On July 1 I wrote here:
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."
The New Left understood that the game was rigged, and it sought through it's often polarizing tactics to "heighten the contradictions". The New Lefties understood that because the game was rigged, there was no hope of changing anything through the normal channels. Heightening the contradictions meant forcing a polarization that flushed out the true motives of the power establishment with the idea that once revealed low-information Americans would be radicalized by their disgust. The New Left succeeded in flushing out the latent brutishness and fascism in the system into the open; it failed insofar as most Americans were ok with it.
The polarizing tactics of the New Left were wrong then, and they would be wrong now. You could make the argument that the New Left empowered movement conservatism, and is indirectly repsonsible for the situation worsening. If you can't finish the job, don't start it. In failing to kill the beast, which was never a possibility, all the New Left accomplished was to make it really, really angry and to reinforce its defenses. But that doesn't mean that their fundamental analysis was wrong. The system was rigged then, and thanks in large part to their failure-dooomed tactics is worse now.
The contradictions have heightened since then, but still not to a point where the system collapses for being unable to contain them. The New Left tried to engineer such a collapse, but it had the opposite effect. And besides, no power system can be brought down until it is too rickety to stand. What was true of France in the late 18th Century or Russia in 1917 and the Soviet Union 1989 was not true of the U.S. in 1968. Collapses don't come from political action alone. Political actors can only give an already collapsing structure a little shove, but ultimately the system falls of its own dead weight.
Are we at the beginning of such a collapse here in the U.S.? I don't know. Things feel pretty rickety to me, but what do I know? And it's certainly not something that I want or would look forward to, because the suffering in this country would be great. I don't want my high-school-age son, who is still so wonderfully optimistic, spirited, and full of possibilities to have to live through such a painful period fo chaos and adjustment. And I don't want to live through such a period, either.
I want us to find another way, and I still have some hope that some way can be found for aligning the system with real reality rather than its own contrived reality. Real reality has this funny way of asserting itself. Either you work with it, or it will work against you. But most of us, me included, prefer our delusions, and nothing changes until the pain becomes to great. The human capacity for denial is so great that things have to get much more uncomfortable before there is any collective will to do anything. So until a majority of Americans, including the players whom the system now benefits, become truly alarmed, things will just keep on keepin' on.
In the 1930s there were factions in the power elite who were capable of making the necessary adjustments. The country was lucky to have a pragmatist and a decent leader and communicator like FDR in the White House. I don't know if we're headed into something like the 1930s again. I hope not. But if we do, better that we have FDR in the White House than Herbert Hoover.