The myth of the conservative 1960s

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

[This is an excerpt of a review of Rick Perlstein?s ?Before the Storm: 
Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus?, the most 
relentlessly hyped book this year next to Hardt-Negri?s ?Empire?. This 
would seem to be no accident since Perlstein tries to make the point that 
the really big thing happening in the 1960s was the conservative revolt led 
by Barry Goldwater rather than the New Left. Perlstein, a DSA?er, shares 
with the two postmodernists a desire to put a positive spin on all the 
wrong things. One thing you certainly shouldn?t expect from me, however, is 
a 10,000 word reply to Perlstein. I?ve got better things to do with my 
time. Perlstein interviewed me (and Doug Henwood) for the book but I have 
no idea whether I am mentioned or not. I was a member of the Young 
Americans for Freedom in high school back in 1960 and Perlstein wanted to 
know how I became a radical. Actually, the transition was not from 
conservatism to radicalism. I made a pit stop at existential liberalism 
while in my freshman year at Bard College in 1961, mostly because the 
people I respected most were left of center. I did not get involved with 
the radical movement until after graduating and working in Harlem as a 
welfare worker and facing the draft.

[The review is by novelist Kevin Baker and appears in the August 2001 
Harper?s magazine. While couched in standard liberal terms, it is 
exceptional for pointing out that Perlstein?s book is factually wrong as 
well as being politically fucked up.

[I met Perlstein once through an ex-friend Scott McLemee who shares 
editorial duties with Perlstein at Lingua Franca. Both were about 30 years 
old at the time and had the kind of sneering cynical attitude toward the 
revolutionary left that makes my blood boil.]

----
Perlstein writes of the "liberal consensus" the way that undergraduates in 
the 1960s spoke knowingly of the Establishment, or that today's 
undergraduates speak of The Matrix. Alternately referred to as "The Story," 
the consensus is an oppressive, homogenizing monolith, made up of the 
government, the military, big business, labor, and the media.

The consensus is, by its very definition, to be held responsible for 
everything, even the crudest fantasies of its opponents, such as a fleeting 
rumor that '"African Negro troops, who are cannibals' . . . , were secretly 
rehearsing in the Georgia swamps under the command of a  Russian colonel 
for a UN martial-law takeover of the United States.?

Back in Mr. Rogers mode, Perlstein explains that In America citizens are 
charged with making their own sense of the world around them. But they were 
refused the information to do so by Cold War secrecy. So they did what they 
could with the facts available. Secret armies trained in out-of-the-way 
forests did try to take over countries; we had tried it at the Bay of Pigs.

Elsewhere, a reader of Before the Storm might well conclude that 
unemployment was rampant in America in the 1960s when in fact it was 
negligible or, thanks to Perlstein's combing of back-page fillers and 
tabloid headlines, that the nation was a raging cauldron of random 
violence, psychosis, and discontent.

Much more disturbing, though, is the odious moral neutralism that Perlstein 
affects in order to debunk the consensus. Often his own rhetoric is 
indistinguishable from that to be found in the National Review. In the 
world of Rick Perlstein, no conservative has ever lost a debate, on any 
subject; few are ever less than brilliant and charming; and almost none 
ever makes anything less than a scintillating speech that instantly brings 
hordes of those sturdy proles ("S.P.'s"?) to their side. Meanwhile, the 
word "liberal" is almost never used without the modifier "smug" in front of 
it; liberals constantly "sputter," "simper," and act "patronizing"when they 
are not certifiable.

"In a clinical sense, Johnson's paranoia and bipolar tendencies bespoke far 
worse mental health than Goldwater's," Dr. Perlstein informs us, referring 
to rumors floated in the early sixties that Goldwater had suffered two 
mental breakdowns early in his career. The more racist and militarist 
sentiments of right-wing leaders are constantly downplayed while leading 
liberals are pilloried for lesser offenses. Perlstein insists, for example, 
that Goldwater's infamous tag line from his acceptance speech in San 
Francisco"I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no 
vice!? And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice 
is no virtue!" hardly differed in tone from President Kennedy's vaunted 
inaugural address: "We shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any 
hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, to assure the survival and 
the success of liberty."

Nonsense. Liberty and justice are by their very definition anathema to 
"extremism"; they are impossible without "sacrifice." Yet Perlstein is 
determined to legitimize the right. He refers repeatedly to a woman with a 
pro-Goldwater button who "became the Rosa Parks of the San Francisco 
streetcars when she flamboyantly defied the unwritten rule against women 
standing on the running boards and caused such a disturbance that she ended 
up getting arrested" a repugnant comparison, and one that serves only to 
suggest that Perlstein has not the least understanding of what either Parks 
or the civil-rights movement was all about.

Elsewhere he writes of how "more and more Americans, in fact, were 
beginning to look at politics as Martin Luther King did and as Barry 
Goldwater, Michael Harrington, Rachel Carson, James Baldwin, and Betty 
Friedan did as a theater of morality, of absolutes." But except for 
Goldwater, none of the above individuals celebrated "absolutes"! If 
anything, they stood squarely in the middle of the liberal, reformist 
tradition, fighting for such highly practical things as guaranteeing full 
citizenship for women and African Americans, reducing poverty, and banning DDT.

