Todd Gitlin: Echoes of 1968
[The author is a professor of journalism and sociology and the author of 12 books including The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage and Letters to a Young Activist.]
[HNN Editor: This spring marks the 40th anniversary of the Columbia University sit-in that ended in violence.]
... Anyone who wants to change the world needs to appraise the world lucidly and think of militancy as a means, not an end. The insurgent, communal moments of 1968 were giddy, moving, indelible. They were also delusory, for the militant surge masked the movement’s fractional nature and weakness. The sequence of 1968, revved up at Columbia, culminated in the Chicago Democratic Convention demonstrations of August, when the police ripped into antiwarriors who, tasting the heady and desperate power of negation, couldn’t quite decide whether they were on the brink of a police state or a revolution (or, confusingly, both at once). That week, proverbially, the whole world watched, but the whole of watchful, fretful America did not side with the demonstrators. To the contrary: they sided with the working-class police against what they thought of as overeducated brats abusing their privilege.
The tragic side of 1968 followed from the fact that the party which organized power and the movements which agitated for justice were at loggerheads. The responsibility for the fatal breach was chiefly Lyndon Johnson’s, since it was he who gambled the party’s future on a phantasmagorical war. But still, given Johnson’s grievous sins, the leadership of the movement was not wise. The confrontation politics of 1968 took for granted a decades-old Democratic consensus that was in the process of dissolving. Hell-bent on going-it-alone, it drastically underestimated the Right. The upshot was that movement helped sabotage the party, which collapsed in the November election and ushered in two generations of Republican domination. For decades since, those who have celebrated the clashes have breezily overlooked the denouement.
In a frenzy of polarization, 10 weeks later, Richard Nixon won the election by applying artful pressure on a cracked Democratic alliance. With Nixon’s election came five years plus more of war, leaving a million more Vietnamese deaths along with some 21,000 more Americans. How can there be a remembrance that does not also remember that awful denouement?
For years, observers have deplored (or celebrated!) the apparent acquiescence of America’s youth, so much less committed and colorful than the insurgents of yore. But it seems to me, more often, that the practicality of today’s students is worthy and justified, though sometimes extreme. They are self-preoccupied, true. Sometimes beyond reason or empathy, they are too cynical even if they disguise their detachment as “irony.” But there is also a graceful compensation. Most of the more idealistic activists want results more than self-expression. They gravitate toward service—a healthy impulse. But “making a difference” is largely something that individuals do when they pool their commitments. And so it is bracing to watch students reinvigorate party politics by putting movement-style energy and principle to work in institutions previously as fossilized as the Democratic Party. In 2004 and 2006, recognizing that no progress was imaginable as long as the Bush alliance of plutocrats, theocrats, and empire-builders ruled Washington unimpeded, thousands of them volunteered in favor of antiwar Democrats. Now, legions enlist in the focused insurgency of the Obama campaign.
The ’00s can’t be the ’60s and ought not to be, any more than the ’60s could be, or should have been, the ’20s. The present campaign makes plain that the commitments of 40 years ago are still working their way through our imperfect union. No wonder: what erupted then was incendiary, deep and long-burning. What was at stake, what remains at stake, were and are long-buried conflicts over American principles, over the meaning of freedom, race, nation, sex, and obligation. Since the past only exists in the present, retro politics are not what we need. We do not have ceremonies of innocence to commemorate. If we aspire to clarity and ingenuity, we do not need them.
Read entire article at Columbia Spectator
[HNN Editor: This spring marks the 40th anniversary of the Columbia University sit-in that ended in violence.]
... Anyone who wants to change the world needs to appraise the world lucidly and think of militancy as a means, not an end. The insurgent, communal moments of 1968 were giddy, moving, indelible. They were also delusory, for the militant surge masked the movement’s fractional nature and weakness. The sequence of 1968, revved up at Columbia, culminated in the Chicago Democratic Convention demonstrations of August, when the police ripped into antiwarriors who, tasting the heady and desperate power of negation, couldn’t quite decide whether they were on the brink of a police state or a revolution (or, confusingly, both at once). That week, proverbially, the whole world watched, but the whole of watchful, fretful America did not side with the demonstrators. To the contrary: they sided with the working-class police against what they thought of as overeducated brats abusing their privilege.
The tragic side of 1968 followed from the fact that the party which organized power and the movements which agitated for justice were at loggerheads. The responsibility for the fatal breach was chiefly Lyndon Johnson’s, since it was he who gambled the party’s future on a phantasmagorical war. But still, given Johnson’s grievous sins, the leadership of the movement was not wise. The confrontation politics of 1968 took for granted a decades-old Democratic consensus that was in the process of dissolving. Hell-bent on going-it-alone, it drastically underestimated the Right. The upshot was that movement helped sabotage the party, which collapsed in the November election and ushered in two generations of Republican domination. For decades since, those who have celebrated the clashes have breezily overlooked the denouement.
In a frenzy of polarization, 10 weeks later, Richard Nixon won the election by applying artful pressure on a cracked Democratic alliance. With Nixon’s election came five years plus more of war, leaving a million more Vietnamese deaths along with some 21,000 more Americans. How can there be a remembrance that does not also remember that awful denouement?
For years, observers have deplored (or celebrated!) the apparent acquiescence of America’s youth, so much less committed and colorful than the insurgents of yore. But it seems to me, more often, that the practicality of today’s students is worthy and justified, though sometimes extreme. They are self-preoccupied, true. Sometimes beyond reason or empathy, they are too cynical even if they disguise their detachment as “irony.” But there is also a graceful compensation. Most of the more idealistic activists want results more than self-expression. They gravitate toward service—a healthy impulse. But “making a difference” is largely something that individuals do when they pool their commitments. And so it is bracing to watch students reinvigorate party politics by putting movement-style energy and principle to work in institutions previously as fossilized as the Democratic Party. In 2004 and 2006, recognizing that no progress was imaginable as long as the Bush alliance of plutocrats, theocrats, and empire-builders ruled Washington unimpeded, thousands of them volunteered in favor of antiwar Democrats. Now, legions enlist in the focused insurgency of the Obama campaign.
The ’00s can’t be the ’60s and ought not to be, any more than the ’60s could be, or should have been, the ’20s. The present campaign makes plain that the commitments of 40 years ago are still working their way through our imperfect union. No wonder: what erupted then was incendiary, deep and long-burning. What was at stake, what remains at stake, were and are long-buried conflicts over American principles, over the meaning of freedom, race, nation, sex, and obligation. Since the past only exists in the present, retro politics are not what we need. We do not have ceremonies of innocence to commemorate. If we aspire to clarity and ingenuity, we do not need them.