That's valid, but also, non-conservatives didn't make white nationalism and the gun debate a big enough priority in 2004/2005. This was a time when liberals had already given up on protesting/ending the Iraq War, and the liberal youth were drinking & drugging in college while mostly remaining politically indifferent to their changing wor…
That's valid, but also, non-conservatives didn't make white nationalism and the gun debate a big enough priority in 2004/2005. This was a time when liberals had already given up on protesting/ending the Iraq War, and the liberal youth were drinking & drugging in college while mostly remaining politically indifferent to their changing world. The liberal youth of the 60's would have acted much differently in the 2000s than my generation did, but then again their asses were on the line via the draft whereas my generation's liberal youth was decadent, complacent, and indifferent and didn't have to think about things like drafts--just how shitfaced they were going to get the following Friday night.
Travis, You made a good point about the end of the draft having a lot to do with the loss of activism among young liberals. But, really, the contexts are entirely different and I don't think it's valid to valorize the '60s generation or come down on millennials. The '60s were exceptional in a variety of ways: a booming economy, a liberal political wave, a uniquely charismatic civil rights leader, a keen feeling of impending nuclear danger, and the dissonance of a failing war that was at that time unprecedented (we've had Iraq and Afghanistan since, so its strangeness may no longer carry the same wonder). There was rising momentum for activism in serial fashion (war protesters first were marching to ban the bomb, then to support MLK), and, most important, political theater of that style was something new that captured headlines and people's imaginations. Impact was easy and full of rewards. Moreover, once things reached a pitch in early 1968, there seemed to be the real opportunity to nominate a winning presidential candidate to implement all this idealism in RFK or McCarthy.
And what did young '60s liberals do when they hit real roadblocks: assassinations and the nomination of the "establishment" Democratic candidate? They sat out the 1968 election and let the new alliance of the GOP and the Dixiecrats become a new majority. Turnout in the climactic year of 1968, a neck-and-neck race, was *lower* than in the blowout election of 1964. The new reality that this clever choice produced led some to move off to the sidelines, while the others made the brilliant choice to go further Left and start the pattern of getting played for generations by strategic and attentive Right. By the time of Watergate, the '60s activists were mostly bystanders. That was when the rise of the militias began--not on your watch: by the mid-1980s the militia movement was full blown and tied to a resurgent Klan. (Domestic terrorism actually rose first on the Left, but all it did was discredit the non-violent Left.) The antiwar liberals were still in their 30s and 40s, but did very little. I think by that time, it wasn't at all clear what could be done. Contexts determine most of what activism means, and the clarity of the '60s context was gone--you can't recreate a time like that: you have to take good advantage of it if it appears on your watch.
I'll grant you that my generation excelled in double-tasking political activism and drugs, but I don't recall that as being very demanding. I'm sure your generation would have managed it with equal skill had you been born at the same time.
But there is one lesson I think we should all learn. In the '60s, many idealists were disciplined by ideas that were captured in Saul Alinsky's writings (which had been waiting for their moment for twenty years). These days, the people who seem to me to be reading Alinsky are generally part of the Alt-Right, and they've been beating the pants off everyone else.
True, Max (assuming you meant to add another 'n' here and there). But the Alt-Right and Insurrectionists are not one group. I'm thinking of the AFPAC, Turning Point, Project Veritas crowd, not the Proud Boys, Three Percenter, or Q types. I think the former group is a rough Right-wing reverse-counterpart to the non-violent young Left circa '68 (SDS, SNCC, Clean For Gene, etc.).
"The liberal youth of the 60's would have acted much differently in the 2000s than my generation did"
The "liberal youth of the 60s" turned into yuppies the second the draft was defeated and they weren't on the hook for any of the bad shit anymore. Meanwhile, the actual victories were won by people who were Silent Generation or older during that time period.
The same drive that leads them to behave as if everyone was at Woodstock leads them to claim victories for which they were no more responsible than the latter generations you're castigating. Americans haven't changed very much. *That* is the problem.
I concur. That doesn't mean that liberal voters didn't slouch politically in the 2000's. It was like liberals saw the conservatives getting hyper-xenophobic, heavily-armed, nationalistic, and imperialistic, and liberals just said to themselves "oh well, not important enough to fight this with the same collective concern I have for equal rights for minorities or climate change or abortion." Now we're at where we're at because the left slept on that fight and decided not to put one up. The closest we got to gun reform was after Newtown in 2012, but even then liberals folded to the NRA like a wet towel and never went after guns beyond "common sense background checks" that never came to pass.
