Do You Ever Wonder If Our Politics Are Still Fighting Over The 60's...

[WillyT]

I know it's more complicated than that... yet it seems like that fight, whatever it was, was never resolved. And is still being fought... Even among Democrats.

[Fumesucker]

1. Not quite, our politics is still fighting the 60's..

The 60's was a bottom-up culture, not top-down.

That scared the bejabbers out of TPTB and they stomped it hard.

[Deep13]

2. The 60s?! The right is trying to undo the New Deal. nt

[WillyT]

4. True... But The PTB Were Definitely Challenged By The Ethos Of The 60's...

The people inside and outside the Democratic Convention (1968) had different goals... and Richard Nixon won.

[merrily]

15. The ethos of the 1960s may have been the reason for passage of the Great Society and

the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Just as the Russian Revolution and the dire misdeeds of the 1% that caused the Crash of 1929 had a lot to do with the New Deal.


Good thing the 1% is so well protected now, eh?

[merrily]

21. The left was demonstrating for civil rights and an end to the Vietnam War.

They were not wrong.

[merrily]

23. I wish it were only the Right.

Then again, I guess it depends on how one defines "right."

[world wide wally]

3. Just a few years ago, Newt Gingrich said that he wanted to destroy every remnant of the 60's...

Proves he's an asshole.

[merrily]

16. He's by far not the only one.

[butterfly77]

19. Well...

he needs to hurry up and die along with his old ideas.

[merrily]

22. And that would solve America's problems?

Newt has plenty of company in both the Republican and Democratic Parties. And his economic agenda is not are not far from those of neoliberals.

[butterfly77]

24. Sounds good to me.

[Tikki]

5. Where I grew up in E. Washington State in the 60's, I knew the majority of 60's kids would….

grow up as conservative adults and they did…on cue. They are painfully typical and follow the plan.

When I was a young girl I grabbed the hand of the one young man in my crappy town that thought more progressive
and we skattled out of town as fast as we could.

We are in a more comfortable place…that might be a bit of what stalls progress.



Tikki

[JDPriestly]

7. I don't know anyone who was liberal in the 1960s and is now conservative.

How did I manage to miss that? Maybe it is because I live in California.

[Tikki]

9. They acted out the 60's and then they became their parents. I could see it early and I knew...

we had to leave or we would have wilted on the vine.

Well you are correct…like they say: Find yourself in California…and we did.

There are a few brave who still fight the good fight where we grew up, but
I couldn't have done that…I am being honest...

The Tikkis

[jtuck004]

10. GAAAA! I'm living around a bunch of broken people. They were like me in the 60-70s? And now

they are this?

Maybe it was the mercury in the river...

[merrily]

17. I am not sure many of the activists in the 1960s knew what they were up against.

They were getting it, but I think most people even today don't fully appreciate what the 99% is up against.

[jeff47]

25. Actually, they didn't.

Or at least the vast majority of people keep the same political leanings from 25 on.

Two things happened.
First, is there actually was something to the "silent majority" bullshit. Polls of baby boomers showed them to be about 30% "hippies", 30% moderate, 40% "Nixon Youth". Younger boomers are much more conservative older boomers.

The Vietnam war caused a lot of moderates and conservatives to support anti-war causes, thus making it appear that there were more liberals in the 60s. But outside the war they were not liberal.

The other thing making it appear that people grew more conservative is our society moved to the left in the intervening years. A conservative in the 1950s believed in segregation, teaching creationism, and executing gay people. A conservative in 2014 believes "those people" are a little worse than whites, teaching creationism, and trying to marginalize gay people.

That 2014 conservative hasn't changed his views, society changed what the 'right-most' end of acceptable opinion is. He went from "right" to "far right" without changing any opinions.

[2naSalit]

6. this evening

I watched that Richard Wolff video on "The cure for Capitalism" or something like that...

http://www.democraticunderground.com/1017174647

And he tells a more detailed version but what he's saying is that there are the rich who are trying to undo the New Deal and why. His claim is that FDR made the rich and the corporatists give him all the $$ he needed to make jobs and fix the depression, and they did as long as he compromised with them. And he did, and they gave him the $$$. What was the compromise? He left the capitalist structure, that the corporations and the "haves" could still make all the decisions about who, what, when, and where the profit was used and who could have it. Sure he got regulation but that's gone now and it only took them eight years to crash the system again.

