The Sixties (revised)

Obama is taking some flak for distancing himself from the MoveOn mentality and toward the faith-based mentality, and I thought I'd make an attempt to explain why I think it's probably a good idea. It is insofar as it  is part of a longer term strategy to explode the left/right/center media narrative that has developed since the sixties and that I wrote about the other day. The real issues before us are not defined by left vs. right, but by those who want to preserve democracy and the rule of law vs. those who are promoting or are ok with or don't care about the nation's drift toward a national security surveillance state. Nothing matters more than arresting this drift because of the threat it poses to the idea of America.

That idea isn't dead yet, but it's moribund.  Obama's campaign revived my hopes that it the idea might survive and move toward a greater realization of itself because he was right on the issues and because he understood to effect a re-alignment around those issues.  That means creating an atmosphere within the Democratic Party that is more hospitable to Main Street than many Main Streeters feel is currently the case.  And a part of creating that atmosphere requires moving away from the style of liberal politics that endoresed or  became associated with the New Left in the sixties.

You could make the case that the movement toward a national police state began in earnest during the fifties and sixties. Reading Rick Perlstein's Nixonland will educate those of you who didn't live through it and remind those of us who did why the new lefties of the sixties provoked the backlash that justified such a movement in the minds of many Americans. It's not that the Left was wrong about the war and race; it wasn't even that the the anger and frustration by many who opposed the war was unjustified--it was. Then as now bi-partisanship meant a shared commitment to idiocy, and that idiocy defined our national policy. It was infuriating. But the anger and frustration about the war combined with Black anger and frustration created a continuous media spectacle of riots and violent confrontations with the police that scared the hell out of most Americans, and they wanted the police to put an end to it.

Perlstein's narrative makes clear that the new lefties, no matter that they were right on the issues, developed a style of protest that was easy for Main Street to hate. They were deliberately provocative and divisive, and their tactics, rather than quicken the conscience of Middle America, provoked instead its disgust and in doing so delegitimated their cause. The New Left driven protests assumed the illegitimacy of the Johnson and Nixon governments, but neglected to persuade the rest of the country.

A precondition for the success of any political protest requires that the majority of non-protesters sympathize with the protesters. That's what distinguished the Civil Rights protests before the riots and protests like Solidarity in Poland.  The New Left tactics were more about expressing rage than effecting change, and despite their being right on the issues, their tactics delegitimated their positions.  People would rather be wrong than be associated with that rabble. Given the choice between the legitimacy of the state and its police powers and the legitimacy of the protesters who challenged that legitimacy, Americans chose the state.

Perlstein is very interesting in the way he describes the media coverage of the police brutality during the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago. The media was outraged at the police because the police was indeed over-the-top brutal.  But it soon became clear that the police were surrogates for what a majority of Americans would have liked to have done themselves--beat the living bejesus out of these ungrateful, morally degenerate, unpatriotic punks:

The media had left Chicago united in the conviction they were heroes, prophets, martyrs. "The truth was, these were our children in the streets, and the Chicago police beat them up," the New York Times's Tom Wicker wrote. "In Chicago," Stewart Alsop wrote, "for the first time in my life it began to seem to me possible that some form of American fascism may really happen here." Top executives at all the networks, New York Times publisher Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, Washington Post and Newsweek publisher Katharine Graham, Time Inc. editor in chief Hedley Donovan, and Los Angeles Times publisher Otis Chandler posted an unprecedented telegram to Mayor Daley excoriating the way newsmen "were repeatedly singled out by policemen and deliberately beaten . . . to discourage or prevent reporting of an important confrontation between police and demonstrators which the American public as a whole has a right to know about about.

Then they learned the American public thought differently. . . .

Bumper stickers proliferated nationwide: WE SUPPORT MAYOR DALEY AND HIS CHICAGO POLICE. Sixty percent of Americans polled supported the sentiment, and 90 percent of the seventy-four thousand letters City Hall relieved in the mail in the two weeks after the convention. It wasn't, they said pace Tom Wicker, their children being beaten in the streets of Chicago.  And these media mandarins, they said, weren't their moral authorities.

