"The youthful rebellion of the 1960s seemed so idealistic in its championing of racial justice, free speech and individual freedom, it is hard to fathom how it could be a manifestation of the same generation, which, 40 years later, was rolling back the New Deal and was enacting a horrifying parody of Wilsonian Internationalism in Iraq.
One thread I pick up in Mario Savio's speech is his hostility to institutional bureaucracy, policy and procedure: "depersonalized, unresponsive bureaucracy". Surely, those words, "depersonalized" and "unresponsive" would come freighted with meaning for Alice Miller or Melanie Klein.
The New Deal institutions were conceived of by people, who had witnessed desperate conflicts of economic interest in labor strife and the financial collapse of banking and ethnic and racial prejudice. The institutions were meant to resolve those conflicts fairly and regularly, in established procedures, to create a Frank Capra world. The ideas of useful constraint and Galbraith's countervailing power seemed conventional wisdom in the late 1950s. Clark Kerr, Savio's antagonist, was the founding director of the UC Berkeley Institute of Industrial Relations.
But, the generation, which had actually fought WWII had experienced an extreme of political solidarity under a leadership, which was competent and nearly selfless in its integrity. They had a remarkable faith in authority, a faith that would be betrayed in Vietnam.
The idealism of the Boomers about race and sexual politics seems to have lasted, but so did that hostility to bureaucratic authority and procedure. It was exploited to take apart economic regulation of the economy. And, in Iraq, the Boomers proved in a disastrous clinical experiment called Iraqi Reconstruction, that they had no idea of the institutional basis of politics, law or the economy, and no expectatons regarding integrity in administration."
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