Relatively Recent Roots Of Standing Up To Trumpism-- The Sixties

My old friend Danny Goldberg, a father of two kids who seem to adore him whenever I see them together, runs a very hands-on successful business. And he still manages to find the time to write thought-provoking, insightful books. His newest one, In Search Of The Lost Chord-- 1967 And the Hippie Idea, brought me back to the time when I-- as well as Danny-- was coming of age. 1967 was 50 years ago-- a lifetime... and part of my own formative years. That summer I hitch-hiked to Mexico City with my friend Bob and came back to New York via San Francisco where I had slept on a stair in a Haight Ashbury crash pad and took acid in a school bus that wound up at an outdoor Grateful Dead concert on the other side of a bridge, probably Marin.. but who knows?

In her NY Times book review this weekend, 1967: A Year In The Life Of Idealism And Anarchy, Sheila Weller admires Danny's determination to treat the "hippie idea" seriously with "a thorough, panoramic account of the culture, politics, media, music and mores of the year to demolish the idea that it was trivial... Goldberg moves from the province of privilege (Time magazine estimated that there were 300,000 self-identified hippies in America in 1967, mostly white and middle class) to the fight against segregation in the South and the rise of the Black Power movement and the Black Panthers. He deals consummately with the power players in the antiwar movement and S.D.S. At times the book feels overpacked. Still, that flaw hides a virtue: proving that so much activism and passion can be crowded into barely more than a single year. When Goldberg was writing his book, that might have been a useful message. Today, in Trump’s America, with a fueled and gathering resistance, it is a potentially mirroring one."

Last month, Danny penned an essay for The Nation, We Have Seen Times This Dark Before-- Here’s How We Fought Back that elegantly makes the point that "1967 offers many lessons for those who want to counter Trumpism." He reminds his readers something that an icon of that era, Martin Luther King, said shortly before he was assassinated: "Darkness cannot drive out darkness, only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate. Only love can do that." How hippie is that! And how needed to face down the Trump Regime!

1967 was worse than 2017-- at least so far. 50,000 of us were killed fighting in Vietnam. Nixon was formulating the Southern Strategy that led right to Señor Trumpanzee. "Today’s alt-right," wrote Goldberg, "has its antecedents in slave owners, plutocratic haters of FDR, and the John Birch Society. J. Edgar Hoover, Paul Ryan’s idol Ayn Rand, and Trump’s mentor Roy Cohn who were all alive and spewing poison in 1967. Trump is not the first president to invite speculation about his mental health."

Like Trump, President Johnson demonized the media, telling Goodwin (without offering any evidence), “The communists control the three major networks and the 40 major outlets of communication.” LBJ bad-mouthed the New York Times to Georgia Senator Herman Talmadge: “There are two or three Jewish boys there that are-- according to our phone taps-- on the communist side of this operation.”

...What are the lessons from 1967 for those opposed to Trumpism? In Todd Gitlin’s book The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage, the word “resistance” appears 88 times. It is not clear, in retrospect, that more confrontational tactics did anything to help the cause. Gitlin acknowledges that as the Vietnam War became increasingly unpopular with the American public, so did the anti-war movement. Alienation and rage without positive inspiration spawn apathy, which strengthens the unrepentant right wing. As Ken Kesey and Jerry Garcia, among others, pointed out in the ’60s, protest rooted in anger and polarization-- even if temporarily cathartic-- usually backfires and creates more darkness than it dissipates. As Naomi Klein suggests in her new book title, No Is Not Enough, the left needs to express a consistent alternate positive vision in broadly understandable cultural language.

Secondly, there must be a reduction in tribal schisms. The divide between the “counterculture” that focused more on inner changes and the “revolutionaries” who focused more on political protest helped neither progressive political goals nor a moral/spiritual balance. Among political radicals, the infighting was so chronic that Che Guevara referred to the American left as a “circular firing squad.” One of the primary tactics of the FBI COINTELPRO programs aimed at weakening the anti-war and civil-rights movements was to foment internal discord.

It was no accident that the DNC e-mails that were curated for media consumption by WikiLeaks and whoever aided them focused on fanning the flames of resentment between supporters of Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders. (One encouraging sign is Sanders and new DNC Chair Tom Perez’s unity tour.)

A third lesson from the ’60s is that liberal elites need to respect the energy and insights of youth if they want to win. In 1967 as now, the younger generation was the most progressive and largest in history, and yet was largely ignored by most Democrats. (In Shattered, the recently published account of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign, only a single paragraph refers to efforts to communicate with millennials, a reference to an ad Sanders filmed in support of Clinton that was never aired).

Finally, there needs to be a balance between action that addresses immediate suffering, and the long-term consciousness-raising that is required to make lasting changes.