1968: Lessons Learned Did the left learn from 1968? Dissent asked veterans of a turbulent year
Berman, Marshall
Dissent's editors asked a number of leading writers and intellectuals of the left to respond to the following questions: "Nineteen sixty-eight was one of the most tumultuous years in the...
...First, Senator Eugene McCarthy dared to challenge President Lyndon Johnson, made a trenchant analysis of the war, and then, in early primaries, did remarkably well...
...Barack Obama was against the war from the start, and predicted exactly what was going to happen...
...Maybe now our country could find a way out of its maze...
...Two of these candidates, Hillary Clinton and John Edwards, supported President Bush and his call to war in 2003...
...The learned ignorance of this moment gives me the creeps...
...My mother and I saw him say this on televiDISSENT / Spring 2008 n 5 SYMPOSIUM sion, and we both thought, "Wow...
...In the end, after Kennedy was assassinated and the Democratic National Convention chose Johnson's vice president, Hubert Humphrey, as the candidate, the poison spread through the summer and into the fall...
...Both candidates are smart, sophisticated people, but both are surrounded by followers who are dragging them (and us) down...
...What made early 1968 such a thrill was that these great men were acting heroically, taking risks, stretching themselves...
...Thus Clinton supporters insinuate that Obama is a secret Muslim, subsidized by variSYMPOSIUM ous Arab dictators...
...At the end of March, Johnson performed his own one heroic act: he recognized himself as an obstacle to peace and took himself out of the presidential campaign...
...They have a future together, and all of us have a future with them—and with John Edwards as well...
...But then King was killed, and hundreds of blocks around the country were burned down...
...This surprise upgrading of the street was the backstory behind the great sixties street romances of Jane Jacobs, of Paul Goodman, of Motown's "Dancing in the Street...
...now, in the midst of another imperial war, he is hoping to be heard again...
...It's saturated with irony: Fogerty in his youth was a star, right in the middle of the Vietnam War—his songs were loved by soldiers, it was said...
...In this, its fortieth-anniversary year, we ask, What is living, what is dead, and what is hobbling and wheezing, in the many-faceted, transcontinental legacy of '68...
...In fact, these two groups of liberal Democrats stood for very similar things...
...As Peter Fonda's character proclaims in the last line of Easy Rider, the cinematic hit of 1969, "We blew it...
...Day by day," he sang, "I hear the voices rising/Started with a whisper like it did before/Day by day we count the dead and dying...
...With all our greening, we burned and crashed in self-destructive rage...
...The great Walt Kelly, creator of Pogo Pos6 n DISSENT / Spring 2008 sum, offers a line that tells us more about 1968 than we want to know: "We have met the enemy and he is us...
...if their man lost, they would vote for Nixon—since the other was just as bad as Nixon—or else they would vote for a third-party candidate (lethal in a close election), or they would stay home and abstain...
...he made the connection clear between America's racism, its exploitation of workers, and its imperial destruction of large parts of the world...
...Dissent's editors asked a number of leading writers and intellectuals of the left to respond to the following questions: "Nineteen sixty-eight was one of the most tumultuous years in the history of the modern left...
...Obama supporters vilify Bill Clinton more or less in GOP language, and say that he simply dictates Hillary's positions on everything, and that she has no mind of her own...
...The presidential election that brought Nixon to power, and 1968 to an end, disclosed another crucial feature of the sixties that I and people on the left would rather leave out: our streets and our cities were turning into very violent places...
...In the winter of '08, many smart people seem to be losing touch with what they know...
...The song's refrain is Did you hear 'em talkin' 'bout it on the radio Did you try to read the writing on the wall Did that voice inside you say I've heard it all before It's like Deja Vu all over again...
...CHARLES DICKENS, at the start of A Tale of Two Cities, his novel of the French Revolution, portrays 1789 as a magical year that crystallized "the best of times" and "the worst of times" within itself...
...I hope Clinton and Obama will get a grip, and help us all overcome 1968...
...By challenging a popular president, both had shown plenty of guts...
...What did they get wrong...
...Then as now, most discourse about urban violence (and there was plenty) blamed lower-class blacks...
...But their supporters overflow with spleen and malice...
