Fraser, Harris, and the memory holes of contemporary history

The prose in this piece is sufficiently smooth that one might almost be carried away by its perhaps slightly-too-clever argument that "limousine liberalism" -- to blame for many current woes -- is finally meeting its comeuppance.  The piece's message is that the real villain is not liberalism, limousine or otherwise, but the capitalism that it has served.  Consider this passage:

Brave and audacious as they were, rarely had the rebel movements of the fabled sixties or those that followed explicitly challenged the underlying distribution of property and power in American society. And yet if liberalism had proved compatible enough with liberty, equality, and democracy, capitalism was another matter.

A case could be made that some of the sixties movements did challenge "the underlying distribution of property and power in American society."  But since Fraser in this piece never bothers to define capitalism, he is free to argue, or at least to imply, that the only movements in recent years that have challenged "the underlying distribution of property and power in American society" have done so under an anti-capitalist banner.

The implication is, at best, dubious.  In 1976, Sen. Fred Harris ran for the Democratic presidential nomination on the message that what was needed was "a fairer distribution of wealth and income and power."  Harris framed that message in terms of left-populism rather than (explicit) anti-capitalism.  Bernie Sanders has framed a similar message against the backdrop of a stated commitment to democratic socialism.  But that commitment has been mainly a matter of ideological self-labeling rather than program, since, as Fraser himself notes, Sanders's proposals have been mostly a left-tinged version of the New Deal, not anything notably more radical.

Btw, this is not to deny that Sanders is a socialist: within certain wide limits, a socialist is anyone who calls himself or herself that, and Sanders, who joined the Young People's Socialist League as a student, has long embraced the label.  But Fraser the historian, in ignoring Fred Harris and his left-populist presidential campaign -- one that occurred after the New Left had burned itself out and when 'limousine liberals' for their part were somewhat in retreat -- can reasonably be faulted for having fallen into one of the memory holes of recent history.         

Dueling mandarins: Vidal & Buckley in 1968

One of the better moments in The Best of Enemies, the currently playing documentary about the TV encounters between Gore Vidal and William F. Buckley Jr. in 1968, is a three-minute side-by-side comparison of the two men's origins.  Both came from privileged if not especially 'old money' backgrounds, both went to elite prep schools, both rode horses well as teenagers, or so the photographs on the screen indicate.  Both were intellectuals.  Both spoke with the sort of upper-class accent that has now almost vanished.  Both ran for office (Vidal more than once).  A Marxist -- or anyone else, really -- from another planet might wonder how in the world these two men ended up calling each other names on prime-time TV during the Republican and Democratic presidential nominating conventions in That Year, 1968.

Class is not always destiny, would be a five-word answer to that question.  And yet, as one of the many (too many) interviewees in this movie suggests, it is possible that each man saw a bit of himself in the other, maybe just enough to nudge dislike over the boundary into loathing.  Despite -- or, who knows, perhaps because of? -- his utterly despicable political and ideological stances, it is Buckley whose charm and air of insouciance (for lack of a better phrase) are more evident when the two square off in front of the ABC-TV camera.  Vidal was, as the person with whom I saw the movie remarked, more self-contained, his gestural, non-verbal language a bit less naturally suited to TV.  There was nothing shabby about Vidal's verbal performance, however, even if, as Hendrik Hertzberg points out with reference to the most infamous exchange, it was not actually true that Buckley was a crypto-Nazi, though he was unquestionably a reactionary.  Still, it's not difficult to see why Vidal, responding to a somewhat loaded question from moderator Howard K. Smith and faced with an annoyingly interrupting Buckley, reached for an insult.

The Best of Enemies is a thesis movie, i.e. it has an argument, and that argument is that the Buckley-Vidal encounter was the ur-moment that shaped TV punditry as it came to exist in the U.S. in the ensuing decades.  Maybe, though I think the argument is pressed a bit too hard.  I have no recollection of watching the Buckley-Vidal encounter at the time: my memories of 1968, somewhat sketchy in general given my age then, are not primarily televisual, though I do have a couple of memories of the Democratic convention that I think must derive from having watched some of it.

In the end, despite this movie's best efforts to convince one otherwise, the Vidal-Buckley debates must be considered, I think, basically an interesting footnote to a tumultuous, historic year -- even if it was a footnote that generated subsequent essays and lawsuits by the protagonists -- rather than a central event.  However, as many of us know, footnotes are not necessarily unimportant; and The Best of Enemies, despite its flaws as a movie, will help ensure that this particular footnote will continue to be remembered.

