"...Savio, like so many young radicals, was a brilliant but very troubled young person, who never in the long run found a real focus for his relatively short life. What fascinates me is the resonance this message found among his audience. They had grown up in a relatively prosperous United States, one far more economically egalitarian than the one we live in today. Just a few months earlier, the US Congress had taken a dramatic step forward toward racial equality with the great Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the Voting Rights Act was only months away. Lyndon Johnson had declared war on poverty. They were enjoying a better education than is available anywhere in the US today, for which, if they were Californians, they paid absolutely nothing. Yet many of them embraced the role of downtrodden subjects of a cruel system, and in the next five years, they set the tone of left wing politics from that day to this. Why?
"The Boomers who made up the bulk of Savio's audience (born 1943-46) came from a mass-produced generation. Their parents regarded them as naturally great, and had laid down simple paths that they expected them to follow gratefully to success--all the more so because so many of their parents had had to struggle very hard through Depression and war to make the same journey. Postwar America was the Garden of Eden that they, like the old testament God, had created for their children. But those children, like Adam and Eve, were determined to eat from the tree of good and evil, and make their own judgments. No matter how kind their world might be, they had not designed it. They resented their parents' certainty that all real truths had been discovered, and were looking for new ones. And meanwhile, in that same week in December 1964 that Savio spoke, a high-level committee in Washington, as I later discovered, was planning the Vietnam War...." DK
I could not conveniently refer to them, and then make a comment, as a comment on his site, for reasons of space......
I want to make some comments on these two paragraphs, at some point. Maybe not right now, but soon.
Just looking at the Savio audience, born 1943-1946 according to DK, I would not have characterized them as "Boomers" (Wikipedia says Boomers go from 46-64, so his audience were not Boomers at all really) in the typical meaning, but rather FDR War Babies, children born of those who often were even too old to fight even in 42, adults during FDR's long Presidency.
Most of these people naturally were on the Left, as much of his Administration also was.
They were a group, big picture, who were anti Western Europe, anti white West Imperialist, and anti American capitalist, and even anti middle class frankly.
Many of them were relatively recent poor refugees or immigrants, Italians (very often Sicilians), Irish, Scottish, Germans, eastern Europeans, Jews, people who had lived hard poor often violent lives in early to mid 20th Century Europe, and or been persecuted.
They got lucky because this was a rich country, expanding, and neither war was fought on our soil, and we entered very late in both, and were the big economic beneficiaries, with Russia, of the second.
We were just lucky. The Second WW and its outcome were the only things that finally gave this ragged violent racist and ethnically hateful hodge podge a golden opportunity for prosperity, not any action by the American government, not FDR's New Deal at all really.
Prior to that, we had finally got into WWI 1917, mainly to help Russia, a fellow revolutionary republic under the Bolsheviks, not to help the Jews or the European Powers at all, quite the contrary.
In terms of surrounding circumstances contributing to a climate of leftist protests, one only has to survey the big picture of what the US had done with WWII. It had finally forced the end of the European Empires, forcing what was called democracy and self determination on an enormous number of them, claiming that it was liberating them from the dead hand of white European Imperialism to join a new world economic and ethnic order of racial blindness and economic equality and equal opportunity for everyone on the planet.
Is it any wonder then that Fazio's young radical audience, who had often been war children of leftist Rooseveltian immigrants who had seen an equalitarian bonanza seemingly suddenly created for them and their war children by that ideology of globalist liberal social welfarism, protested that all restraints imposed by Western inequalitarian capitalism should be torn down, in the 60s?
By the early 60s, they had seen a whole world of colored people, liberated from the white race by the United States, march off into the free and prosperous sunset of universal culture.
The best analogy for 1963 here is 1763. Wastrel Revolutions For the Hell of It
Call it a 200 Year Wastrel Cycle
Not that I was in favor of war in Asia against so called communists, but white wastrel protest communism and negro power here were both toxic. They didn't go together except for the Soviet program.
Coddle white wastrel communists and negroes radicals at home.
Kill communists of color abroad.
The Soviets had been all over the American radical negroes since the beginning. MLK's organization was highly infiltrated with CPUSA Soviet operatives as well as Soviet illegals as such. See eg The Mitrokhin Archive, Index: King, Carmichael, etc., see also p. 238 especially, Service A.
