Burnt Orange Report

Counter-Cultural Ninjas

By Jim Dallas

Commenter Scoop Jackson Democrat on Gregsopinion wrote recently, in a colloquy:

Indeed, the more I thought about it, the more I realized that I am so troubled by MYDD, DAILY KOS, the Kossacks, the Deaniacs, ACT, MOVE.ORG and Michael Moore precisely because they remind me of the "Get Clean for Gene McCarthy" crowd in 1968, McGovern's Army in 1972 and the people that a man I used to despise named Spiro T. Agnew called the "Rad-Libs." He went even farther than that. Agnew, a true hate monger and a crook convicted of taking kick backs, called the Rad-Libs "nattering nabobs of negativism," a phrase that I believe that the frequently sneering and supercilious William Safire coined for him.

I've been reflecting on this for a few days, and I think I've realized a few things.

First, I think if you did a poll of people who volunteered for Howard Dean, and similarly, Kossacks, I think you'd find enough differences between our clique and the 60's "Rad Libs". To be sure, you'd also find similarities, and, particularly among the younger supporters, some genuine respect for post-civil rights radicalism. But, like myself, I think you'd find a lot of the younger bunch that didn't actually remember the 1960s may very well have a lot to learn. Nonetheless, this is a different bunch. The real hippies, after all, were for Kucinich. Moreover, the new-new left is a lot more pragmatic and classicly-minded than a lot of people give credit for.

I posted a couple of weeks ago about "protest culture", and about a week ago the American Prospect ran a critical essay on the "spirit of '68." Quoting that essay:

The idea’s salience arises from its respectable lineage in American political thought, which stretches back to Thomas Jefferson and John Dewey. Dewey believed democracy required a home in the local neighborhood where discussion and association took place. When members of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) gathered in Michigan in 1962 to write the famous “Port Huron Statement,” they outlined the demands of participatory democracy and invoked Dewey’s ideals. But they also invoked a jargon of authenticity taken from existentialist philosophy. While embracing “a democracy of individual participation,” they hoped to find “a meaning in life that is personally authentic.”

But there’s a problem with proclaiming both of those as goals: Authenticity of the self and actually living in a democratic community with other citizens who hold varying opinions are two very different -- if not, in fact, irreconcilable -- demands. In Chicago, the two ideals clashed, and authenticity won out. Protesters pitted themselves against the inauthentic masses -- the police, those who believed in the Vietnam War, the “pigs.” When this occurred, participatory democracy no longer supplemented representative democracy but replaced it; authenticity displaced the challenge of deliberating with other citizens who might disagree. To be authentic meant to give direct expression to desire rather than to work through a longer process of changing representative institutions. It focused on what George Cotkin, the historian of American existentialism, called “catharsis.”

The Washington Monthly article I linked to in my original post did not get as philosophical, but hit on the same point: that protest became symbolic and expressive rather than pragmatic and effective.

Which brings me back to the Dean campaign. To what extent did support, particularly towards the end, become more about making a personal statement (and from the campaign's view, about mass numbers) rather than about actually winning the election? To an extent, I think for a lot of us the means became the ends.

This phenomenon was not limited just to Perfect Stormers. The entire Democratic effort seems to have been focused on the wrong things. Rather than adopt a business-like attitude, as the GOP machine did, we focused so much on being authentic that critical gaps in the campaign emerged, which, ironically, resulted in the grassroots getting detached from their own communities, and in mobilization rather than persuasion.

The new-new left (or the counter-counter-counter-culture, since the Deanies and Kossacks and MoveOn are as much a response to the centrist politics and distancing-from-the-nutters of the Clinton-era as they are a continuation of the original counter-culture) is faced with the choices which the "Rad Libs" were faced with 40 years ago. How do we walk that thin line of being pragmatic and effective while at the same time not perceiving that we are "selling out"? Needless to say, the Rad Libs flunked that test pretty badly.

I don't know. But I encourage you all to think about this problem. As well as brush up on philosophy (do we need a new grand unified theory of everything? probably. is it possible? perhaps not.)