And the public being their customer, it wasn't long before the media mandarins' interpretation changed.

The editor of the Chicago Daily News, whose publisher had signed the telegram to Daley, abjectly apologized for one of his reporters who had shouted at policemen beating three women,"For God's sake stop that!": "He acted as a human being, but less than a professional, he was there as a reporter not to to involve himself."

Chicago's American was the conservative Hearst paper, and even their tough-guy, cop-loving columnist Jack Mabley had written about how "a policeman went animal when a crippled man couldn't get away fast enough." Shortly thereafter, Mabley climbed down from his short career as a cop critic in a moment of severe self-doubt: "80 to 85 percent of the callers and letter writers cheering for Daley and the cops: You can't help that gnawing feeling--can all these people be right and I be wrong?"

Godfrey Hodgson wrote of the media about-face: "They had been united, as rarely before, by their anger at Mayor Daley. Now they learned that the great majority of Americans sided with Daley, and against them. It was not only the humiliation of discovering that they had been wrong; there was also alarm at the discovery of their new unpopularity.  Bosses and cops everyone knew were hated; it seemed that newspapers and television were hated even more."  pp. 335-37

I quote Perlstein here to make a couple of points: The liberal media narrative was created in the sixties, and intellectuals and others who sided with blacks and anti-war protesters lost all credibility with Main Street. Not because they were wrong, but because they became associated with the forces of social chaos.  Their being right on the issues wasn't enough because they hadn't earned broad public legitimacy, and indeed supported the behavior of many whom the broad public perceived disturbingly illegitimate, which in turn caused them to lose whatever legitimacy they had.

It's not about facts; it's about legitimacy. The media types saw and experienced for themselves unfettered police brutality. Their initial outrage was more than justified. But Main Street thought the protests were illegitimate, so it was quite at one with what Daley and his police had done. Main Street was terrified by the social chaos that had been unleashed, and it looked to thugs like Daley to force the demon back into the box. People said they were for law and order, but put the emphasis on order--if the police have to step all over the law to insure order, so be it.  They saw it as the reassertion of a legitimate order on an illegitimate  threat to that order. Challenges to the status quo just don't work unless they are broadly perceived as legitimate no matter how legitimate the protesters' cause might be in their own minds. The first task for any protest is to earn  legitimation by the broad public. Being right isn't enough.

This is how police states are born.  And nine out of ten times when a confrontation develops between an angry mob and the power of the state, the state wins--and the majority applauds. Liberals and intellectuals sided with the angry mob in the sixties because they understood that the mob was right on the issues.  A majority of Americans sided with the police and the so-called law-and-order pols because they thought the world was falling apart and that was more of a problem for them than whether the war was wrong or whether blacks had justified grievances.

So this is why I think that any kind of progressivism that has a chance of working in this country has to dissociate itself from the delegitimated new-left style of the sixties. It has to bring Main Street on board, and the new-left style of liberalism still causes a kind of revulsion in Middle America that makes it extremely difficult for Main Streeters to look at the issues except through this distorting left-right, liberal-conservative lens. They see the issues in tribal terms, and the tribal alignments determine one's attitudes no matter what the facts on the ground might be.  And as long as those tribal alignments persist, it is very difficult for people who came to loathe "liberalism" in the sixties to support policies, even if they are in their interest, even if they are fundamental to the idea of America, if they are policies they perceive as  promoted by sixties-style "liberals."

How to do this is not obvious or easy, but it seemed to me early on that Obama was trying to find a way. I hope was right about that. I don't think MoveOn is some terrible fomenter of political illegitimacy, but I think it has limited Main Street appeal because of its association with sixties style liberalism. And so I'm all for any attempt to find a way to promote the legitimacy of challenges to the current political arrangements, and if it's necessary in order to achieve that to disavow the sixties style of politics practiced by the netroots or progressive "community", so be it. But it's a question of changing style and tactics without compromising on substance.  And that's a distinction that seems to have been lost on the Obama campaign the last week or two. A new narrative is growing that Obama is just a politician who talks pretty but doesn't really believe in anything. I don't believe that to be true, but he better not let such a narrative get legs.

