1968: Lessons Learned Did the left learn from 1968? Dissent asked veterans of a turbulent year
Walzer, Michael
IT WAS OPPOSITION to the Vietnam War that filled my time and occupied my mind in 1967 and '68. I was one of the organizers of Vietnam Summer in '67 and then of the Cambridge Neighborhood...
...many of them, too, are salt of the earth...
...A 24 n DISSENT / Spring 2008 SYMPOSIUM few of the CNC activists moved into draft resistance, but most of us were committed to electoral politics...
...A Harvard graduate student in sociology, later an editor of Dissent, did a study of the '67 referendum, and the findings were disturbing to old leftists—and even to new ones...
...we wanted to be where the people were, or where large numbers of them were, and that seemed to require engagement within the Democratic Party...
...So: we oppose this war, but would fight whenever necessary to defend our country...
...We favor resource transfers to the global poor, but insist on a decent welfare system here at home...
...It brought large numbers of men and women, mostly young men and women, into a life of political engagement (and many of us are still engaged...
...That was roughly the same percentage that similar campaigns achieved in Flint, Michigan, and San Francisco...
...Jean-Jacques Rousseau has some admirably harsh lines about people who love humanity but can't get along with their neighbors...
...But our effort to be where the people were produced the same odd result as in the referendum...
...In the old language, we had strong bourgeois support and virtually no working-class support...
...There is nothing wrong with people who pay high rents or own expensive houses...
...Too many leftists in those years believed in the maxim of "No enemies to the left...
...is a better maxim...
...What's wrong became clearer the next year when I was working for Eugene McCarthy...
...Next time, we have to do better...
...In the CNC, we didn't spell America with a "k" and we didn't wave Viet Cong flags, but some of our allies did, and we never figured out how to distance ourselves from them...
...Not good enough, obviously, especially since we had chosen the most favorable sites...
...If we are not connected, it must be because we disdain parochial loyalties...
...But no left or liberal candidate can win an election with that kind of support...
...DISSENT / Spring 2008 n 2 5...
...And then it is necessary to do what we didn't do in the sixties...
...So the citizens of Cambridge were invited to vote for or against the war, and about 40 percent of them voted against...
...It's when leftists fail to connect with the people whose side we think we are on that we are tempted by vanguard politics...
...What is wrong with this picture...
...One strategy is to focus on bread-and-butter policies, on welfare, health care, and the minimum wage, where we have a good chance to convince large numbers of our neighbors and to stand with the people we are standing for...
...Confronting patriotic citizens from Cambridge's working-class neighborhoods, who were far more likely than our supporters were to have kids in Vietnam, we had neither charity nor humility...
...And I still believe that our position on the war was the right one...
...But we were a little too sure about that rightness and a little too proud of our high-mindedness...
...The CNC circulated petitions to put a question about the war on the November ballot and, after a number of legal challenges, succeeded in doing that...
...Or, more scientifically, the higher the rent you paid, the greater the value of your house, the more likely you were to vote against the war...
...we are universal men and women—we are really connected to Vietnamese peasants and to all the oppressed peoples of the third world, even if they don't know it...
...Or, we are tempted by a kind of virtual politics...
...We are dissidents and internationalists, yes, but committed at the same time to American well-being...
...its institutional legacy is virtually nil...
...But sometimes we have to go public on harder issues—to oppose a war or call for massive foreign aid or set limits on the tough-minded pursuit of national security...
...For all of us who were part of it, the left upsurge in the 1960s, the politics of civil rights and opposition to the Vietnam War, was wonderfully exciting...
...Look at the results more closely, however, and you will see a far more serious problem with what seemed to us the most obvious kind of left politics...
...So we sent volunteers to New Hampshire in February 1968, and we even succeeded in forcing the Boston/ Cambridge Democrats to include a few of our people among the delegates they sent to the Democratic National Convention that summer...
...we have to defend our positions in ways that respect the emotional and intellectual commitments of our fellow citizens...
...That is not a formula for democratic success, because it is your neighbors who vote...
...Though we never did a survey, I am pretty sure it was true that the higher the rent you paid, the greater the value of your house, the more likely you were to support McCarthy...
...0 NLY CONNECT...
...I was one of the organizers of Vietnam Summer in '67 and then of the Cambridge Neighborhood Committee on the War in the fall of that year...
...But it did not produce a sustainable politics...
...The problem of left politics, then and now, is how to hold unpopular opinions and still connect with "the people"—or with enough of them...
...In fact, it contributed to forty years of rightward momentum that, only now, is there any prospect of stopping...
...It changed American culture for the better in many ways...
...We oppose torture because America was founded on a rejection of "cruel and unusual punishment...
...If we are not connected, it must be because we are so far out in front...
...And the result was that we made enemies to our right that we didn't need to make, men and women whom we needed to have as friends...
...MICHAEL WALZER is co-editor of Dissent...
Vol. 55 • April 2008 • No. 2
