Decades of letting neocons dictate a hawkish foreign policy have put the American Republic in profound danger, just as presidents from George Washington to Dwight Eisenhower predicted, warnings that Americans must finally take to heart, says ex-U.S. diplomat William R. Polk.The American republic is already gone. The conversation needs to be about recovering it, or the great American experiment is over. The republic has become an empire ruled by the deep state and plutocracy.
A long, sad story, this is the first of two parts in which William Polk relates the gory details and lots of fascinating background. These are lessons that George Washington taught and Dwight Eisenhower expanded on. These are also lessons the US should have learned from the bitter experience of humiliating defeat in Vietnam. But the leadership has not listened nor has it learned.
Consortium News
Losing the American Republic
William R. Polk
See also
Jeb Bush’s stumbling start to his presidential bid has refocused attention on Official Washington’s favorite excuse for the illegal, aggressive and disastrous war in Iraq – that it was just a case of “bad intelligence.” But that isn’t what the real history shows, as ex-CIA analyst Ray McGovern recalls.Ray McGovern reminds us just how bad it was.
The Phony ‘Bad Intel’ Defense on Iraq
Ray McGovern
Imagine a utopian America that never existed, and claim that it has been lost. The same people that always controlled America, still control America. The closest we came to being liberated was the 1960s but it turned out when the hippies came into power they were more conservative and evil than any previous generation. They were completely obsessed with finance, markets, trade, and took multinationals to their logical extreme while their hatred and distrust of authority and government lead to policies of austerity and smaller government.
ReplyDeleteThey un-did much of the progress made during the post depression era on regulation, taxes, and protections for workers, almost ended progress on racial issues, public works came to a halt, and especially public spending on luxuries like art, recreation and parks that allow common people enjoyment of many of the finer things usually reserved for the rich were viewed as wasteful.
Maybe the one thing that hippies did that was not a total catastrophe was increasing the rates of education. But even there, they gutted funding for education and make it a financial scheme based on loans to impose market constraints on consumption of education. The result wasn't fewer people buying education, it was lower birth rates, it reduced the ability of people to buy their own homes and instead become indebted renters that pay hippies for the privilege of living.
Gen X, Y and Millenials have lower rates of drug use and as such they tend to be less paranoid and distrusting of the people and social institutions around them while their higher levels of education and better media allow public discourse to rise above the base levels we've had in the past. There are early signs of more constructive policy and smarter governance as the boomers and hippies leave the workforce. It's a great renaissance as we come out of the dark ages. It's funny, the hippies think the world is ending and have all these dark gloomy analysis of the state of the world, while young people see the opportunity. I guess nothing ever changes, every generation solves the problems left by the previous and creates their own new problems to hand on to the next.
It probably is mostly the pharma Ryan...
ReplyDeleteI would like to see a study showing the pervasive influence of "hippies." In my estimation it is largely a myth.
ReplyDeleteI recall events of the period differently and I participated in them up close. while this is anecdotal evidence, I was pretty well embedded in what was happening, went to SDS meetings, etc.
The percentage of a "hippies" was rather small. There were a lot more weekend hippies that dressed up like hippies to party but held regular jobs. In fact, actual hip was over by the time of Woodstock. Previous to that, one could concluded that if it waddled and quacked like a duck it was a duck. That was over by the time commercial music began to take over the music scene and hard drugs hit the street.
But the numbers in the 1972 election tell the story. McGovern was the darling of the progressive left and he lost every state to Nixon but ultra-liberal Massachusetts. There was no hippie takeover of the US. It was essentially an anti-war movement driven by the draft.
The other group that was intellectually prominent but whose numbers were limited was the futurists, people that were attracted to thinkers like Bucky Fuller, for instance, and MIT's Marvin Minsky. It was time people were looking for alternatives and this was the time of the mainstreaming of Eastern spirituality, which had previously been esoteric.
Hip did influence US culture, eventually changing it, but this was through becoming commercialized. Companies soon learned there was a new market to be exploited and exploit it they did. DFHs rejected it in principle but still bought the records of their favorite bands.
