hope of ever really controlling our destiny as long as we follow things as they are.

I can’t speak for felicity, but it’s pissing me off.  I concur with your generational analysis.  Moreover, i also concur with your statement on Fascism (corporationism is just a euphemism).  What was conservative became Fascist, and what was liberal became conservative…trending towards Fascist, or at least corporate.  I would only disagree that the story stretches back more than 7 years.  15 years ago would be the most logical starting point: when the “me” generation took nearly full power in America.

Dear Felicity.I apologize for misreading your statements and the point you were trying to get to.I beleive your conclusion is wrong.Conservatism rose as the” me” generation took control.If you can call what took the place liberalism, conservatism.We should probably call it by its right name Fascism.Or if you find that term objectionable use Naomi Wolffe’s term corporationism.As America’s intelligence level went down corporationism flourished culminated in the last seven years of complete corporate control of the government.How is that workin for you?

Excellent comments all.

We came to a fork in the road and decided to take the path well traveled.  So now we have become all the history that we stood our nation against.

It occurs to me that I am America.
I am talking to myself again.

Asia is rising against me.
I haven’t got a chinaman’s chance.
I’d better consider my national resources.
My national resources consist of two joints of marijuana millions of genitals
an unpublishable private literature that goes 1400 miles and hour and
twentyfivethousand mental institutions.
I say nothing about my prisons nor the millions of underpriviliged who live in
my flowerpots under the light of five hundred suns.
I have abolished the whorehouses of France, Tangiers is the next to go.
My ambition is to be President despite the fact that I’m a Catholic. ~Ginsberg

http://www.writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/88/america.html

^ and yes it’s terrifying to have ones worst fears realized.  But Americans love fairytales and have believed their myth and will never wake up to reality.  I’ve resigned myself to that truth.  We now think we’ve found the Knight in shinning armor to save us from ourselves.  Pity.

You’re right.  I should have said “more even distribution of wealth.”  I think most people could find happiness in living with a comfortable minimum.

I submit it’s a bit more than a ‘little frightening.’ It’s downright terrifying.

For it appears that the spiritual heirs of the American thugs who supported replacing democracies with death squad-running military dictatorships in places like Iran (‘53), Guatemala (‘54), Chile (‘73), Brazil, Argentina, etc., etc. now run the USA with nary a peep of protest from our “free” (read: corporatocratic) media.

Are we to imagine that the “abuses” - nay, torture techniques - used in places like Abu Ghraib just happen, by chance alone, to be virtually identical with the techniques used in the dungeons of the Latin American dictators the USA supported during the dirty wars, dungeons in which credible witnesses reported Americans were present, apparently supervising the barbarity?

Harvard attorney, Jennifer Harbury’s, 2005 book, “Truth, Torture and the American Way - The History and Consequences of U.S. Involvement in Torture,” makes it plain that these techniques have long been favored, and enthusiastically practiced, by America’s clandestine military-intelligencia.

And Naomi Klein’s new remarkable book, “The Shock Doctrine,” is a tour de force that details the USA’s close collaboration with tyrants and dictators around the world.

Both books offer not only good information, but copious citations to original sources, often declassified government files.

It’s a national disgrace that our country has endlessly preached human rights, freedom and democracy in public while simultaneously standing in private with murderers, tyrants and death squads.

Is it any wonder America’s reputation in the world lies in tatters?

Gary

Why should this be a societal goal? How about simply that those at the bottom (and there will always be a bottom) can lead comfortable lives and always have the opportunity to improve their lives?

Thanks for the link.  I have such huge respect for people who can think and write like that.

I could do little more than “feel” all this to be true until I read it.  Lapham confirms my belief.

I think it’s a little frightening.

Thomas, interesting read of my comment.  I am a socialist - hardly one to champion conservatism.  I understand rage. I applaud rage. I recognize rage as a legitimate reaction to oppression and coercion. 

Feces were not an example of liberal rage.  Feces were an example of rage - forget the liberal tag. 

E. J.‘s post deals with the demise of liberalism and the rise of conservatism.  My comment was directed at the root of the fall and thus the logical and almost predictable rise of conservatism to take its place.

Dear Felicity to use an a reference to fesces left on your property as an example of liberal rage is asinine.Liberal rage is generally directed at people like you who use these moronic examples directed at an entire movement directed at social fairness.Want to see conservative rage.Legislate regulations at derivatrives.Do me one favor and at least look up the dictionary definition of liberal before you make such ridiculous statements.I hope you are not one of the enraged conservatives who are getting booted out of your house.

I’ve always thought that it was when liberalism became identified with rage that its demise as a political, social and economic force in American politics began. The public manifestations of that rage paved the way for conservatism.

It’s hard to discount the war in Vietnam as a major source of rage among the young who were, afterall, the ones being forced to fight it.

(Our family summer cabin on California’s Russian River was periodically broken into and trashed during the years when the ‘River’ was a favorite hanging out place for hippies. Opening the cabin on Memorial Day and faced with the sight of human feces deposited everywhere but in the toilet, my mother would tell us that it was a sign of rage. It was palpable, even to us.)

RdV:  “And thanks to…” brilliantly encapsulates what went terribly wrong politically, propelling us to where we are today.