You are correct that just blaming isn’t going to accomplish much if no responsibility is taken.
But we already know that the Rs stopped being patriots (in addition to a host of other problems). They aren’t going to change. They appear to be set on destroying our democracy, damn the torpedoes full speed ahead.
So the Rs aren’t going change and the Ds don’t change in response, we are going to wind up with more of the same. Which right now is a really bleak proposition.
"Dems have always been weaker in that they keep thinking the other side will come to see how unfair but they never do." This is actually you blaming the D's just like I am. I blame both groups really. Conservatives for putting party over country and liberals for putting social cohesion and decadence over principled fighting. Hence the usage of "we" in the OP. *We* own everything we're living through now. Can't put it all on the GOP when the dems have had no backbone on just about any issue outside of when George Floyd was murdered and the LGBTQ+ crowd wanted equality. I mean really, outside of marriage equality and BLM, what exactly have liberal voters actually fought with the same intensity that conservative voters fight their fights with? That's the liberal decadence that paved the way for conservatives to get away with everything they've been pushing for the last 20 years. Liberals ignored the need to *fight* politically on issues like gun control and combating domestic terrorism. Now their political enemies have allllll the guns and political militias and I don't see a new AWB coming to us anytime soon.
Trumpers have all the tools they need at their disposal to take the country by force and end democracy, and liberals gave it to them on a silver platter and then got shook when J6 happened. What did you guys think was going to happen when you ignored this problem for 15 years?
"What exactly have liberal voters actually fought for with the same intensity that conservatives fight their fights with?"
Ending slavery, civil rights, abortion rights, labor rights etc.
What more do you need? What is it you want liberal voters to do to make you think they are fighting with intensity?
I believe you are exaggerating (not purposefully) the amount of intensity conservative voters have. I read extremely right-wing sites too (i.e. Free Republic) and they make this same complaint about their voters compared to liberal voters.
I mean you're kind of making my point for me. You have to go back to other generations of liberals to find the ones who fought with the kind of intensity my generation of liberals lacked. When I speak about intensity I'm talking about how quickly they cave, and I'm talking about the voters--not the pols. Conservatives blame their pols for not being extreme enough and they're still pulling them further. Liberals have been moderate in terms of compromise the entirety of my adulthood dating back to 2003. Their voters *and* their pols. The sole issues that liberal voters came out in force on were LGBTQ+ equality and BLM. From 2001 until present.
Correct. But at least you guys put in work while you were young before you became decadent boot-lickers of the low-tax/high-growth model that gave us the economic inequality we live with today. My generation was born into its decadence, and frankly didn't do much when called to national politics until the economic inequality got so bad that it gave us OWS and the police brutality got so bad that it gave us BLM. It was only *after* my generation got slapped in the face with the inequality cultivated by your generation that we collectively got off of our asses and did something. But between the 60's and OWS in '11, liberals let a LOT of things slide in economics, policing, foreign policy, and national culture (guns, etc.). Now we're dealing with the fallout of them not fighting hard enough when these problems were small. Now these ignored problems are enormous.
So what will help our democracy? I see Republicans getting denigrated everywhere on the daily and it hasn’t done much to slow their roll up to this point. In fact, they appear to be doubling down on the crazy and paying no price for it.
I’m not sure talking up how powerful Ds are is going to get the Ds to start fighting in a way that actually makes a difference.
It’s clear to me by now that nothing is going to get the Rs to change so my best hope is that the Ds change and adapt to the new reality.
Well, of course I would agree with that! But I don’t think that’s likely to happen unless the Ds change their messaging along with some strategic and tactical changes.
The current status quo would seem to indicate that the Rs aren’t in danger of going anywhere. I don’t understand it but that seems to be the reality.
If we can't learn why we failed for the last five decades then how can we hope to win in the coming battles? Preparation for a fight is half the battle, and understanding that your side sucks at that part is how you *start* to get better at it. Refusing to acknowledge previous failures does nothing to prepare you for future trials either. It's just more of the same tactics being reintroduced without self-examination in the aftermath of the previous trials.
Comparisons are how you demonstrate the advantages/disadvantages of differing approaches. When those comparisons don't go your way, you can always change your tactics after comparing yourself to others who are more successful than you at performing the same tasks. Failing to change is failing to adapt, and Darwin told us some centuries ago what happens to groups that fail to adapt to their changing environments.
