Clinton and the Counterculture
Berman, Paul
DID BILL CLINTON 'S impeachment crisis represent a continuation of the culture wars from the nineteen sixties? My three-part answer is: it did; did not; and vice versa. To wit: (1) The...
...The counterculture had a spiritual dimension, which got its start in the old American Puritanism, and made its way into the modern age by way of Unitarianism and literary transcendentalism...
...To people like that, Clinton's sexual enthusiasms and peccadillos have always been especially horrifying...
...Those traces have evidently driven a number of right wingers out of their minds...
...If evidence turned up tomorrow showing that Bill Clinton really did murder Vincent Foster, the right wing would say: See...
...2) On the other hand, the counterculture as pictured by crazed reactionaries was always a myth...
...Now, from that sort of countercultural point of view, Bill Clinton has never been an attractive figure...
...He has misled...
...Sometimes has lied...
...That's how it seems to me...
...The spiritual dimension was, above all, a cult of truthfulness, and a hatred of hypocrisy...
...To wit: (1) The impeachment did represent a continuation of the old culture wars, if only because a large part of the radical right thought it did...
...But, what can I say...
...Of course, I recognize that no one among the Republicans or on the right wing would accept my description of their perceptions and motives...
...PAUL BERMAN is the author of A Tale of Two Utopias: The Political Journey of the Generation of 1968...
...Now, if you keep in mind the elite liberal opposition to Clinton—the loathing for him that has been expressed by newspapers like the New York Times and the Washington Post (even if the journalists did not go so far as to endorse the impeachment)—you can see that the political crisis was something other than a continuation of the culture wars...
...Remember Charles Manson, the California hippie cult murderer...
...Those people, in the press and elsewhere, look at Clinton, and they shudder at the spectacle of a man whose inner life is other than transparent, and they shudder yet again at the violations of the sexual code, and the entire spectacle he presents is, to them, unbearable...
...It was a rebellion in favor of the direct, the unvarnished, and the authentic, against everything that is tricky and false...
...On the contrary, his craftiness as a politician has rendered him repulsive to a large number of people who remain committed to the old countercultural cult of authenticity...
...The right wing has been anti-Clinton because it is antisixties...
...Which is to say, traces of the counterculture of old do seem to be all over him...
...He has violated the code of authenticity...
...My notion of a dozen positions requires a long explanation, though, and this is not the place to make it...
...And so, the campaign by the Republican right to get the president thrown out of office did represent, in this one respect, a continuation of the culture wars of old—a desperate action by committed reactionaries, blinded by their hatred of the present and their zeal to restore the past...
...Clinton's craftiness, combined with his violation of the sexual code, explain why some of the most vehement condemnations pouring down on Clinton's head have not come from dyed-in-the-wool reactionaries but from liberal graduates of the elite universities, where the counterculture long ago helped to shape moral thinking...
...I myself have found Clinton increasingly sympathetic the more his enemies pile on...
...12 n DISSENT / Spring 1999...
...3) How to explain the differences in opinion about Clinton, then, if not by reference to the sixties counterculture...
...For he has not been direct...
...In addition, he has violated a highly anthropological bias, on the part of some people, against sexual relations between older men and young women—a devastating violation in the eyes of people who cling to that particular sexual taboo...
...I think that, in the matter of Clinton and his personality and his scandals, there are probably a full dozen points of view, not just two (pro-sixties and anti-sixties), and each of those dozen positions expresses a morality of its own, and each of those moralities derives from a different set of ideas about religion, individuality, sex, and truth...
...But far be it from me to identify my own opinions with those of the vast population of my fellow exhippies...
...but the elite liberal journalists have been anti-Clinton for a variety of reasons, including reasons that are pro-sixties...
...Bill Clinton has wavered in his governmental policies according to the political exigencies of the moment, but he has never wavered in his personality—has never wavered in expressing an air of cheerful informality and natural sensuality, in enjoying a black-influenced cross-over pop music, in having black friends, in being tolerant and friendly to homosexuals, and in having married a woman who is his professional equal...
...It is because, in a certain kind of rightwing imagination, the counterculture is a program for vice and crime...
...The sixties...
...And so, the actual relation of the counterculture to Bill Clinton and his scandals was infinitely complicated, and the ex-hippies came down on all sides of the matter...
...The actual counterculture, the vague thing that really did exist, was much DISSENT / Spring 1999 n I I THOUGHTS AFTER IMPEACHMENT more complicated, and among its complications was a very specific attitude toward truth...
Vol. 46 • April 1999 • No. 2