Life paths

If there is such a thing as an American creed and if you had to pick one statement that comes closest to encapsulating it, the most likely candidate would be Jefferson's assertion that all persons ("men" in the original) are "endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness...."

Although the pursuit of happiness is an old notion, its translation into the idea of personal fulfillment is arguably more recent. The material precondition for this is the existence of a group of people whose (relative) affluence allows them enough leisure to worry about being 'fulfilled'. Needless to say, this observation is far from original. It was made, to take only one example, by Andrew Hacker some forty years ago in a book called (rather presciently) The End of the American Era.

In a chapter titled "The Illusion of Individuality," Hacker cast a skeptical eye on the notion that most people have hidden capacities and potentials waiting to be unleashed, if only given the right setting and opportunity. On the contrary, he wrote, "most people are ordinary...regardless of the time or society or setting in which they live." Most people, he continued, lack "any special qualities of talent or creativity" and "prefer the paths of security." They are "not terribly clever or creative or venturesome."

That may sound harsh, but what Hacker went on to say about education is, I think, still apt, more than forty years after it was written. "Middle-class Americans," he observed,

remain persuaded that with just a little more effort and some added insight they may discover their true selves. Thus the growing commitment to education, and the conviction that with schooling can come not only worldly success but also an awareness of one's own potentialities.... Yet, on the whole, the educational process has surprisingly little effect in determining how people will finally shape their lives.... [T]he overwhelming majority of college graduates...despite their exposure to higher education and their heightened awareness of life's options...nevertheless take paths of least resistance when faced with critical decisions throughout their lives.

While this was and remains a considerable overgeneralization (like virtually all such social criticism), it does bring to mind the large numbers of graduates of elite colleges and universities who have gone into investment banking, fancy consulting firms, hedge funds, private equity firms, etc., in recent years. Lately the numbers have started to decline, but for many it is still the preferred option. Of course today the majority of young people, including no doubt the majority of college graduates, face economic uncertainty, high levels of student debt, and a job market in which getting any kind of reasonably remunerative employment is a challenge. In that respect the picture is different from what it was when Hacker wrote the above-quoted passage. But it is interesting that in the late 60s and early 70s, a period one thinks of as full of experimentation and rebellion by the young (especially the 'privileged' young), at least one observer found more evidence of conformity and rationalization. Also interesting is that Hacker's The End of the American Era was published in the same year, 1970, as Charles Reich's The Greening of America, which took a quite different view of the rising generation.

P.s. (anecdotal): Back in December the NYT ran a piece about a 30-year-old American with an MBA who had decided to make a career in the slums of Rio singing hard-edged Brazilian funk. No 'path of least resistance' there.

Noted

This piece about the NY Public Library's purchase of Timothy Leary's papers has some interest from the standpoint of cultural history. Also some neat quotes. For example:

After trying Leary’s magical pink pills Arthur Koestler told his host the next day that they were not for him: “I solved the secret of the universe last night, but this morning I forgot what it was.”

The Pentagon Papers 40 years on

Sanford Ungar and Michael Beschloss brought back the memories on the NewsHour tonight in a quite interesting discussion (which I heard on the radio as my TV is not working). Beschloss mentioned in passing that in 1961, ten years before Daniel Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon Papers to the NYT, that paper had acceded to the Kennedy admin's request not to publish material it had acquired about the prospective Bay of Pigs operation. Apparently Kennedy later said, after the Bay of Pigs turned out badly for the U.S., that he wished the NYT had published it.

What really strikes me is the realization that only one short decade separates the Bay of Pigs from the Pentagon Papers. That was one heck of an eventful ten years. I'm not old enough to have many reliable first-hand memories of the U.S. in 1961 (and was only living here briefly then anyway, between my family's overseas domiciles), but I have a sense of what the early '60s were like from photos, movies, some things I've read, etc. The early '70s, of which I definitely do have memories, seem a long way away from the early '60s, which is, partly, a testament to how much happened in between and to how much 'the 60s' changed the tone (for lack of a better word) of American life and politics.

