The View From 1776

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Depending upon how delicately one may wish to phrase it, liberal/Progressives have their heads either in the clouds, or in the wrong end of their anatomy.

Too many Americans since the Boomer generation of the 1960s and 1970s have remained juveniles living in a fantasy world where reality is reduced to a video-game abstraction.  The liberal/Progressive juvenocracy’s attention was momentarily captured by Iraqi, but, for them, its just a political game that they can demand be stopped whenever they get bored. 

Liberal/Progressives have grown up (chronologically, though not emotionally) with life viewed as a Marshall McLuhan “Massage.” The media, not what’s actually happening in Iraq, is the ‘message’ in our mass age.  They see nothing wrong, no adverse consequences in demanding that we abandon the Iraqis and immediately repatriate our troops from Iraq.  It’s just a political game, another abstraction.

But before the McLuhan mass-media effect, before the Vietnam War, the first war reported graphically each day on their TV screens, Americans were of tougher, more realistic fiber.

At the end of World War II the United States was the strongest nation in the world, with booming industries and full employment.  And the public felt entitled to a bit of largesse after twelve years of Franklin Roosevelt’s failure to end the Depression and four years of World War II.  The GI Bill of Rights sent more young people to college after 1945 than ever before in the nation’s history.  Too young to have had any personal knowledge of the ethos that prevailed until 1929, they fell under the sway of college professors who, while not radicals, were strong advocates of socialist ideas.  Thus started the process that led the returning veterans’ children, the Baby Boomers, to become the student radicals of the late 1960s.

Those radicals, at Cal Berkeley, Columbia, Cornell, and elsewhere were essentially anarchists.  Their mentors were professors like C. Wright Mills, who preached that society was a conspiracy of the Power Elite to suppress the people.  Irving Howe, the dean of the Old Left American socialists, said of New Left student activist leaders like Mario Savio, Tom Hayden, Rennie Davis, Abbie Hoffman, and Jerry Rubin, that they reminded him of 1920s Soviet Party Commissars.  They were militantly determined to destroy everybody and everything.  It amounted to burning down the house to get rid of the bedbugs.

Radical socialist Herbert Marcuse in “Eros and Civilization” gave the students a theoretical basis for a hedonism founded on Freudian Epicureanism and Marxian socialism that translated into “Make love, not war.”

Paradoxically, Marcuse was also a transmitter of his native Germany’s authoritarian and statist philosophical tradition, which is at the root of liberal/Progressivism.  In the philosophical vein commencing with Immanuel Kant, the good political state was one that compelled its citizens to act in accord with the political state’s definition of acceptable conduct, i.e., the social justice of atheistic socialism.  Whence came Marcuse’s advocacy of the speech and behavior codes that bedevil almost all of our colleges and universities today.

Michael Harrington, the chairman of the American Socialist Party, said of the student radicals, “They are angry militants who see the poor as a new force in America, perhaps even as a substitute for the proletariat that failed.” The New Left’s distinctive flavor was “a sense of outrage, of having been betrayed by all the father-figures” that grew out of the Korean War and the McCarthy hearings, later to be intensified by the Vietnam War.  To the New Left, the whole of society, including the Democratic and Republican liberals and the Old Left radicals, had become hypocrites who gave only lip service to social justice for the poor and civil rights for the Negroes.  They wanted a dictatorship of the proletariat (led, of course, by the students themselves).

Beginning with the 1963 Free Speech Movement at Cal Berkeley and on through the student occupations and sit-ins at Columbia, Harvard, Cornell, and other Eastern schools into the 1970s, the academic world was turned on its head.  College administrators, caught between the need to minimize bad publicity and the demands of students, began to allow callow, ignorant student activists to determine what classes were to be added to the academic curriculum and even to participate in selecting and discharging professors.  It was the beginning of what Lewis Feuer called “juvenocracy”.

Student radicals admonished their brethren not to trust anyone over thirty, so adults began trying to look and act younger, as the youthful counterculture became the dominant ethos.  Adult men let their hair grow long, donned bell-bottom pants, and necklaces, but succeeded only in looking silly.  Families came unglued as wife-swapping and drug abuse became fashionable pursuits. 

As a consequence, what our children have been taught in public education since the 1960s serves to destroy the moral and social fabric of our constitutional system.  Children are told that traditionalist virtues of their parents are old-fashioned nonsense.  They are taught that they should feel free to do whatever their raging hormones and lack of experience make them desire, that the only standards are what their peers condone. 

In short, the effect of the liberal jihad on education is to stand society on its head, to make the immature and selfish desires of young children the standard of society.  It is to make society a juvenocracy, a creature of fad and instability.

The counter-cultural effect was certainly a long-lasting, industrial-strength one.  Today, liberal/Progressives give lip service to “supporting our troops,” but their actions make clear that military personnel are for them objects of cynical disdain, while they have made entertainers and athletes the most glamorous and astronomically-highly-paid group in history.

Hedonism, not patriotism, is the McLuhan TV ‘massage’ for liberal-Progressives.

Unencumbered by even a grain of understanding about the real world and how a complex economy functions, the 1960s and 1970s student radicals, denouncing the Vietnam War, recommended, “Bring the war home, destroy the power elite, kill your parents, and ice the pigs!”

The same level of juvenile instant-gratification and immaturity governs today’s recommendations for immediate troop withdrawals from Iraq. Liberal/Progressives resort to any ploy, no matter how destructive to our troops or to our national interests, because it’s all part of a political game.

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