Pete Buttigieg Is Worried About the "Revolutionary Politics of the 1960s," but We Need Them Now More

[David__77]

At the South Carolina Democratic debate, Pete Buttigieg made his latest play to paint Bernie Sanders as too big of a risk because of the democratic socialist’s revolutionary politics.

On the debate stage just days ahead of the “first in the south” presidential nomination contest, where Black voters made up 61% of the Democratic Party electorate in 2016’s primary, Buttigieg said, “I am not looking forward to a scenario where it comes down to Donald Trump, with his nostalgia for the social order of the 1950s, and Bernie Sanders with a nostalgia for the revolutionary politics of the 1960s.”

...

The first big question, especially for a southern Black crowd, might be how the civil rights movement squares with Buttigieg’s concerns about an era which saw Martin Luther King, Jr.’s rise to political prominence, and his tragic assassination; an era that gave prominence to the Black Panthers, Malcolm X, Medgar Evers, and many, many more Black leaders, whose work is still relevant today. These people, their work, and their movement are undoubtedly part of the “revolutionary politics of the 1960s.”

Or maybe Buttigieg is talking about the people fed up with the homo- and transphobic policies of the times, who rose up, in 1966, at Compton’s Cafeteria in San Francisco, and at the Stonewall Inn, in 1969, in New York? Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera, two of the most notably lionized figures to come out of Stonewall and the ensuing years of LGBTQ organizing in New York, even put the word “revolution” in the name of the organization they started to house and care for LGBTQ youth, the Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR).

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.teenvogue.com/story/pete-buttigieg-revolutionary-politics-1960s/amp

[beachbumbob]

1. 1972 was the culmination of "revolutionary politics" of the 1960, I truly do not wish to see

2020 as a repeat.

[David__77]

2. ...

Maybe 2008 was also a culmination of it.

[HarlanPepper]

4. My first thought exactly

The entire era was totally overrated. Great stuff on civil rights was accomplished but a whole lotta nothing everywhere else.

[Turin_C3PO]

7. Great Society happened too.

60s politics had an enormous effect on society. Plus, Civil Rights legislation alone would be enough to deem the 60s a success.

[HarlanPepper]

8. Sure

But I’m not as enthralled with Boomer era Glory Daze as others are. Pretty good era for music though.

[ehrnst]

5. That's a pretty big straw man you're going after...

And still you're "undecided" about a candidate?

[PlanetBev]

6. I hate to tell you, Pete

But Stonewall happened in 1969, right in the middle of all those “Revolutionary Politics” of the 1960’s. It’s part of why a gay man can now run for President and be taken seriously.