Oblomova said:
Good thing Tom Hayden isn’t a black dude, or he would never have had the strength to endure Reconstruction and the long hard murderous slog toward civil rights.
Which is not only an embarrassingly silly, ill-conceived comment (uh, wasn’t that a period of over a century, and like, not this century?) it disregards the fact that those who fought for civil rights over that long period were, in their time, considered reckless, over-zealous TROUBLEMAKERS who were threatening not only the blissful standard of segregation and white supremacy, but the (ghasp!) unity of the Democratic Party. And this, whether we consider them “progressives” or “radical left,” or not (many advocates of civil rights, you know, really were those bad old lefties that you clever rumproasters enjoy sneering at.)
Indeed, even today, the DLC pitches a bogus goal of “getting back the South” by turning corporatist right, and pretends that the disaffection with the Democratic Party there came about because of “McGovernism” (i.e., excessive, morally-relative left-liberalism)—when the truth is, southern segregationist Democrats followed Strom Thurmond out the door in droves over civil rights legislation starting in 1965, the Republicans exploited that trend with their race-baiting ‘southern strategy,’ and the formerly ‘solid South’ was GONE by the time McGovern came along.
Politicians can be complicated folks. LBJ and Humphrey are some strong examples of that. Both are justly regarded as heroes of the civil rights movement, but their legacies are darkened considerably by the war policies they advocated and carried out. This, too, is just.
I’m old enough to remember 1968. It was not only “the left” who were outraged over the war, and the terrible death toll among American soldiers in that time (never mind the bad time the Vietnamese were having along the way.) Many mainstream people who opposed the war were fooled by Nixon’s claim to have a “plan” to end it, and very likely would have voted for another Democratic nominee besides Humphrey who had the decency and sense to oppose the war—especially a popular and charismatic Democrat like Robert Kennedy.
By the same token, antiwar left people whom I knew mostly ended up voting reluctantly for Humphrey, because the alternative was Nixon. Even Ed Sanders of the Fugs, Yippie leader of sorts, says in a memoir that he went out and voted for Humphrey on election day. So it was the fault of “leftists” that Humphrey lost, because they had opposed the war, demonstrated against it, supported candidates besides incumbents and backroom choices? Absolutely not. That’s deceitful scapegoating and nothing else.
In fact, boys and girls, what really brought us the Nixon years was not the bad old narcissistic babyboomer Weather Underground Yippie left, but, in the first place, the disaffection of many reactionary, but previously Democratic, voters with LBJ and Humphrey BECAUSE of civil rights legislation—in combination with widespread, justified anger over LBJ’s insane, tragic and utterly unjust war. His pressure on Humphrey not to criticize his policies during the ‘68 campaign sure didn’t help either. In many people’s eyes, a vote for Humphrey was a vote for the hideous status quo in Vietnam.
Want to blame people like Hayden for this? The truth is, if people who shared Tom Hayden’s views had been listened to, the war either wouldn’t have taken place or would have been ended by that time. Further, if candidate Robert Kennedy had survived, I strongly believe he would have defeated Nixon in that election, either with the support of Hayden’s kind or not. In either instance, the useless war would have wasted far fewer lives than the 58,000 Americans and perhaps 3 million Vietnamese that resulted from LBJ/Nixon.
But the DLC-ilk “moderates” of today’s Democratic Party can only see “the left” today or in the past as troublemakers who undermine party unity—that is, “the left” and no one else. Oblomova’s ‘Dump the Hump’ comment is in keeping with the familiar shtick of belittling the privilege of liberal Democrats, like RFK, and anyone to their left, like Hayden, of opposing war policies in particular, or really, of participating in American politics at all by advocating their own views.
Everyone else in the political spectrum, from this view, has a right to vote, to demonstrate, to opine as they see fit—except “the left.” Instead, those folks are obliged to obediently vote as if they shared DLCer views, for the Clintons, Liebermans, and Gillebrands. Your “moderate” Dem candidate loses by 1 percent to a Republican, while a Green Party candidate got 1 percent or less, and 9 percent of registered Dems voted for the Republican? Well, of course, it’s still all the Green Party voters’ fault. Again, nothing but deceitful scapegoating.
“Moderates” can pitch all the sanctimony they like about “the hard slog” toward civil rights, but it’s plain that they themselves would NEVER have rocked the boat enough to bring about that hard-fought progress. In the current situation, it’s quite clear, judging from strategic leaks over the last several weeks, that President Obama’s terrible and fateful decision on Afghanistan came about because hawks in his administration had outmaneuvered him and others who doubted the wisdom of escalating, especially to the scale that the hawks wanted. We Democrats are NOT helpling Obama push through reasonable decisions on important issues when we refuse, out of a completely misguided sense of party loyalty (or something worse…) to criticize bad policies that come out of his administration.