This is another DK passage, a great summation:
I would point out, here, as an extended aside really, that capitalism is one of the ways, beginning only in the 19th Century, of describing the European Powers, and Britain, against which the American colonists had been the first to rebel, as Michael Howard had put it. They had not at all been rebelling against capitalism, nor in fact imperialism, really.
Their rebellion had not been put in those terms, in the 18th Century, where religious sectarian terminology, and religious liberty, had been the way they thought of things.
Even concepts of representation or contractarianism were anachronisms later overlain onto religious disquietudes in under-regulated and under taxed colonies.
In this country, radicalism against Britain, and against Western Civilization itself, went back to before its very beginnings in 1776, in certain Reformation era religious revolutionary and sectarian ways of looking at rebellion, of protest and dissent, against what was viewed at times as arbitrary and or autocratic monarchic or ministerial or parliamentary authority, whether vested in monarchs, emperors, popes, even Reformation Anglican prelates of the Church of England. Clark does a good job of exploring these issues and distinctions. The Language of Liberty, Our Shadowed Present
Imperialism, on the other hand, as distinct from capitalism, went back to early times. What the colonists were objecting to would have been called mercantilism rather than capitalism (in which they were in favor), from at least the 16th Century forward, but even this term was coined, by its critics, only in the early 19th Century.
Here is another great passage:
"Within three more years, the student movement had largely disintegrated as draft calls shrank and sectarian splits turned pieces of it against one another. Many activists rejoined the mainstream, and many more became local activists of various kinds, with little or no interest in national politics. But simultaneously, during the 1970s and 1980s, the idea of a corrupt system became more and more popular among certain types of young academics, those focused upon race and gender. The civil rights movement, the feminist movement, and later the gay rights movement all began as attempts to open up access to an existing political and economic system and give everyone an equal chance. Yet beginning with the Black Power movement in the 1960s, younger civil rights activists began renouncing integration into a corrupt system in favor of a radical critique of that system. Many feminists, and eventually LGBT activists, took the same tack, which dominated black, women's and gay studies programs in colleges and universities. This, in my opinion, was in part a self-interested and self-centered activism among young academics. To argue that one's own group had traditionally been excluded and silenced was an argument for giving more members of it academic jobs, and that spirit is still very much alive, as a recent letter by black Princeton faculty shows. And in the last, critical step, all the intellectual and political achievements of western civilization increasingly fell into disfavor, seen as instruments of straight white male oppression against "marginalized" groups. These achievements included most of the western intellectual tradition, free speech, and representative democracy itself. In my opinion, much of the new scholarship about white people and western civilization is projection on the part of female and nonwhite academics. Having become obsessed with race, gender, or both, they assume that western civilization has been equally obsessed with those categories. In fact it has been less obsessed with them than any other--which is why the ideas of racial and gender equality are almost unique to the West...." DK
I will just start by pointing out similarities between the fragmentation of the early 60s protest movement discussed at the top of this long paragraph into various single issue protest groups, each and all now calling the American system itself a corrupt system to be overturned and replaced, following the lead of the Black Power movement DK mentions.
Without going further along in this paragraph, it is useful, in my judgment, to think here, by analogy, of the various sectarian religious groups, each often identified with particular colonies, which each found its own reasons to oppose the rule of Britain in all the colonies, and which eventually fitfully and reluctantly banded together, not around any of their particular and disparate sectarian focuses of theological grievance, but rather around a least common denominator Jeffersonian confabulation of taxation representation, anti Popery, and anti oppression rhetoric similar to that which had characterized British Isles 17th Century revolutionary and civil war unrest.
My own view is that the colonists' grievances, and the progression of the American rebellion are better characterized by analogy to what DK describes as self-interested and self-centered activism, all surrounding circumstances considered, than anything else, including oppression, excessive unrepresented taxes, slavery of the white population, or military occupation by a standing mercenary army.
Lord Dunmore's Proclamation plays into the self interest and self centered argument rather than against it, and my rejoinder to arguments downplaying the slave issue would be that by then the colonists' true self centered self interested colors had already emerged for the British to act on. Certainly this is also generally the view of some acute experts on the subject, notably Professor Robert Allison at Suffolk.
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