The 1960s and Today’s Crises

Posted on June 16, 2020 by Derek Helms, University Press of Kansas Blog

http://universitypressblog.dept.ku.edu/

 

by Ted Morgan, author of What Really Happened to the 1960s; How Mass Media Culture Failed American Democracy

“The past is never dead. It’s not even past”—William Faulkner

It’s been a long fifty years since the end of the 1960s. Yet, as current events involving racism and the police remind us, the past is still with us. In many ways, the long 1960s era—from about 1954 to 1975—remains a benchmark for protest movements, political turmoil, and youthful activism of various kinds.

On May 4, 2020, we witnessed the fiftieth anniversary of the shootings at Kent State, an iconic 1960s event. What is perhaps most notable about Kent State is how deeply divided the public was over the killing of protesting students at Kent and Jackson State. That polarization reflected the mediated events of the 1960s, and it is still very much with us.

This year’s protests against police violence erupted after millions saw the truly horrifying video of George Floyd being killed by Minneapolis policeman Derek Chauvin. These protests, heavily populated by the young, spread like wildfire across the country and much of the rest of the world. Floyd’s desperate words, “I can’t breathe,” have graced sign after sign all across the globe.

The spread of protest, itself something of a media-assisted phenomenon, became a magnet for media attention, generating multiple references to the urban uprisings of the 1960s. As they were in the 1960s, the televisual media in particular became preoccupied with outbreaks of violence against property, including, at the margins of organized protests, the looting of stores. Also echoing the 1960s, mainstream media commentary ranged from right-wing denunciations of the protests—notably President Trump’s malicious calls for crushing protesters with military force—to liberal commentators clearly sympathetic to the protesters’ anguish but who were quick to denounce any form of violence as counterproductive.

The effect of mainstream media coverage, then as now, is to steer the public discourse inside the boundaries of the two-party system, thus leaving outside those who call for more structural reforms of the American political economy. One important difference today is, of course, the prevalence of the internet and social media providing a place where people can find compatible voices, express their views, and share images.

What Really Happened to the 1960s: How Mass Media Culture Failed American Democracy documents the way media coverage helped to spread protest while also generating increasing militancy and alienation among the many protest groups of that era. The book demonstrates how the same mass media continue to fail American democracy. Most fundamentally, the book explains how we got from an era of promising democratic reform to our current world of shocking inequality, endless wars, and a planet on the brink of ecodisaster.

The images broadcast in the 1960s gave right-wing commentators fodder for fueling a backlash to 1960s social movements and the liberal Kennedy-Johnson years. It began with Barry Goldwater’s 1964 effort to link the “riot” in Harlem to the “lawlessness” of the Southern civil rights movement—thus becoming the first Republican to win four states of the Old South. The backlash continued through Ronald Reagan’s 1966 rise as governor of California and Richard Nixon’s successful “law and order” presidential campaign of 1968.

Typically, the backlash seized on the most extreme behaviors that’s visible in the media, equating the “lawlessness” with the allegedly destructive intentions of the protest movements themselves. Highly inflammatory protest actions, like the Viet Cong flags that began showing up at antiwar protests, aided the cause of backlash commentators. Politicians cynically played on the fears, antipathies, and feelings of being “left out” of 1960s era reforms on the part of rural Americans, white southerners, the white working class, and religious conservatives.

The other backlash story revolves around corporate America’s anxiety over declining economic profitability in the 1970s. As the corporatist Trilateral Commission put it, the rise of “previously passive or unorganized groups” (notably racial minorities, women, and students) in the 1960s era produced what they termed an “excess of democracy.” Their response became a blueprint for the neoliberal America that emerged under Ronald Reagan—deregulate the economy, cut taxes on corporations and the wealthy, privatize everything public, and greatly expand defense spending.

Which brings us to Donald Trump—quite probably the most narcissistic, corrupt, and polarizing president in our history. Trump very effectively plays off the post-1960s themes, voicing sentiments, however crudely, that those who’ve long felt marginalized find emotionally satisfying. At the same time, he backs policies that enrich the rich, militarize our police, and endanger the future habitability of the planet—further marginalizing the public at large.

There are, however, lessons from the 1960s era that can help point the way toward a more democratic, just, and sustainable future. These, too, are considered in the concluding chapter of What Really Happened to the 1960s.

Are the Democrats Dead (Again)?