That's valid, but also, non-conservatives didn't make white nationalism and the gun debate a big enough priority in 2004/2005. This was a time when liberals had already given up on protesting/ending the Iraq War, and the liberal youth were drinking & drugging in college while mostly remaining politically indifferent to their changing world. The liberal youth of the 60's would have acted much differently in the 2000s than my generation did, but then again their asses were on the line via the draft whereas my generation's liberal youth was decadent, complacent, and indifferent and didn't have to think about things like drafts--just how shitfaced they were going to get the following Friday night.
Travis, You made a good point about the end of the draft having a lot to do with the loss of activism among young liberals. But, really, the contexts are entirely different and I don't think it's valid to valorize the '60s generation or come down on millennials. The '60s were exceptional in a variety of ways: a booming economy, a liberal political wave, a uniquely charismatic civil rights leader, a keen feeling of impending nuclear danger, and the dissonance of a failing war that was at that time unprecedented (we've had Iraq and Afghanistan since, so its strangeness may no longer carry the same wonder). There was rising momentum for activism in serial fashion (war protesters first were marching to ban the bomb, then to support MLK), and, most important, political theater of that style was something new that captured headlines and people's imaginations. Impact was easy and full of rewards. Moreover, once things reached a pitch in early 1968, there seemed to be the real opportunity to nominate a winning presidential candidate to implement all this idealism in RFK or McCarthy.
And what did young '60s liberals do when they hit real roadblocks: assassinations and the nomination of the "establishment" Democratic candidate? They sat out the 1968 election and let the new alliance of the GOP and the Dixiecrats become a new majority. Turnout in the climactic year of 1968, a neck-and-neck race, was *lower* than in the blowout election of 1964. The new reality that this clever choice produced led some to move off to the sidelines, while the others made the brilliant choice to go further Left and start the pattern of getting played for generations by strategic and attentive Right. By the time of Watergate, the '60s activists were mostly bystanders. That was when the rise of the militias began--not on your watch: by the mid-1980s the militia movement was full blown and tied to a resurgent Klan. (Domestic terrorism actually rose first on the Left, but all it did was discredit the non-violent Left.) The antiwar liberals were still in their 30s and 40s, but did very little. I think by that time, it wasn't at all clear what could be done. Contexts determine most of what activism means, and the clarity of the '60s context was gone--you can't recreate a time like that: you have to take good advantage of it if it appears on your watch.
I'll grant you that my generation excelled in double-tasking political activism and drugs, but I don't recall that as being very demanding. I'm sure your generation would have managed it with equal skill had you been born at the same time.
But there is one lesson I think we should all learn. In the '60s, many idealists were disciplined by ideas that were captured in Saul Alinsky's writings (which had been waiting for their moment for twenty years). These days, the people who seem to me to be reading Alinsky are generally part of the Alt-Right, and they've been beating the pants off everyone else.
True, Max (assuming you meant to add another 'n' here and there). But the Alt-Right and Insurrectionists are not one group. I'm thinking of the AFPAC, Turning Point, Project Veritas crowd, not the Proud Boys, Three Percenter, or Q types. I think the former group is a rough Right-wing reverse-counterpart to the non-violent young Left circa '68 (SDS, SNCC, Clean For Gene, etc.).
"The liberal youth of the 60's would have acted much differently in the 2000s than my generation did"
The "liberal youth of the 60s" turned into yuppies the second the draft was defeated and they weren't on the hook for any of the bad shit anymore. Meanwhile, the actual victories were won by people who were Silent Generation or older during that time period.
The same drive that leads them to behave as if everyone was at Woodstock leads them to claim victories for which they were no more responsible than the latter generations you're castigating. Americans haven't changed very much. *That* is the problem.
I agree. See my criticisms above. Still doesn't let my gen off the hook.
I concur. That doesn't mean that liberal voters didn't slouch politically in the 2000's. It was like liberals saw the conservatives getting hyper-xenophobic, heavily-armed, nationalistic, and imperialistic, and liberals just said to themselves "oh well, not important enough to fight this with the same collective concern I have for equal rights for minorities or climate change or abortion." Now we're at where we're at because the left slept on that fight and decided not to put one up. The closest we got to gun reform was after Newtown in 2012, but even then liberals folded to the NRA like a wet towel and never went after guns beyond "common sense background checks" that never came to pass.
You are correct that just blaming isn’t going to accomplish much if no responsibility is taken.
But we already know that the Rs stopped being patriots (in addition to a host of other problems). They aren’t going to change. They appear to be set on destroying our democracy, damn the torpedoes full speed ahead.