So the news is that Americans are stupid and this headlong rush into what is good for me instead of what is good for us has led us to financial collapse and George Bush.Well EJ we have only ourselves to blame.Our parents did a pretty good job from FDR to LBJ. We have only ourselves to blame for what has transpired since.Since the baby boom generation has taken over we have seen a steady decline in “us’and a steady uptick in “me”.How is that workin for you.The economies that remembered “us” currencies are burying us and we are borrowing from them.EJ I think you overstate the “we” in mourning the passing of Bill Buckley.His big contribution to the dialogue is he gave some sort of philosophic backing to racism and greed.Some contribution.Capitalism can only succeed if their is a robust and involved middle class that is convinced it has a piece of the action,FDR showed us that and I guess we have forgotten the lesson.They scrapped the fireside chats George Bush was going to give they did not think he was smart enough to chat.

The best explanation I’ve ever read for how America began its turn from hope to despair in 1968 came from Louis Lapham, the former august editor of Harper’s Magazine.

In an essay entitled, “Tentacles of Rage,” he lays out that the national restiveness in the mid 60s provoked a counterreaction from the seats of corporate power in the USA.

The entire, utterly brilliant essay is well worth a read and can be found at: http://www.mindfully.org/Reform/2004/Republican-Propaganda1sep04.htm

But here’s a teaser.

Gary

In the summer of 1968 the misgivings were indistinguishable from panic. Martin Luther King had been assassinated; so had Robert Kennedy, and everywhere that anybody looked the country’s institutional infrastructure, also its laws, customs, best-loved truths, and fairy tales, seemed to be collapsing into anarchy and chaos—black people rioting in the streets of Los Angeles and Detroit, American soldiers killing their officers in Vietnam, longhaired hippies stoned on drugs or drowned in the bathtubs of Bel Air, shorthaired feminists playing with explosives instead of dolls, the Scottsdale and Pasadena sheriffs’ posses preparing their palomino ponies to stand firm in the face of an urban mob.

Historians revisiting in tranquility the alarums and excursions of the Age of Aquarius know that Revolution Now was neither imminent nor likely—the economy was too prosperous, the violent gestures of rebellion contained within too small a demographic, mostly rich kids who could afford the flowers and the go-go hoots—hut in the hearts of the corporate chieftains wandering among the redwood trees in the Bohemian Grove in July 1968, the fear was palpable and genuine. The croquet lawn seemed to be sliding away beneath their feet, and although they knew they were in trouble, they didn’t know why. Ideas apparently mattered, and words were maybe more important than they had guessed; unfortunately, they didn’t have any. The American property-holding classes tend to be embarrassingly ill at ease with concepts that don’t translate promptly into money, and the beacons of conservative light shining through the liberal fog of the late 1960s didn’t come up to the number of clubs in Arnold Palmer’s golf bag. The company of the commercial faithful gathered on the banks of California’s Russian River could look for succor to Goldwater’s autobiography, The Conscience of a Conservative, to William F. Buckley’s editorials in National Review, to the novels of Ayn Rand. Otherwise they were as helpless as unarmed sheepherders surrounded by a Comanche war party on the old Oklahoma frontier before the coining of the railroad and the six-gun.

The hope of their salvation found its voice in a 5,000-word manifesto written by Lewis Powell, a Richmond corporation lawyer, and circulated in August 1971 by the United States Chamber of Commerce under the heading Confidential Memorandum; Attack on the American Free Enterprise System. Soon to be appointed to the Supreme Court, lawyer Powell was a man well-known and much respected by the country’s business community; within the legal profession he was regarded as a prophet ...

For the rest, go to http://www.mindfully.org/Reform/2004/Republican-Propaganda1sep04.htm

A mean legacy of greed, glutonous privilige at the expense of the common good—and as I heard someone state last night, “cowboy capitalism resulting in socialism for the Wall Street class”. Combined this with the “dumbed-down” voting against their own economic interests, subsisting on patriotic entreaties wrapped in the flag while the country goes down the drain and the world hates us.
  And thanks to the triangulating Democratic party DLC leadership that paralyzed party identity and effectiveness, the campaign against liberal ideas got a boost into NeoCon fascism.

It’ll take more than the weal liberalism of those who want to merely adjust a system that has lived beyond its usefulness. King understood the class contradictions that make real change—revolutionary change, a necessity. Had he been a liberal, he would have been satisfied with the few reforms he achieved and not continued speak out connecting issues of race, class, and War. While modern liberals remember the “I Have a Dream” speech, those of us that have moved beyond liberalism remember where later King’s struggles against the roots of poverty in the contradictions of class interest that perpetuate war and oppression.

First, government could hardly be bigger than it now is—under the champions of small government.  Slogans and lies!

Second, address poverty in this country and you’re addressing a whole host of other issues as well. 

“Small government” sayers, if you get right down to it, are saying “no” to ending poverty and that makes way too many Americans quite happy, which is why King’s dream, IMO, was a pipe dream. 

This country and the world will never come to peace until there is moral, political and ethical consensus, and I doubt consensus and an even distribution of wealth will ever co-exist, anywhere.