Those revolutionary Brillo boxes

I happened to pick up a copy of Arthur Danto's new book on Andy Warhol (called, surprisingly enough, Andy Warhol) in my local public library. Although it's a short book, I didn't and don't have the time or inclination to read it from cover to cover. I did dip into it, however.

For those who don't know, Danto is a philosopher and art critic who has written about the philosophy of art, among other things (see Louis Menand's piece in the current New Yorker). In a nutshell, Danto thinks Warhol was a revolutionary artist because he threw into question the definition of art more sharply than previous artists (such as Duchamp) had. If Warhol's Brillo Boxes, which consists of stacks of Brillo boxes, is art, the definition of art must involve something extra-visual or non-visual, since there is no significant difference between Warhol's Brillo Boxes and Brillo boxes that could have been found on any grocery store shelf. "What makes something art must accordingly be invisible to the eye" (Danto, Andy Warhol, p.65).

Similarly, Warhol's 1964 movie Empire, consisting of "an uninterrupted view" of the Empire State Building and running for "just over eight hours" (p.77), throws into question the definition of a movie. Empire "showed...that in a moving picture, nothing in the picture has to move" (p.79).

Danto's book also contains some humor. This R-rated passage (pp.76-77) is an example:

"In none of the silent, so-called minimalist films is there anything much to see, not even in the 1964 Blow Job, which shows the face of an attractive if anonymous young man who is being fellated off-screen. So the title seems like false or at least misleading advertising. It [i.e., the film] was too long, however short a time it lasted, and nearly caused a riot when shown at Columbia University...in 1966. The students were impatient and filled the air with boos, hisses, and jokey singing of 'He shall never come.' ... Andy was in the audience, planning to say a few words after the screening, but he left quietly when the furor started."

A bit more on the '60s

Further to this post: I just became aware of a 2007 book by James Piereson called Camelot and the Cultural Revolution: How the Assassination of John F. Kennedy Shattered American Liberalism (Encounter Books).

Though I've not read the book, its thesis, as expressed in the subtitle, leaves me somewhat skeptical. To the extent that there was a "liberal consensus" on foreign and domestic policy in the '50s, the Vietnam War and the convulsions of 1968 had a lot more to do with "shattering" it than Kennedy's assassination, or so I'd be inclined to argue. (Don't forget that some of the greatest domestic triumphs of liberalism, such as the Voting Rights Act and Medicare, occurred during the Johnson administration. Not bad for a supposedly "shattered" movement.)

An artifact from the early 1960s: The Duke's Men of Yale on the New Frontier

Some time ago, a friend who is an alumnus of two Yale a capella groups, the Duke’s Men and the Whiffenpoofs, gave me a multi-CD compilation that he had produced of recordings by “Da Doox” going back to the early 1950s. One of the songs on the first disc is “New Frontier,” which pokes fun at JFK, Camelot, and (of course) Harvard, and which the Duke’s Men first recorded in 1963. The song is interrupted by a monologue in which one member of the group does a more-than-passable Kennedy imitation. Although the flavor of the song cannot be captured entirely by the lyrics alone -- indeed, the music and the lyrics are very well matched -- I thought the lyrics in themselves were clever and evocative of the period. And in light of what happened in November 1963, the last lines take on a certain poignancy. So here are the lyrics.

New Frontier
First recorded by the Duke’s Men of Yale in 1963
Music and lyrics by
Carl Kaestle and Gurney Williams
(Lyrics reproduced by permission)

We sing of the pioneers of old
Who ventured forth so brave and bold
Far from their rightful homes so dear
They slept beneath the stars on the old frontier
And the rocky campground’s peaceful glow
Cheered the hearts and souls of the men below.

But the old frontier is dying
The old frontier is gone.
Yet behold the low clouds passing
To hail another dawn.
Yes it’s a new frontier
Put your money on the sunny boy from Hyannis
Hail to the sod where Kennedy trod
A hunter on the new frontier.

Oh we love the walls of ivy
That surround the new frontier
[JFK monologue]
Jack is the king of the new frontier
Jack is the fellow who makes folks cheer
Massachusetts' favorite son
Hah-vad moved to Wa-shing-ton.
And though he began as the un-der-dog
Now he's considered a vi-tal cog.
Let John Harvard fade a-way
Jack Harvard's here to stay.
It’s young Jack Harvard so shout hoo-ray Hooray-hoo_eee.