...This is also true about their positions on health care, on education, and so on...
...And then, for the next two months, supporters of McCarthy and supporters of Kennedy acted like they could kill each other...
...It felt like a terrific moment to be alive...
...AYEAR OR TWO ago, a couple of years into the Iraq War, I felt we were learning...
...that's my Déjà vu All Over Again...
...if they were greenhouses, many of their plants were poison...
...The uncanny feeling of "1968," of what it was like to be here then, was that somehow, maybe for fifteen minutes, all these pretentious labels were real...
...Without anybody planning it, the streets of the sixties became the greenhouses where both our antiwar movement and our counter-culture grew...
...Our real "urban renewal" was that Americans came to recognize their city streets as public space, as the heart of democratic life...
...everywhere they revealed a thickness and richness of street life that nobody had thought was there...
...Early in the sixties, street fairs came from nowhere and throve everywhere, in cities all over the country...
...Edwards-watchers say the same about him...
...It's a sad song, sung like a dirge, yet optimistic, affirming faith in "that voice inside you" and in our capacity to read "the writing on the wall," to see through what is being done to us and done in our name...
...Their crucial idea, which they themselves may not have fully grasped, was doing politics in the street...
...Street life gradually took on a new meaning, a new gravity and depth...
...But both groups of supporters had whipped themselves up into frenzies of rage and hate, and convinced themselves there was no way they could live with each other...
...and that truth was paying off for them...
...What did '68ers get right...
...Living through 1968 in America felt like this, though "the best" was concentrated in the year's first half, and "the worst" in its last...
...Please don't reminisce (or don't only reminisce) or recount your personal engagements...
...Don't they know they need each other...
...As the Iraq War went on, several strong Democratic candidates emerged, all offering powerful critiques of the war and promises to end it soon...
...Can't they see that whoever gets nominated, these two will have to work together over the long haul...
...I thought that Hillary was signaling her supporters that it was Against Her Better Judgment...
...It takes me back to the McCarthy-Kennedy campaign, and the Siege of Chicago, and "We blew it," and Nixon taking over...
...Democratic peaceniks destroyed each other, and the truly dangerous Nixon stepped over the bodies...
...With such friends, they don't need enemies...
...he addressed not only the war, but what was wrong in the country as a whole, and how the whole of American society was falling apart...
...then, for years, he disappeared from sight...
...but it could be that he felt freer to speak precisely because he was out of federal office in 2003, and so beyond presidential reprisal...
...The early months of 1968 unfolded a series of thrilling moments...
...How is knowledge of their successes and failures useful to us today...
...In America, the cauldron that overflowed in '68 had been boiling for years before...
...McCarthy, who had moved first with few resources of his own, showed more guts, but I thought Kennedy would make a better president...
...that they were not only telling the truth, but telling complex truths that didn't fit easy formulas...
...There was a brilliant song by John Fogerty, "Deja Vu (All Over Again)," that compared what we were learning from the Iraq War today with the knowledge we achieved in the Vietnam War...
...Then Robert Kennedy finally entered the presidential race and spoke with a horizon far wider than McCarthy's...
...The point is, their positions aren't all that different...
...With all our degrees, we didn't know who we were...
...I think it started in the late 1950s, when the small, student-run civil rights movement started stopping traffic on street corners, in bus terminals, in front of department stores...
...The best" of 1968—indeed, the whole idea of "1968"—lay in the fusion of the mass movement against the Vietnam War with cultural currents that had flourished and grown all through the 1960s...
...Martin Luther King, Jr., wasn't running for office, but trying to lead a Poor People's Campaign...
...Tell us instead what might be learned from '68 for the future of the left...
...MARSHALL BERMAN'S latest book is New York Calling, co-edited with Brian Berger...
...The clichés that our mass media used to describe them—"the counterculture," "sex, drugs, rock-and-roll," "the greening of America"— for once conveyed something real...
...But the November triumph of Nixon and his demagogic "Southern strategy" a long-term disaster that still poisons American political life, grew directly out of violence perpetrated by left/liberal middle-class whites against other left/liberal middle-class whites...
Vol. 55 • April 2008 • No. 2
