by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2015 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The PBS programs last night
were two “theme” shows dealing with the Viet Nam war on the upcoming (today,
actually) 40th anniversary of the fall of Saigon and the ignominious
end of the first war in its history the United States clearly and unambiguously
lost. The first was called The Day the ’60’s Died (note the numerical title — if you search the PBS
Web site for “The Day the Sixties Died” you won’t find it), about the May
5,1970 massacre of four unarmed student demonstrators by a detachment of
riot-squad equipped National Guardsmen who pulled rifles and deliberately fired
into the crowd. It’s important to remember that that’s what happened because
the mainstream media carefully avoided portraying the Guard’s actions correctly
until a photo surfaced two months after the massacre showing the Guardsmen in
formation deliberately and calmly firing into the crowd. Unfortunately, a
majority of Americans saw it differently; they agreed with President Richard
Nixon’s assessment of the student demonstrators as “bums” and not only
supported the Guard’s firing on the crowd, at least some people chillingly told
interviewers at the time (in film included here as documentary footage) that
they wished the Guardsmen had killed more demonstrators. The filmmakers regard May 5, 1970 as “the day the
Sixties died” because the massacres at Kent State and Jackson State University
six days later scared enough people out of the protest movement that the Nixon
administration really didn’t have to worry much about them even though popular opinion
was also turning against the war itself. In at least one sense the Sixties had
died a year and a half earlier, when Nixon had won the 1968 Presidential
election by using his and Strom Thurmond’s “Southern strategy” to cleave apart
the Democrats’ New Deal coalition that had dominated Presidential politics from
1932 to 1964 (in which the Presidency had been won by four Democrats and a
moderate Republican who continued and in some cases even expanded the New Deal
programs) and construct the Right-wing coalition that has more or less
dominated American politics ever since. As I’ve pointed out in these pages
before, between them Richard Nixon and George Wallace got 57 percent of the
Presidential vote in 1968 to Hubert Humphrey’s 43 percent, and those percentages
remained pretty much unchanged until the second Clinton election in 1996, in
which Bill Clinton parlayed the advantages of incumbency and a moderate image
(signing the bill to end “welfare as we know it,” proclaiming “the era of big
government is over,” repealing most of what remained of government regulation
of Wall Street after the successive assaults of Carter, Reagan and Bush I; as
I’ve argued here before, Bill Clinton was to Ronald Reagan what Dwight
Eisenhower was to FDR — the opposing party President who recognized and
cemented the finality of the political sea change his predecessor had wrought)
and pulled virtually even with the Republicans.
Even in 1992 the combined vote
for George H. W. Bush and H. Ross Perot was 57 percent to Clinton’s 43 percent
— and the only reason Clinton won whereas Humphrey had lost with a similar
percentage of the popular vote was Perot’s support wasn’t regionally based, as
Wallace’s had been; Perot got no electoral votes but won enough votes in key
swing states to “spoil” the election for Bush and the Republicans by swinging
them, and the election, to Clinton. The Day the ’60’s Died is a fascinating program that for me, who was in
high school when the college campuses were exploding into dissent and openly
and ardently sympathized with the New Left (and felt disappointing that I was
graduating from high school just as the New Left was fragmenting and
self-destructing, so I wouldn’t and didn’t get to be a direct part of it), had
a lot of historical weight
attached to it: the extraordinary expressions of Left-wing idealism, both their
hopefulness and their naïveté; the bizarre and almost insane insistence from
Nixon and his officials that they would not be swayed by anti-war protests; and
the way the issues were reframed by the Right so they could do what they’d been
doing since the McCarthy era and are still doing: argue that there’s a class war in America, all right, but not between the 1 percent and everyone else
economically. Rather, the Right’s version of the class war is between the
“producers” — the entrepreneurs who create great companies and the workers who
build things through them — and the “takers,” the welfare recipients and
overprivileged students and the intellectual academics who rule over them and
justify their sucking off the work of people who are really creating wealth.
One of the odder clips from this film, especially in terms of current debates,
is one of the Right-wing “hard hat” demonstrators giving a speech and sounding
uncannily like Elizabeth Warren today in saying, “You didn’t build that” — only
he means that he and his fellow white working people built the American
infrastructure, including the colleges the students were so energetically
trashing, and the class enemies he saw were not the rich people he had worked
for but the intellectuals who were teaching those students, training them to
hate America, and using the population as guinea pigs in their search for a new
social order that sounded suspiciously like the one the Communists were pushing.
The main representative of the Nixon administration on the program was Pat
Buchanan, and as offensive as he got in his smarmy self-righteousness, he was
absolutely correct when he said that there was a revolution that started in the 1960’s — and the
Right clearly, overwhelmingly and unambiguously won. We’re seeing the fruits of
that division in the U.S. today — the white working class (especially its male
members) definitively part of the Republican voting bloc and the bedrock behind
not only the Republican Party but the extreme Right-wing of it (the people who
have made Rush Limbaugh and the other Right-wing talk-radio hosts stars because
they not only say what these audiences feel, they say it the way they would if they were on the air — one of the great
tragedies of the 1970’s and since is how relentlessly academic the Left has
become in the U.S., to the point where we have literally forgotten how to talk to working people). The real winners of the 1960’s were the Young Americans for
Freedom and the shock troops of Barry Goldwater’s 1964 Presidential campaign —
in previous entries I’ve said that Goldwater was to the Right-wing majority
what Al Smith and his 1928 Presidential campaign was to the New Deal: the
campaign that, though it didn’t win, set the themes for the future campaigns
that would win elections for its
ideology and its programs. We are still living in the post-Sixties Right-wing
America, the one wherein the Republican Party was able to make itself the
majority by appealing to white voters with racial and cultural hatreds — and
though the Right hasn’t won all the battles since, either electoral or
cultural, they’ve won enough of them that they’ve been able to take over the
House, the Senate and the Supreme Court, and are just one Presidential election
away from full-spectrum dominance of American politics and the end of the
Progressive era and the New Deal once and for all.