JFK and the jelly doughnut

Did JFK really say he was a jelly doughnut in his famous Ich-bin-ein-Berliner speech? A recent post at the NYT blog Paper Cuts finally sorts it all out... well, sort of. The link is here.

p.s. The Newbolt follow-up is coming this weekend. Stay tuned.

Personal Enlightenment or Collective Transformation?

Dormgrandpop, who was kind enough to leave a comment here earlier (see "Obama once more," below), believes, along with the Dalai Lama, that the path to tackling social problems such as the increasing gaps between rich and poor begins with personal enlightenment: see, e.g., his May 18 post beginning "A bleak view of how things are on our planet."

I am not really convinced of this, perhaps partly because I am probably unenlightened by the Dalai Lama's measures. I cannot help recalling the example -- though I'm not quite old enough to have experienced it very directly -- of some young people during the 1960s for whom personal enlightenment became a substitute for political activism. Charles Reich's The Greening of America famously argued that "a revolution in consciousness" would lead to a political and social revolution, but when it came to concrete measures, it turned out that Reich thought, for example, that eating natural instead of artificial peanut butter would herald a new age. OK, this is a slight caricature of Greening, but I do think it discloses a tendency that is at least worth worrying about.

Does this mean people should not read or listen to the Dalai Lama's books? Of course not. It does perhaps raise a cautionary flag, however, about assuming too direct a progression from personal enlightenment to collective reform.

May '68 (and all that)

This afternoon I saw Romain Goupil's 1982 film Mourir à 30 ans (To Die at Thirty), the last in a series of movies dealing with May '68 shown at the Nat'l Gallery (Wash. D.C.). The movie won prizes for its director, who was a high-school militant/activist at the time and later an apprentice to Godard and a moviemaker in his own right.

The movie, told retrospectively, is basically a group biography of Goupil and some of his friends, especially one Michel R (I'm not going to try to spell the last name), who was a leading activist, though still a high-school student in '68, then became a professional revolutionary, was imprisoned for several months after the Communist League was banned in summer '73, and committed suicide in March '78. He seems to have been charismatic and a skilled organizer; the movie touches on what might have contributed to his death, though it proceeds by indirection. Indeed, the whole movie is somewhat cryptic in effect, at least for someone (i.e. me) who in May '68 was about to turn eleven, did not live in France and thus did not directly experience the events in question, and knows something -- but not a huge amount -- about the history of the French left in this period.

In particular, it would have been nice to learn more about the backgrounds of the protagonists. Goupil seems to have been from a left-wing and working-class family and he is shown selling the Communist Party newspaper L'Humanité door-to-door as a young kid (before deciding the CP is too do-nothing and "establishment"), but although Vietnam is mentioned there's no real explanation of exactly where his politics came from, or of the specifics of his class/social background (father's occupation, e.g.). Then there are the mundane questions: if all the flashback scenes in which Goupil and his friends appear actually show them (which seems to be the case) as opposed to actors playing them, then who is holding the camera (they were the budding filmmakers, after all)? And why, when everyone in the movie obviously is speaking French, is Goupil's voice-over narration in English?

Finally, this movie, made in '82, underscores the psychic and political gulf that separates 1968 from 2008 by refracting '68 through a lens that itself now seems distant. In 1982, after all, the French socialists were in power, Mitterand had not yet made his U-turn away from his original program, and there was no firm indication that Reaganism/Thatcherism/corporate neoliberalism was going to triumph so definitively. The "second Cold War" had just begun, the nuclear freeze movement in the U.S. and Europe was about to go into high gear, and one could still perhaps see some of the flames of '68 flickering if one looked hard enough. There are people who think "the world revolution of 1968" (as I. Wallerstein calls it) had long-lasting effects in several crucial ways, and they are probably right. And of course mass demonstrations still occasionally occur (Seattle '99, Genoa '01, Feb '03 vs. the Iraq invasion, etc.). Still, 1968 does seem now like a very long time ago: in some ways it could be almost as far away as 1848; and the 1971 Paris celebration of the centennial of the Commune (as shown in the movie), with the banners of Lenin and the choruses of the Internationale, seems almost as distant as the Commune itself. To watch To Die at Thirty in 2008, in other words, is like reading a kind of double elegy, or walking through two sets of mirrors into a dim, even if not altogether vanished, past.