Rescuing the Sixties

[polly7]

By Paul Street

Tuesday, July 02, 2013

Edward P. Morgan, What Really Happened to the 1960s: How Mass Media Culture Failed Democracy (Lawrence, KS: University of Kansas Press, 2010).

Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past

- George Orwell, 1984

During the Sixties and ever since, the basic systemic and historical forces and issues that fueled the decade’s uprisings and the real democratic and egalitarian nature of its popular movements have stood beyond the boundaries of legitimate discourse in dominant U.S. media. The underlying problems that drove Sixties movements – soulless corporate rule, imperial war, ubiquitous poverty, oppressive racism, stultifying cultural homogenization, pervasive sexism, environmental pollution, and more – have been thrown down Orwell’s memory hole in that media. They’ve been exiled to the margins of collective memory, along with the democratic hopes of millions who participated in those movements. In transmitting the Sixties, the managers of mass U.S. media have offered an emotionally potent but highly superficial, heavily image- and personality-centered depiction of the decade’s movements and protests as dysfunctional deviance reflecting little more than a rebellion of angry and “sick” youth against authority as such. This great generations Sixties smear relies heavily on sensational visual representations of the protestors themselves and the national degradation and mayhem they allegedly advanced.

Some will question the depth and degree of the great 1960s “democratic awakening” today. Many in the U.S. establishment did not at the time and in the Sixties’ immediate aftermath. In August 1971, for example, top corporate attorney Lewis Powell penned a length and remarkable memorandum to the director of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Written two months before Richard Nixon appointed him to the Supreme Court, the memo detailed what Powell considered a “broadly based” assault on “the American economic system” (capitalism) emanating not just from radical margins but from “perfectly respectable elements of society: the college campus, the pulpit, the media, the intellectual and literary journals, the arts and sciences, and from politicians.” By Powell’s reckoning, a dangerous anti-business uprising led by such “charismatic” threats as Ralph Nader and the radical professor Herbert Marcuse meant that corporations should undertake a concerted and many-sided public relations and media counter-offensive – a veritable capitalist cultural counter-revolution. “It is time,” Powell proclaimed, “for American business – which has demonstrated the greatest capacity in history to produce and influence consumer decisions – to apply their great talents vigorously to the preservation of the system itself” (emphasis added). Powell felt that the struggle to win back hearts and minds for capitalism should target the universities, the publishing world, and the mass media, including an effort to place the television networks “under constant surveillance.” By Morgan’s account, Powell’s “urgent appeal helped set in motion forces that subsequently transformed public discourse in the United States for decades to come.” (165-167).

Two years later, Chase Manhattan Bank chief David Rockefeller, chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations, convened top figures from business and government in Europe, North America, and Japan to determine how to maintain what he called “the wider international system.” Organized as the Trilateral Commission, the elites gathered by Rockefeller produced a study claiming that “excessive” popular engagement and activism during the 1960s had generated “A Crisis of Democracy” – meaning, by Morgan’s translation, “that capitalism, its constrained, elite version of electoral democracy, and U.S. global hegemony were all endangered” (243). Writing the report’s section on the United States, Harvard political scientist Samuel P. Huntington worried that the “democratic surge” had activated “previously passive or unorganized groups in the population,” including “blacks, Indians, Chicanos, white ethnic groups, students, and women,” who “embarked on concerted efforts to establish their claims to opportunities, positions, rewards, and privileges” (imagine!). This was all, Huntington scolded, part of a an effort towards “reassertion of the primacy of equality as a goal in social, economic, and political life” – a goal that Huntington found dangerous and dysfunctional because it sought a “welfare shift” of government resources from “defense” (the military-industrial complex) to things like education, public health and social security (244).

What really happened to the great many-sided democratic and egalitarian awakening that was the essence of the 1960s? The decade’s great popular movements were of course quite significantly snooped on, infiltrated, manipulated, smeared, bloodied, and otherwise repressed by local, state, and federal government. Just as importantly and of no small relevance for authorities’ ability to repress, however, those movements were defeated in their own time and ever since by a mass media that has distorted and exploited the Sixties for reasons both political and commercial, with terrible results for democratic and human prospects.

Full Article: http://www.zcommunications.org/rescuing-the-sixties-by-paul-street

[truebluegreen]

1. + 1000

What happened in the 60s was that Americans felt empowered, and started demanding a place at the table of power. A lot of it had to do with the middle class, but not all. Everybody got "uppity": minorities, women, students, environmentalists...everybody!

And TPTB have been pushing back ever since.

[lastlib]

4. The "Reagan Revolution" was actually a counter-revolution......

(bookmarked for later.....)

[truebluegreen]

6. Yes it was...

a reactionary response to the people claiming "too much" power.

[love_katz]

9. ^^^^^This^^^^^

+ a gazillion!

[marble falls]

2. The Port Huron Statment comes to mind.....

Port Huron Statement of the Students for a Democratic Society, 1962

Courtesy Office of Sen. Tom Hayden.

THE PORT HURON STATEMENT OF THE STUDENTS FOR A DEMOCRATIC SOCIETY

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introductory Note: This document represents the results of several months of writing and discussion among the membership, a draft paper, and revision by the Students for a Democratic Society national convention meeting in \cf2 Port Huron\cf0 , Michigan, June 11-15, 1962. It is represented as a document with which SDS officially identifies, but also as a living document open to change with our times and experiences. It is a beginning: in our own debate and education, in our dialogue with society.

published and distributed by Students for a Democratic Society 112 East 19 Street New York 3, New York GRamercy 3-2181

INTRODUCTION: AGENDA FOR A GENERATION

We are people of this generation, bred in at least modest comfort, housed now in universities, looking uncomfortably to the world we inherit.