It's well worth the watch, it's over 2 hrs but totally worth it because he offers a proposal for a cure rather than a fix. It won't be easy to change what we have regardless of the direction we choose but his idea has merit and could be something to strive for. But WE have to make that happen, of course. And it won't be easy or pretty. But then, what we have now sure is ugly, just like it was back in the 20s and the 30s and the 40s and the 60s.

Our politicians have been fighting the 60s lately but they have been consistently fighting the people vs the capitalists since FDR.

ETA: sadly, it's obviously now the politicians and the corporatists/capitalists vs the people. Not sure I can attach a starting date to that.

[cemaphonic]

8. Just look at the postconvention election season in 2004

Everybody on both sides couldn't stop talking about Vietnam.

[merrily]

12. Thank goodness that had nothing to do with people who did not look European.

[merrily]

11. Which 60s? 1660s? 1760s? 1860s? Or 1960s?

Last edited Mon Feb 10, 2014, 05:09 AM - Edit history (1)

Racism and white European male privilege was the original sin of America. We've never expiated it. To the contrary, it is being continued, even on this board.

[delrem]

13. Big money clamped down HARD on press freedom after the '60s.

Now the MSM is so totally embedded that puppets in fake uniforms standing in front of green screens like MSNBC's star "reporter" Richard Engel are considered "cutting edge reportage".

[merrily]

18. Not only after the 1960s. Peter Zenger had a harder time than Ellsberg and the NYT.

I think Engel is a tool.

ETA: The American Civil Liberties Union formed in 1915. Guess why.


Anytime the 1% (formerly the 10%) of this country have felt threatened, they clamp down with one side of their mouths and talk about being more fair with the other side.

[vicman]

14. For a surprisingly large segment of our population...

the "Civil War" never ended. What happened after FDR and WWII was the greatest redistribution of wealth experienced by any modern country. It built the strongest engine for universal prosperity the mind of man could ever conceive. The wealthy have always seen the middle class as a theft from what they knew was rightfully theirs. Since they elected Ronald Reagan, they've been taking all of that wealth back. They promised they would. They've succeeded.

[merrily]

20. Something older and broader than the Civil War continues.

European settlers brought slaves with them and thought nothing of slaughtering First Nations or following the British tradition of denying significant rights to women. And, in one form or another, the mentality continues.

[liberal_at_heart]

33. Yeah, there are some, not all, but some Caucasian men in this country who think that

they are the only ones who deserve freedom. The very first law our Congress ever passed was that only white men could own land. That mentality has never gone away. They are very angry that black people, Hispanics, Asians, women, Native Americans, and any other minority have any kind of freedom at all.

[JoePhilly]

26. Yea ... the 1860s!!!!

[TBF]

31. You beat me to it -

they are much further back than the 1960s for sure ... I'm not the only one calling this the 2nd gilded age. Folks like Mark Zuckerberg being compared to Carnegie, Roosevelt and Mellon ...

The more things change the more they stay the same. At least for the poor ...

[upaloopa]

27. We are fighting over the New Deal, The New Fronter and

The Great Society.

[randome]

28. Big cultural events have ripple effects.

We are still paying the price for WWII. For the Korean War. The Vietnam War. The changes didn't stop once the wars did.
[hr][font color="blue"][center]A ton of bricks, a ton of feathers. It's still gonna hurt.[/center][/font][hr]

[malthaussen]

29. The Revolution was not televised...

... the Counter-Revolution, however, gets all the air time it wants.

-- Mal

[stillcool]

30. I've come full circle..

War, human rights, corruption, bigotry. Just as then, I don't believe most of what I read, and know the system is rigged. Maybe it's just a matter of living long enough to see my own history repeating. God, I hope not. I barely made it through the 70's.

[polichick]

32. Some of the think tanks were designed to stop the progress of the 60s...

So in a very real sense, we still are fighting those battles.

[CK_John]

34. absolutely, this is Easy Rider all over again. Long hair vs always wrong tea party aholes.