Published by Common Dreams on May 17, 2020* 

https://www.commondreams.org/views/2020/05/17/are-democrats-dead-again

For election after election, the Democrats failed to present either an effective counter to the Republican myth-makers or a program that would effectively address the needs of workers who felt left out.

Have we ever seen a more incompetent Federal Government?

For more than forty years, the Republican party has been captured by neoliberal right wingers who’ve led this country further and further into decline while a tiny portion of the population reaped obscene levels of wealth.

The Republicans have succeeded politically, because they’ve followed a formula first instituted by Ronald Reagan: appeal to resentments felt by rural Americans, religious conservatives, and the white working class –all of whom legitimately felt left behind in the America of the long 1960s era.

While voicing sentiments these folks found emotionally satisfying, Reagan’s actions did something quite different.  He launched the neoliberal project: tax breaks to the wealthy, privatize everything public, and kill off as many domestic programs and regulations as possible.

What most people don’t know is that, during the Reagan years, Democratic Party leaders decided to scrap their long-standing –and, incidentally, highly successful— New Deal orientation to government.  Centrists Democrats like Sam Nunn, Chuck Robb, Bill Clinton, and Walter Mondale helped to launch the Democratic Leadership Council to move the party into the corporate center where it has resided ever since.

For election after election, the Democrats failed to present either an effective counter to the Republican myth-makers or a program that would effectively address the needs of workers who felt left out.  Their only successful presidential candidates, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, rode to the White House because they ran campaigns that aroused the hopes of millions of Americans –far more image and style than substance as it turned out.

And now, we are battered by a highly contagious pandemic that has already killed 100,000 Americans and an economy with staggering unemployment that compares in many ways to that of the Great Depression.

So, how are the Democrats responding?  First, many Democrats, and a few Republicans, are heeding scientific advice to protect public health during the pandemic.  As a majority of Americans recognize, the United States leads the world in pandemic cases thanks to an unbelievably inept performance by the Trump administration.

Second, Congressional Democrats have managed to insert helpful funding here and there into Republican-initiated bail-outs for corporate America.

The Republicans are currently resisting more federal COVID relief, pushing the re-opening of the economy, a position that has obvious appeal to the millions of American workers and small-business owners who are currently suffering mightily.

Again, a time-tested Republican strategy to win an electoral majority –blame your opponents for not caring about working Americans and small business owners.

In an electoral contest between the still-invisible prospect of a COVID resurgence and the staggering economic woes felt by millions, the latter cause will ultimately prevail in neoliberal America, bringing the Republicans electoral victory, and the rest of us a disastrous future.

In addition to being political inept, the Democratic leadership is so closely tied to corporate and Wall Street interests that they are incapable of forging the kind of New Deal-like program that is desperately needed right now –one that could promise electoral success.

Even their $3 Trillion “HEROES” aid package is riddled with neoliberal standards like tax breaks for the wealthy and subsidies for Big Oil and private insurance companies.  Declaring that “we are sleep-walking towards a gut-wrenching, painful failure,” Democratic Senate staffer, Charlie Anderson, observed a few weeks back “More than 80,000 Americans are dead. Unemployment is at Great Depression levels. Yet, Congress appears prepared to massively undershoot what's needed.”

It took both New Deal programs and World War II to pull the U.S. out of the Depression.  Now we need both massive New Deal-like support for human needs and economic revitalization and a total mobilization to curtail the pandemic.  We did it before, we can do it again.

The times call for nothing less than a massive, multi-trillion dollar government program that includes sufficient financial support for all who are unemployed, adequate support for small business owners who face disaster, rapid mobilization for the mass production of COVID protective equipment and effective testing and tracking of the virus, ample funding support for state and local governments that are reeling budgetarily, safeguards for mail-in elections, and, obviously, access to Medicare coverage for everyone.

To achieve electoral success, the Democrats must unite behind such a bold program.  They must reject their 40-year collaboration with neoliberalism and build on their long-forgotten New Deal heritage to embrace Franklin Roosevelt’s Second Bill of Rights of 1944.

But even that is not enough for our current moment.  We are at a turning point where we must also track a radically new course into an environmentally sustainable future.

Rest assured, however, the Democrats will do almost none of these things in the absence of massive, forceful public demand.  That, at least, is up to us.

*An updated version was published by The Morning Call under the title, "Why Democrats Should Embrace a Second New Deal."