One has the feeling that Perlstein does not have a good grip on the era, 
particularly in his insistence on the whole idea of "the liberal consensus" 
in the first place. For proof, Perlstein offers mostly clips from period 
editorials and columnists and the stump speeches of politicians. This is 
the historical equivalent of proving the existence of the yeti by paying 
Tibetan peasants to show you its droppings. Insisting on the unity of the 
American people is a wish that politicians and editorial writers like to 
throw up into the ozone periodically, and you could as easily collect like 
quotes from any era in American history.

There was indeed a general liberal ascendancy from 1932 to 1980 or so, but 
it was never uncontested or all-powerful, never a consensus. Throughout 
this period, liberalism was under constant assault from plutocrats pouring 
money into anti-union drives and conservative campaign coffers; from 
reactionary southern and Republican congressmen blocking most progressive 
and civil-rights legislation; from red-baiters and professional moralizers; 
from the three quarters of the nation's newspapers that backed the more 
conservative candidate in nearly every presidential election.

In short, very much the political landscape that Perlstein describes as 
coming into being sometime around 1964. Key parts of the consensus keep 
coming off under his pen like, well, like petals on a daisy. The 
conservative movement rose for years on the cash of one corporate 
millionaire after another (so much for the business end of the consensus), 
generals urged nuclear war (there goes the military), and we hear of "Barry 
Goldwater's nine-year string of good press" and syndicated newspaper column 
(so much for the press).

Describing the Kennedy Administration's proposal of what would become the 
Civil Rights Act in the wake of the Birmingham protest movement, Perlstein 
writes:

---
In their conclusions the White House betrayed a constellation of unspoken 
assumptions about race relations about social relations in the United 
States: introduce bold legislation and the troublemakers would quit, like 
kidnappers who had been paid their ransom. Theirs was an almost desperate 
belief that America was by definition a placid place, if only "extremists" 
could be kept in check. That didn't just mean the racists who perpetrated 
the violence but also those who "disturbed the peace" on the other side by 
protesting racism.
---

But it is really Perlstein who is being naive here. These are the mechanics 
of democracies and their leaders we push them, and they pull us. It is 
highly unlikely that the sons of Joe Kennedy ever thought of America as "a 
placid place," but they were certainly trying to use legal measures and 
moral suasion to give black Americans what they wanted. Of course they were 
trying to promote harmony and prosperity. What else should they have done? 
Passed out arms? Ignored the whole mess?

The great story of the 1960s remains what liberalism accomplished. America 
became the first major state in modern history to guarantee the full 
citizenship of a sizable racial minority. And its civilian leaders 
successfully resisted the repeated, urgent appeals of its military chiefs 
to launch a "preemptive" war of mass destruction.

If you don't think that's so much, consider what a Goldwater administration 
might have been like, with its intimate ties to racist southern whites; its 
support for using nukes in Vietnam and invading Cuba; its stated 
determination to resume aboveground nuclear testing and, not least, its 
adoration of those same trigger-happy generals. (Here's Goldwater in 1963, 
before something called the Military Order of the World Wars: "I say fear 
the civilians. They're taking over.")

Perlstein has turned history on its head, but not as he thinks. "The 
consensus" and "The Story" are what hold sway now, not what held sway in 
the 1960s. That America was a place where a generation of liberal victories 
had produced a nation open and secure enough to throw up a Barry Goldwater 
and to refute him soundly. The apogee of the liberal epoch marked a 
brilliant flowering of cultural and political diversity, in which all sorts 
of views were entertained and debated, however raucously. If you turned on 
your television set in the 1960s even with a mere three channels you might 
have seen anyone from Malcolm X to the head of the Ku Klux Klan or the 
American Nazi Party, from Michael Harrington to Milton Friedman.

Quite a contrast to the imposed culture we have today. Perlstein, who is a 
contributor to The Nation, has made it clear that he would like to use 
Before the Storm as a rallying cry for the left that the triumph of the 
conservatives after Goldwater should be no different from the Democrats 
being able, in just a few short years, to elect a leader

?whose positions included halving the military budget, socializing the 
medical system, reregulating the communications and electrical industries, 
establishing a guaranteed minimum income for all Americans, and equalizing 
funding for all schools regardless of property valuations and who promised 
to fire Alan Greenspan, counseled withdrawal from the World Trade 
Organization, and, for good measure, spoke warmly of adolescent sexual 
experimentation.?

What he does not seem to understand is that majorities of Americans support 
many of those positions now, at least according to opinion polls, and it 
doesn't matter. For the triumph of the right has not been the triumph of 
some mass democratic movement but the triumph of Clif Whiteelite, privately 
financed cadres, adroit enough to discourage or ignore what most people think.


Louis Proyect, Marxism mailing list: http://www.marxmail.org