Origins of Dissolution

...Being relativists they cannot say it is bad, and being believers in Progress, they cannot be against the newest trend...

...Demands for instant perfection - "freedom now" - usually cannot be satisfied even when the objective sought is inherently legitimate...

...The Black Power movement was made possible by liberals who told Negroes that society owed them whatever they wanted and that they should blame society, not themselves, for all their ills...

...These divisions continue to be reflected in the liberal approach to defense and to the law and order issue...

...However, they are wont to "do their own thing" with a disregard of the right (especially property rights) of others who do not happen to share their proclivities...

...now clean up the mess you have made, or perish in it...

...Civil disobedience is incompatible with the maintenance of any civilized order, because it has an inherent tendency to spread - from the more sophisticated to the less, and from the supporters of one cause to the supporters of all causes...

...those who expect such demands to be satisfied completely disable themselves from responsible participation in actual democratic processes which are the best we have, and in many cases the best we are ever likely to have...

...Therefore, it is our lot to work with and support such liberal institutions as can be saved from the radical destroyers, until the time comes when we are strong enough to take leadership ourselves through established channels...

...Turn on, tune in, drop out" is just as revolutionary a message in its own way as "burn, baby, burn", and it is far more acceptable to most of its potential audience...

...When people speak of rejection of "middle-class values" it would be well to remember that, while they may start with sexual taboos, marijuana, and motivation toward material success, there is no basis either in reason or experience to expect the process of rejection to stop short with these values...

...The same year saw the emergence of the drug cult on campus which has done more than any other single factor to set the campus in opposition to the world outside, and which, of course, tends to bring them in conflict with the law...

...Furthermore, having no commitment to the American, constitutional system, and only a vague, generally left-oriented system of values, they are easily led back into the political arena...

...However, so intertwined is this establishment with the fabric of our society, and so entrenched are liberals in positions of leadership in our society, that the destruction of liberalism threatens to be the destruction of the society itself...

...If civil disobedience is a legitimate part of the decision-making process, why shouldn't they take it up, and if it is not, then why is it allowed to affect the decisions actually make in our society...

...student radicalism led to Berkley, Columbia, and San Francisco State...

...Many try to be "with it", while others serve on commissions to study it...

...Sit back and say "We told you so...

...So, what should conservatives do...

...However the first split in the anti-Goldwater coalition, that of the radicals, black and white, occurred by the spontaneous choice of these radicals, and so soon after the election it cannot be considered a result of Great Society policies...

...While radicalism was growing, liberals became progressively more split, with two groups appearing - what we may call left, or radical-liberals and center-liberals...

...We are not Utopians...

...It is a rejection of self-discipline, reason, and reality for self-indulgence, irrationality, and illusion...

...hence we must realize that we can only work with what exists...

...Both these strands of radicalism feed on such New Frontier ideas as the "revolution of rising expectations" (often deliberately created both at home and abroad...

...We have already fully experienced the results of the first of these phenomena, but the second has yet to run its full course...

...The Black Power movement led both directly and indirectly to Watts, Newark, and Detroit...

...Unfortunately we cannot afford such an attitude, because when the liberals receive their just deserts, it is our cities, our universities, indeed our country which will be destroyed...

...Even when things go to extremes and such cherished liberal values as academic freedom and free speech are under attack from the radicals, the liberals are usually unable to take a strong stand without leadership from outside their own ranks, and even when they do, there are always some who side with the radicals...

...It was a victory for an anti-Goldwater coalition made possible by a campaign of fear and distortion, run not only by the Democrats but also by the media themselves, before which anything the 1970 Nixon-Agnew campaign has been accused of pales into insignificance...

...But it was a result of liberalism, particularly as manifested in the rhetoric and action of the Kennedy administration...

...With the 1964 election out of the way the growing tensions within the Democratic Party were free to emerge...

...In that year the Black Power and student radical movements emerged with startling suddenness...

...tablished channels...

...As conservatives we also know that even a bankrupt leadership is not replaced all at once, except by revolution, which is the worst of all political evils, except tyranny...

...Both retained the idea of disobedience to an "unjust" authority, but discarded, or relegated to the tactical plane, the idea of non-violence...

...I believe it was this coming cultural revolution which Goldwater was trying to warn us about when, toward the end of the 1964 campaign, he began to emphasize the "breakdown of morality" in America...

...The breakup of such a coalition was inevitable, but it did not simply return American politics to the status quo...

...If those who are devotees of the counter-culture simply "did their thing" it might be annoying, but, as believers in individual freedom, conservatives might merely adopt an attitude of tolerance toward them...

...This same period saw another, not strictly political, phenomenon, that is, the emergence of the "counter-culture...

...Until 1965 radicalism was not a significant political phenomenon...

...both are deeply rooted in the attitudes and methods of the civil rights movement...

...Both movements rejected liberal methods, and at least some liberal goals...

...What has happened is that 1964 was the last victory of the Liberal Establishment, because liberalism itself is dying...

...It is but one short step from the non-political hippie to the Abbie Hoffman Yippie, or the nihilist- anarchist Weathermen-or for that matter the Charles Manson-type criminal...

...This is doubly true because the consequences of liberal policies for the whole society are coming home to roost at the same time that dying liberalism leaves us with a dearth of leadership, moral or political...

...the latter concentrated especially in the governmental, corporate, and union bureaucracies, were more committed to integration and the middle (Johnson) course in Vietnam...

...After Goldwater, the . . . Origins of Dissolution John C. Meyer Surveying the political scene today one finds fragmentation and disorder on all sides, yet only six years ago the Liberal Establishment was fresh from its greatest triumph, having united Liberal Republicans, trade unionists/white ethnic groups, Negroes, academicians, and even radicals for the defeat of Barry Goldwater...

...It was not a victory for a new coalition espousing a new program, as that of Franklin Roosevelt, but a negative victory...

...it serves you liberals right...

...The term "hippie" and the wide-spread phenomenon to which it refers both became current only in 1965...

...The former, concentrated especially in education and the media, became dovish and at least apologists for Black Power...

...But in the nature of that victory, the discerning eye could see the shape of things to come...

...At the time I though it was a false issue, but years later when I was engaged in the struggle with the radicals at Columbia, I remembered his words and knew he had seen deeper and farther than I. The liberal reaction to the cultural revolution is even more confused and ambiguous than their reaction to the political revolution...

...As it had to face the existential consequences of its theories of halfhearted struggle with Communism abroad and social engineering at home, the Liberal Establishment itself became divided...

...the student movement was made possible by liberal professors telling students that the American system is so rotten that they are justified in doing whatever is necessary to change it...

...The liberal intellectuals around Kennedy did not understand that the principle of civil disobedience, though it may occasionally be moral for a few highly disciplined individuals, is destructive of democracy and imcompatible with the maintenance of a civilized order over the long term...

...True, we are afflicted with Women's Lib, but the opponents of such leftist causes have yet to take it up...

...It is destructive of democracy because the very keystone of democracy is the idea that everyone must respect the results of the decision-making process, and that if one's side loses, one must wait until next time...

...Rather, history would seem to teach us that many will go on to reject the entire system of self-restraint which civilization imposes on the individual, leaving the natural man, otherwise known as the savage, free and unrestrained...