I understand the need to be practical about political reality, but I think that his so far believable presentation of himself as the politician who finally will say NO to the kind of Beltway politics expediency-based is capital that he should be very careful not to squander. We'll see how much the expediency-driven decisions of the last two weeks in the long-run hurt him, but I think they did him more harm than good.

Comments

[Matt Zemek]

Jack,

That's chilling stuff from NIXONLAND. So many echoes of Tim Russert's career and its lessons--chiefly, that journalists must choose to either be unprofessional, loved and wealthy, or professional, hated and poor--can be found in those passages.

What's even more unsettling, though, is that Americans didn't trust the media (in 1968) when the media got it right. Now, Americans don't trust the media when the media gets it wrong... Yet, those same Americans who hate the media are still led to the same reactionary stance and fear-driven mentality that emerged after Chicago 40 years ago.

[Jack Whelan]

Matt--

The larger issue here which I try to make clearer in the revisions I posted this morning is legitimacy--which is what makes anything believable. The problem with intellectuals and liberals in general is that they think the facts alone confer legitimacy, and in political reality it just doesn't work that way.

That's the point of the story about how the press backed away from their condemnation of Daley. At first they assumed that the viewing public would be as horrified at police behavior as they were. They thought the facts spoke for themselves. Not so. It's all about a legitimating narrative that creates filters that allows only that information in which supports the narrative.

The challenge for Obama is to change the narrative of legitimacy as a precondition for the realignment necessary for changing the mindset that got us into Iraq, has us drifting toward a police state, and that prevents any sensible solution to the healthcare and energy mess. He needs Main Street as a power base to counter the power of special interests who will oppose him.

My ongoing argument here is that the secular liberal narrative has only the most tenuous legitimacy on Main Street. The Republicans have owned the narrative Main Streeters feel more comfortable with for the last thirty years. If Obama is going to be a truly transformational political leader, he has to change the legitimating narrative as Reagan did. But if he doesn't do it in the service of the common good and constitutional principle, it's worthless.

[Nate Wilcox]

What I don't understand is how MoveOn -- a virtual organization founded in 1998 -- has come to stand for the 1960s New Left. Eli Pariser isn't event 28 years old. Is the simple act of opposing a foolish war enough to qualify an organization for condemnation as part of "the new left"?
Was it their very ill-advised "Betrayus" ad? Howard Dean's scream? The fact that many of their supporters are middle-aged white women who quite possibly were active or sympathetic to the 60's New Left?

[Bonnie Prince Charlie]

The idea of a "legitimating narrative" is thought-provoking. I've been dealing with the "right-wing forward" problem a lot lately, with my in-laws sending all kinds of basically made-up messages about Obama being a racist, a Communist, &c. It's frustrating, because, as you say, I do assume that the facts speak for themselves. But they obviously don't. The facts just don't matter, and calling people to task for sending out messages with lies in them -- when you can demonstrate that they are lies -- doesn't do a bit of good.

An alternative "narrative of legitimacy" is indeed needed right now. Otherwise, we'll continue to fight about the dirty hippies for the next hundred years. I just hope Obama and/or his advisors are indeed thinking about more than just winning the election; otherwise, we'll wind up with another Bill Clinton.

[Jack Whelan]

Nate:

I personally don't have a problem with MoveOn, but check out this depiction of the Netroots by the so-called liberal New Republic: http://blogs.tnr.com/tnr/blogs/the_plank/archive/2008/07/02/hey-nutroots-you-lost.aspx You can't build a transformational politics with only netroots types. They're a part of the conversation, but they have to be brought into alignment within a larger emerging narrative, which, like the New Deal narrative, embraces relatively sane Main Streeters while remaining fundamentally progressive on the issues.

I'm not saying this is easy, but it's the key to any reasonably progressive politics establishing itself as an enduring presence on the American scene. I think the more sensible people on Main Street are sick of the GOP narrative and are open to be sold by the Dems on a new legitimating narrative, but to be legitimate it has to be different in style from the liberal politics that has dominated the Dems since the seventies. Or the GOP wins by default

It's not about moving to the center but about redefining what it means to be at the center. It's not about compromise but about standing firmly on principles that all decent Americans can appreciate and support. Trying to figure out how that can happen has really been the mission of the blog since Day 1.