Moreover, drugs were not as pervasive in the 60's and early 70's as has come to be believed. In most parts of the country drugs were fairly difficult to come by, unlike today when any school kid can score pretty easily. Hallucinogens like cannabis were much more prevalent than psychedelics, too.
The majority of the people involved were anti-war types, and these were the people that eventually became yuppies and joined the establishment. John Kerry is an example, as well has Tom Hayden, who both went to Congress.
It's true that most of the youth were libertarians but they were left libertarians rather than right. Ayn Rand was little known and most were scared by what they regarded as Goldwater's bellicosity at a time that they were protesting war. In my view the real shift that occurred was the political radicalization of a large number of American youth, mostly of draft age or who had served in war they came to recognize was a scam. But that didn't really take root widely and deeply enough to persist, and after hostilities ended most just moved on or were co-opted. Hippiness had pretty much become a cultural cliché by the late 70s. Whence it has arisen and what it had stood slipped into the past. It became just dress up.
The cultural revolution of the Sixties was not consciously libertarian. Liberal justice Douglas was very popular but he was hardly a libertarian. However, only a very few that I cam in contact with were anarchists who read people like contemporary anarchist philosophers like Robert Paul Wolf. Marx was not popular. I read some minimal Marx in philosophy grad school, but he really did make a dent in the US. The only Marxists and communists I knew of were Europeans that were in the US and most Americans regarded them as somewhat eccentric of not nutty and out of touch due to their dogmatism at time that dogmatism was outré.
The whole movement evaporated pretty quickly with the end of the war and the draft. by then American culture had shifted sufficiently that there was really no need to continue waging the cultural revolution. Business was doing a fine job of it.
But drugs did catch on and eventually go mainstream. Drug use is much more pervasive now than it was then as far as I can see and is rivaling alcohol for recreational use. Business is chomping at the bit to get aboard.
Interesting times and I am glad I got to live through them.
The amount of discontent and pace of social change in the period was remarkable in history. On many economic charts too, the 60s and 70s were turning points.
ReplyDeleteAmong young people, I think marijuana use peaked in 1979 then fell continuously until 2008 or 9 when the legalization began. Now it is back up to the levels of the mid 2000s. Hopefully when it is legal it reduces the paranoia and animosity between government and users. The fact that it is becoming legal shows progress against the old conservatism and the success of a majority of people think it harmless. It isn't just pot, either, there are many issues where polls show marked shifts in perceptions between the young and old that seem to make it more likely progress will be resumed on intractable issues.
The swing to the right of the last couple decades has been replaced with a swing to the left. In my view whether the election of Obama, the new Pope, the election of Syriza in Greece, even Janet Yellen all are disconnected but similar in that less ideological more pragmatic leaders are taking over. The consequences shouldn't be underestimated. When the pragmatist Mao took over and decided to do what works rather than what is ideologically pure, look at what happened. It was huge. No guarantees it won't fizzle but...it has potential for each election in the years to come to change policy.
We sort of lump the whole generation after the baby boomers in with the term hippies even though very few actually were in fact hippies. I think it is because they were emblematic of the rapid social progress during the period. It certainly wasn't because of the lasting impact of fashion sense at the time.
ReplyDeleteGee Ryan. thanks for the backtracking. Great assessment Tom. I WAS THERE,too.
ReplyDeleteI don't think I backtracked, what happened in the 60s was great. What happened after was tragic.
ReplyDeleteRight. The revolution got sidetracked, largely co-opted, and the point of it was lost.
ReplyDeleteThe focus of the revolution was individual freedom based on human dignity, human rights and civil liberties, respect for all, interdependence, popular participatory democracy, anti-militarism, anti-materialism, and creativity. It was initially a secular spiritual awakening in reaction to what was perceived as a cultural revolution against false values.
So-called hippies and rock musicians represented it on the surface but there was a solid underpinning, too. A lot of the thinking that came out of that period is still relevant today.
My sense is also that there are a deep feeling then that change was possible and many people were committed to bringing it about. I don't feel that today. In fact, the feeling is more that significant change is not possible now. On the other hand, there is much stronger and coordinated opposition to change organized at the highest levels with all the power of the state behind it.