So the Rs aren’t going change and the Ds don’t change in response, we are going to wind up with more of the same. Which right now is a really bleak proposition.
Yes, the Democrat's biggest weakness is they constantly expect Republicans to behave like decent people.
I mean, that *is* a weakness given the context. "Fool me once shame on you, fool me twice shame on me."
"Dems have always been weaker in that they keep thinking the other side will come to see how unfair but they never do." This is actually you blaming the D's just like I am. I blame both groups really. Conservatives for putting party over country and liberals for putting social cohesion and decadence over principled fighting. Hence the usage of "we" in the OP. *We* own everything we're living through now. Can't put it all on the GOP when the dems have had no backbone on just about any issue outside of when George Floyd was murdered and the LGBTQ+ crowd wanted equality. I mean really, outside of marriage equality and BLM, what exactly have liberal voters actually fought with the same intensity that conservative voters fight their fights with? That's the liberal decadence that paved the way for conservatives to get away with everything they've been pushing for the last 20 years. Liberals ignored the need to *fight* politically on issues like gun control and combating domestic terrorism. Now their political enemies have allllll the guns and political militias and I don't see a new AWB coming to us anytime soon.
Trumpers have all the tools they need at their disposal to take the country by force and end democracy, and liberals gave it to them on a silver platter and then got shook when J6 happened. What did you guys think was going to happen when you ignored this problem for 15 years?
"What exactly have liberal voters actually fought for with the same intensity that conservatives fight their fights with?"
Ending slavery, civil rights, abortion rights, labor rights etc.
What more do you need? What is it you want liberal voters to do to make you think they are fighting with intensity?
I believe you are exaggerating (not purposefully) the amount of intensity conservative voters have. I read extremely right-wing sites too (i.e. Free Republic) and they make this same complaint about their voters compared to liberal voters.
I mean you're kind of making my point for me. You have to go back to other generations of liberals to find the ones who fought with the kind of intensity my generation of liberals lacked. When I speak about intensity I'm talking about how quickly they cave, and I'm talking about the voters--not the pols. Conservatives blame their pols for not being extreme enough and they're still pulling them further. Liberals have been moderate in terms of compromise the entirety of my adulthood dating back to 2003. Their voters *and* their pols. The sole issues that liberal voters came out in force on were LGBTQ+ equality and BLM. From 2001 until present.
Correct. But at least you guys put in work while you were young before you became decadent boot-lickers of the low-tax/high-growth model that gave us the economic inequality we live with today. My generation was born into its decadence, and frankly didn't do much when called to national politics until the economic inequality got so bad that it gave us OWS and the police brutality got so bad that it gave us BLM. It was only *after* my generation got slapped in the face with the inequality cultivated by your generation that we collectively got off of our asses and did something. But between the 60's and OWS in '11, liberals let a LOT of things slide in economics, policing, foreign policy, and national culture (guns, etc.). Now we're dealing with the fallout of them not fighting hard enough when these problems were small. Now these ignored problems are enormous.
Tbf, when we fight really hard for something everyone calls us progressive socialists that are going to end up destroying the party/country. :shrug:
So what will help our democracy? I see Republicans getting denigrated everywhere on the daily and it hasn’t done much to slow their roll up to this point. In fact, they appear to be doubling down on the crazy and paying no price for it.
I’m not sure talking up how powerful Ds are is going to get the Ds to start fighting in a way that actually makes a difference.
It’s clear to me by now that nothing is going to get the Rs to change so my best hope is that the Ds change and adapt to the new reality.
Well, of course I would agree with that! But I don’t think that’s likely to happen unless the Ds change their messaging along with some strategic and tactical changes.
The current status quo would seem to indicate that the Rs aren’t in danger of going anywhere. I don’t understand it but that seems to be the reality.
If we can't learn why we failed for the last five decades then how can we hope to win in the coming battles? Preparation for a fight is half the battle, and understanding that your side sucks at that part is how you *start* to get better at it. Refusing to acknowledge previous failures does nothing to prepare you for future trials either. It's just more of the same tactics being reintroduced without self-examination in the aftermath of the previous trials.
Comparisons are how you demonstrate the advantages/disadvantages of differing approaches. When those comparisons don't go your way, you can always change your tactics after comparing yourself to others who are more successful than you at performing the same tasks. Failing to change is failing to adapt, and Darwin told us some centuries ago what happens to groups that fail to adapt to their changing environments.