My hope has been that Obama would emerge as a political figure that would embody and articulate the new narrative that I think is required to redefine that center. My dismay is based not on his betraying the sensibility of the netroots, but on his formulaic move to the center rather than his more aggressively redefining what that center means. His leadership task is to redefine, not just be defined. And certainly one of the things anybody at the center has to believe in is the rule of law and constitutional principle. Nevertheless, I still have hope that he might be able to do it.

I'm not dealing with or aware of all the pressures and difficulties he's facing, so I'm willing to cut him some slack until it becomes clear he's been defeated by the system. I see Obama as having an enormous opportunity to change the terms of the conversation, but that doesn't mean he'll seize it, and even if he does that he will succeed.

[Matt Zemek]

Nate:

Jack put it brilliantly, but I'll say some more:

First, not many care that Eli Pariser is only 28.

Moreover, yes, the Betrayus ad was a sellout move to Beltway attack politics that reinforced old modes of political operating.

The great paradox/irony of the Democratic Party is that it has always had available a real means of capturing the country: being different from the Republicans.

Now, you might scratch your head when you read that, but when you realize everything that Jack and Glenn Greenwald have been documenting over the years, the Democrats cede territory in debate before the debate ever has a chance to get started.

The Democrats are so obsessed with money, spin, and "looking tough" that they try to play the Beltway game, which--being vicious as it is--is a Republican kind of game. And when elections are ugly knife-fights in back alleys, and not cerebral discussions of facts and policy nuances, Republicans win (unless Republicans are caught having sexual episodes of some sort with gay men or underage boys).

All Democrats have to do is be, up and down the line, like Russ Feingold: stubborn, principled, not tied to money, above reproach in personal and political behavior, and so clearly authentic in speech and action as to be an undeniable living example of how politicians are supposed to act.

That's all Democrats have ever had to do to win the hearts and minds of Americans, but they insist on playing the Republican game and assuming that Republican talking points or Republican (argumentative) frames must necessarily be the ground on which elections must be contested.

We're definitely seeing it now with Obama, who is scared sh--less of appearing too friendly to Muslims, telegraphing to the whole country that he's afraid of giving the impression that he values Muslim people just as much as any other human beings, which sends the deeper message that he wants to fit a Republican mold of how a president is supposed to view the war on terror.

Ditto all of that with the FISA bill.

Pause for a moment and look at McCain: is he lurching leftward toward this mythical, mushy "center"?

Heck, no! He's lurching to the right. We're seeing the terrain on which this election is being contested, and it's Republican terrain.

The Democrats just keep making the same mistake of playing games on Republican terms.

Why would this be the case? Because Democrats are complicit in the system of money, greed, corruption and power, and their existence in the Beltway community matters more than reforming the country. They'd rather win by playing the conventionally understood game than win by reforming anything.

There once might have been a time when various Democrats of varying ages had a pure belief in what they wanted to do. But once you step inside the land called Beltwayville, everything about you--your values, perspective, methods, aspirations, hopes--becomes warped and skewed and distorted.

Democrats have to step outside the Beltway prison and be normal people. It always has been, and always will be, their solution.

As Obama is showing, though, they're not about to do this. For a man of Obama's considerable political (theatrical) gifts to not realize this is, on one hand, disappointing. But when you realize how deep this system gets its meat hooks into virtually all of its principal players (Russ Feingold is, sadly, a fringe figure in Congress), it's not very surprising at all.

When people like Feingold get marginalized by the press (and politicians) in such demonstrative fashion, it's little wonder, then, that the average American--who is struggling to deal with the rising food and gas prices--can pay enough attention and do enough homework to see through the prevailing Beltway narrative transmitted by the docile and compliant mainstream media.

It's a vicious cycle, and it's only through determined and robust oppositional leadership--which does the redefining Jack so superbly talks about--that we'll see any hope of change.

Don't expect anything soon.