At the end of October I wrote that it’s not too late to stay frosty in response to a Pat Buchanan article stating that 2018 is not as violent as 1968:
According to Bryan Burrough, author of “Days of Rage, America’s Radical Underground, the FBI, and the Forgotten Age of Revolutionary Violence,” “During an 18-month period in 1971 and 1972, the FBI reported more than 2,500 bombings on U.S. soil, nearly 5 a day.”
No, 2018 is not 1968, at least not yet.
But Victor Davis Hanson has an admonishment:[1]
But maybe the ’60s, not the silent majority, won out after all. The world a half-century later looks a lot more like 1968 and what followed than what preceded it.
Most of the political and cultural agenda from that turbulent period — both the advances and the regressions — has long been institutionalized. The military draft, for good or bad, has remained defunct. There is greater transparency in politics, fewer smoke-filled rooms. Disabled children, once ostracized and/or dismissively labeled “retarded,” are now far better integrated into society and treated more ethically as special-needs kids. The rights of women, minorities and the LGBT community are now widely accepted.
Yet lifestyles have been radically altered — and often not for the good. Before the late ’60s, most Americans married before having children; afterward, not so much. One-parent households are now far more common.
Other legacies of the ’60s include couples marrying later and having fewer children. A half-century later, these social inheritances often mean prolonged adolescence, older parents, delayed or nonexistent homeownership, and more emphasis on leisure time than on household chores.
It’s a viewpoint against which it is hard to argue. I think they’re both correct and perhaps from the future’s long view 2018s troubles will be recognized as aftershocks from The Big One of 1968.
There are, I’m sure, some lessons to be drawn from examining the 1960s.
One might be that the path to political victory MUST be via one of the two parties; that–because of the gendered nature of our political system–all third party efforts are made with as much vanity and nonsense as the so-called “non-binary genders” of transsexual activists. The Hard Left took over politics not with a Socialist Party, nor by routing Republicans, but by taking over the Democratic party.
Another more important is less a lesson than an observable truth: The so-called Right in America actually stands for nothing but Liberalism. It must stand for something. Larry Kummer writes in, The Left Pushes America down a slippery slope:
The Left drives America down a slippery slow to an unknown future. Radical social changes are coming ever faster, experiments powered by government power, done without our consent. We can still get off this path.
How? We might wonder. LK gives his prescription in his comments:
Hence awakening a desire for liberty and for self-government is necessary.
Yeah, that makes sense: What the Right needs to do is to be better Leftists. Then we will stop the Left…
Larry Kummer is not alone in his thinking. I was right there with him until I got smacked around by the writings of Zippy Catholic. I trust everyone sees the problem, but just in case: To be Right–and not Left–is to be overtly for authority; to take joy in being yoked together, each under the other–in, into, and of–a powerful structure. That is what has been capitulated.
Please leave your own suggested lessons in the comments.
[1] HT: Nathan Rinne
(Edited to add the link Dalrock’s post, which I had intended from the start of this post.)
Things that We have Heard and Known 