When we were kids the United States was the wealthiest and strongest country in the world: the only one with the atom bomb, the least scarred by modern war, an initiator of the United Nations that we thought would distribute Western influence throughout the world. Freedom and equality for each individual, government of, by, and for the people -- these American values we found good, principles by which we could live as men. Many of us began maturing in complacency.

As we grew, however, our comfort was penetrated by events too troubling to dismiss. First, the permeating and victimizing fact of human degradation, symbolized by the Southern struggle against racial bigotry, compelled most of us from silence to activism. Second, the enclosing fact of the Cold War, symbolized by the presence of the Bomb, brought awareness that we ourselves, and our friends, and millions of abstract "others" we knew more directly because of our common peril, might die at any time. We might deliberately ignore, or avoid, or fail to feel all other human problems, but not these two, for these were too immediate and crushing in their impact, too challenging in the demand that we as individuals take the responsibility for encounter and resolution.

While these and other problems either directly oppressed us or rankled our consciences and became our own subjective concerns, we began to see complicated and disturbing paradoxes in our surrounding America. The declaration "all men are created equal . . . rang hollow before the facts of Negro life in the South and the big cities of the North. The proclaimed peaceful intentions of the United States contradicted its economic and military investments in the Cold War status quo.

We witnessed, and continue to witness, other paradoxes. With nuclear energy whole cities can easily be powered, yet the dominant nationstates seem more likely to unleash destruction greater than that incurred in all wars of human history. Although our own technology is destroying old and creating new forms of social organization, men still tolerate meaningless work and idleness. While two-thirds of mankind suffers undernourishment, our own upper classes revel amidst superfluous abundance. Although world population is expected to double in forty years, the nations still tolerate anarchy as a major principle of international conduct and uncontrolled exploitation governs the sapping of the earth's physical resources. Although mankind desperately needs revolutionary leadership, America rests in national stalemate, its goals ambiguous and tradition-bound instead of informed and clear, its democratic system apathetic and manipulated rather than "of, by, and for the people."

Not only did tarnish appear on our image of American virtue, not only did disillusion occur when the hypocrisy of American ideals was discovered, but we began to sense that what we had originally seen as the American Golden Age was actually the decline of an era. The worldwide outbreak of revolution against colonialism and imperialism, the entrenchment of totalitarian states, the menace of war, overpopulation, international disorder, supertechnology -- these trends were testing the tenacity of our own commitment to democracy and freedom and our abilities to visualize their application to a world in upheaval.

Our work is guided by the sense that we may be the last generation in the experiment with living. But we are a minority -- the vast majority of our people regard the temporary equilibriums of our society and world as eternally-functional parts. In this is perhaps the outstanding paradox: we ourselves are imbued with urgency, yet the message of our society is that there is no viable alternative to the present. Beneath the reassuring tones of the politicians, beneath the common opinion that America will "muddle through", beneath the stagnation of those who have closed their minds to the future, is the pervading feeling that there simply are no alternatives, that our times have witnessed the exhaustion not only of Utopias, but of any new departures as well. Feeling the press of complexity upon the emptiness of life, people are fearful of the thought that at any moment things might thrust out of control. They fear change itself, since change might smash whatever invisible framework seems to hold back chaos for them now. For most Americans, all crusades are suspect, threatening. The fact that each individual sees apathy in his fellows perpetuates the common reluctance to organize for change. The dominant institutions are complex enough to blunt the minds of their potential critics, and entrenched enough to swiftly dissipate or entirely repel the energies of protest and reform, thus limiting human expectancies. Then, too, we are a materially improved society, and by our own improvements we seem to have weakened the case for further change.

http://www.h-net.org/~hst306/documents/huron.html

[truebluegreen]

7. +100

[bvar22]

3. DURec!!!

---bvar22 & Starkraven
Living Well on a low Taxable Income
and stuff we learned in the 60s!

[summerschild]

5. K&R

[Doctor_J]

8. Fail is not the right word

Fail implies that they were pro-democracy and didn't get the job done. In fact they were part of the fascist apparatus, and succeeded mightily.

[Mojorabbit]

10. K and R nt

[MisterP]

11. Todd Gitlin's such a poodle

the trajectory takes us into the 70s--OPEC, Ford and Carter gradually dropping the economic reins until Reaganism broke out, Team B saying we had to attack "the USSR" in Africa, Cambodia, and Latin America (a response to the shock of Vietnam and the Church Committee), corporate astroturf in response to chemical regulation, the environmentalist movement, and the more hippieish doctors bringing local herbs into the materia medica

astroturf, BTW, doesn't even have to win over the public--just the political discourse and establishment: if a corpo-friendly policy is passed, it doesn't matter if 70, 80, 90% are against it; as long as FOXy talking points get into circulation they become conventional wisdom: at least one assertive, "well"-informed guy in a party yammering about how "we had AR-15s in high school when *I* was a kid" or "Occupy needs to be shot" is enough to put the kibosh on conversation (that reminds me, I have to disinvite that white supremacist...)

[xtraxritical]

12. k&r

[Democrats_win]

13. 2019. We cherish the activism and ideals of the 1960s.

Yet, world events including in the U.S. indicate that Authoritarianism is gaing control: India, Brazil, Russia, Turkey, and Hungary. Truly horrible events are occuring in these countries and America has opened concentration camps on its southern border. Terrible jobs are plentiful in America and affluenza has conquered the hearts of Americans.