Back To The Future - the Protest Movement

[housewolf]

From Digby's Hullabaloo

Digby reviews and defends the protest movement of the 60's and 70's and reminds us what the fight was all about

Back To The Future

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American liberalism grew out of a passionate progressivism and a worldwide union movement, both of which featured plenty of "protest politics" in their day.

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The author fails to realize, however, that just as the rabble on the right took to the airwaves, the rabble on the left is taking to cyberspace. This ain't no hippie protest movement, dude. It's as modern as modern can get.

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But, underneath that Chicago convention circus a bunch of really important other things were happening that are glossed over by these newly minted men in the grey flannel suits with patronizing lip service to "idealism".

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the time had come for liberalism to act on its long overdue responsibility to fully extend the rights and responsibilities of the American experiment to women and racial minorities --- to use, as Dear Leader would say, its political capital. The social changes that were ratified in the 60's and 70's were arguably more important to the lives of more than 50% of Americans than anything that had happened in the previous century. That's not hyperbole. The women's rights movement alone is one of the greatest progressive leaps forward in human history.

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However, the energetic political activism of the 60's resulted in tangible, everyday improvement in the lives of vast numbers of Americans who fought for and won the right to be equal under the law in this country. That betterment of real people's lives is what liberalism is supposed to be about.

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I don't know where this vast horde of reborn hippies worshipping at the feet of Jerry Rubin are but I do not see them. What I do see is modern political activism that is demanding change in modern ways.

http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2005_04_03_digbysblog_archive.html#111267590954238924