Thursday, September 22, 2022

Freedom, Now!


The 60s were owned by the Left. The military-industrial complex and the war in Vietnam were the targets along with segregation. You marveled at William Buckley’s verbal pyrogenics as he had it out with Gore Vidal on Firing Line, but you didn’t find either Young Americans for Freedom, the Daughters of the American Revolution or the John Birch Society marching in the streets. In fact, the very idea of protest was contrary to the conservative ethos, until the Tea Party came to town. Today, the tables have been turned. It’s the base, the deplorables, the lumpenproletariat or whatever you want to call the mass of white men and women who find themselves dispossessed by modernity, who populate rallies. Naturally the apex of this was January 6, but the rage at injustice expressed at Trump events finds no reciprocal component on the Left. "The deep state" is to today’s Retrumplicans what the military-industrial complex was to SDS, speaking of which the notion of "participatory democracy" argued by student radicals does bear some resemblance to the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys since it was not participatory at all. If you’d ever occupied a college campus in the 60s, you quickly realized it was a relatively small cadre who were running the show. The vociferousness of Trump’s supporters may to some extent explain the pervasiveness of The Big Lie (at least among MAGA Republicans). Where’s the Left? You need a crowd to impress the opposition with the fact that the biggest lie is The Big Lie.

read "Final Solution: Apres Coup" by Francis Levy, HuffPost

and listen to "Subterranean Homesick Blues" by Bob Dylan

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