The Taint of '68

'WHY don't we just vote to strike tonight - and we'll decide to morrow what we're striking for?"

Those were the words of a student protester thoughtfully deliberating at Yale University, as recounted by Roger Kimball in his book on the left, "The Long March." It was a question that captured much of the heedless spirit of the student demonstrations of the 1960s, for which "May 1968" is shorthand.

That spring 40 years ago saw a radical takeover of Columbia University - eventually duplicated at other elite campuses - and student protests around the world. In France, the government was rocked to its foundations; in the Eastern Bloc, a crevice was opened up in the Berlin Wall. Here at home, campus life became synonymous with a straitened leftism, and the post-World War II political consensus shattered.

Before we had our long national nightmare (Watergate), we had our long national temper tantrum. In America, student protests were an indulgence of the privileged, a wail by baby boomer kids raised in unprecedented affluence against their parents' authority.

To accuse of "fascism" a generation that bled in the mud of Normandy fighting the Axis took a massive historical ignorance and overweening self-regard. The New Left had both.

Now, we honor the baby boomers' parents as "the Greatest Generation," but we haven't given up the romance of their kids. We remember the '60s protesters as beatific flower children, aching idealists opposed to the Vietnam War. Airbrushed from the popular imagination is the nihilism, the thrill of the wrecking ball, that animated the vanguard of the New Left.

Means relate to ends. If a movement thrives on the takeover of buildings, non-negotiable demands and threats of violence, it is an unmistakable sign it is coercive and illiberal, no matter how vehemently it invokes "liberation."

I saw it all first hand. It was contemptible. As Rich Lowry says, the bitter fruits of those days have poisoned academia thoroughly. What he doesn’t mention is that leftists are disproportionately in control of academia now because attending graduate school was one way to extend your draft deferment and avoid going to Vietnam. It was easier than fleeing to Canada.

If anything, most “humanities” departments have gotten steadily worse over the years, and still have not reached the bottom of the sewers they are exploring.

"the Democratic Party's challenge is to free itself from the taint of 1968."

As long as the Left continues to blame America for the failure of their Utopian dream born in the 60s, the DemonRATs will never be free of the 60s "taint." The animosity for this failure is deep seeded. The revolution of the 60s was the great hope of the Baby Boomers. It evaporated like the media mirage that it had became. The movement evolved from the flower children into the Me Generation, and as those whose hopes rested on the making of a perfect world, watched their dreams end into the world of reality and human nature. With that end, grew a deep resentment that is the heart of the DemonRAT party. It is a genuine hatred of America and all that it represents.

It is the America that the Left hates that Obama wants to change. Obama is giving the Left the false hope of achieving that revolution that was left in the hash pipes and the trash of Woodstock. He is appealing to the Left who wants to create that perfect Utopian world. It is a psychological pandering to an impossible hope based upon a self centered world view. It is a change from the real world that was handed to them by their parents who fought World War II and won the cold war. It is a change but to what? Given Obama's Marxist background, it is a perilous change.

MARK MY WORDS,

Hillary!™ wants a replay of 1968.

Starting with arranging a face-to-face meeting between Barrak Obama and Bobby Kennedy...

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