Vic and Jerry and “Frat Boys Need Not Apply”

            Vic and I were the political equivalent of what one of my fraternity brothers had years before called “bundling-board buddies”: associates on the anti-War Left in the late 1960s and 1970 at the U of Illinois (Urbana) and that far “in bed together,” but/so we would not fuck each other (over), but neither would we act out any love. 

            At best, Vic and I were polite to each other, so it’s unlikely I arranged for him to speak at the fraternity where I was an alumni brother, but appropriate for me to be there to hear his pitch. Anyway, speak Vic did, and very well, and his argument against US fighting in Vietnam was cogent enough that he got some volunteers for “The Movement” and an indication that the chapter as a unit would support resistance to the War.

            And then he got a kind of question from one of the house officers, the immediate past president if I remember right: Jerry. Jerry told how after a fairly formal appointment he’d gone over to an ad hoc Movement HQ to volunteer. “And I was wearing my blazer and slacks from the meeting I’d been at”; and he’d been sent off with some sneers about the Movement not wanting his type. And Jerry politely asked what I’ll crudely put, «What the fuck was that about?!» And Vic chuckled and said, more or less “Hey, we’ve got prejudiced people on the Left same as everywhere else,” people who’d judge others by their clothes and living arrangements — and Jerry should go over again and tell them he was going to resist the War and they should just tell him what work he could do.

            Vic was smart and an effective politician, and Jerry in his own way was a good organizer and would help the cause. 

            One other guy from the house was ex-Marine ROTC  (there is such a thing), who helped me with “marshalling” at a couple peace marches and provided the backup muscle to stop our possibly Government-Issued Anarchist and Potential Provocateur from starting a fight with the Champaign-Urbana contingent of the FBI and other armed and nervous agents of Law’n’Order. Another house officer — the current president, I believe — provided one of the great images from the Student Strike of 1970 on the U of I Urbana Campus. He marched around the very large Engineering Quadrangle, alone, with a picket sign proclaiming, “ENGINEERING SCHOOL ON STRIKE!” 

            There weren’t many, but my former fraternity chapter was one of the “radical houses” among the U of I Greeks, and a high point of the strike was when Pan Hellenic endorsed it, and the president thereof, from a balcony of the Illini Union announced to the crowd below, with a slight pause, that “Illinois student aren’t going to stand for this … shit anymore!” (quoting from memory).

            Times change, and student cultures change; but there were “radical houses” during The Troubles of 1970 or so at the University of Illinois, and there is nothing intrinsic in fraternities or sororities to prevent that, although most of the fraternities were conservative, and at Cornell about that time one could see at least one militantly conservative fraternity in action on racial issues. 

            The key variable we noted at the U of I (Urbana) at that time was less living unit than age: older students tended to be more militant. Part of that was being closer to graduation and the draft for guys and for women with bothers and friends and lovers who could be drafted. Part was just being older and knowing more: most 18-year-olds probably should be pretty conservative until they know enough to be knowledgeable activists. Anyway, the leadership and hard-core of the activists tended to be older students: juniors and seniors and graduate students.

            “Effective politics is coalition politics,” and for the US Left ca. 2018 this means, I think, mostly getting the secular and religious Left together. On a much lower level of importance, though, is getting across the general principle of excluding no one unnecessarily. If people on the Left can look at the Right and think, “Goll dang and thank God, those guys can act dumb with their bigotry: they’re missing out on a lot of conservative Blacks and Latinos!” — and other groups. Even so, the academic Left may be missing out on a few or more “Jerrys” in just dismissing “frat boys.” 

            The correct terms I believe are still “frat rats” and “dorm rats” (cf. “gym rats” and “lab rats”); and the rule is still to take recruits where you find them, wherever they live. 

            If you believe fraternities are essentially pernicious, okay, work against fraternities. But they’ll be around for a while, and it might be better to work against bad behavior and systemic problems, without snarky and lazy personal attacks like casual use of “frat boy.” 

Parable of the Masturbating Madmen (11 April 2014)

            In reading The Parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 25-37), we might ask, Who was this man "going down from Jerusalem to Jericho," who was mugged and left for half dead. What was the date and time of day of the assault, and what were the hometowns of the priest and Levite who didn't get involved and passed by. What, we might ask — if we were cops or criminologists — was the age and economic class of the Samaritan who "took pity on him. […] and took care of him," that man attacked on the road? We might indeed ask, but most of us don't, 'cause it'd be dumb to do so. Jesus's parable is true, but not factual; there's no reason to believe the event ever happened — it only needs to be plausible — and there's no need to believe that it did happened. "The Good Samaritan" story is a parable: a teaching story, a thought experiment on a matter of ethics and theology.

            Even as with The Good Samaritan, I was given as a parable in my education in the sciences the story of scientific studies in days of yore (19^th c.? late 18^th?) showing that 92.3% of male inmates in mental institutions reported having masturbated, often having masturbated fairly frequently (and one or two have been doing so while being interviewed, but when I went to school such a narrative touch might have been omitted). The story is plausible, given old theories of "masturbatory insanity" and given continuing attempts to find something pathological with jerking off.

            Anyway, given that "87.6% of all cited statistics are made up," you can fill in any impressive-sounding stats you like here, and we retain a cautionary tale of problems with our thinking.

            First off, you have scientists collecting evidence for what they know to be true, following in the steps of earlier generations of intellectuals that got masturbating sinful by twisting the story in Genesis of Onan, or continuing the error of Aristotle and looking for a goal (telos) with every behavior.

            (Cats don't hunt with the goal of eating; they hunt in a beautifully-graded cascade of encoded behaviors, fairly frequently culminating in a kill and a meal; humans sometimes have sex in order to reproduce, but all Mamma Nature requires is that the sex be heterosexual vaginal copulation often enough that babies get conceived — which happens quite enough, thank you, that we humans have been fruitful and multiplied and held dominion over the Earth up the wazoo, whatever else our various "wazoos" have been up to, down to, or rooting around in.)

            Second off, getting back to the jerking-off parable — second off, an early Liberal pedant might have pointed out the problem of confusing correlation with causation: Are there so many wankers in insane asylums because whacking off causes insanity, as the social conservatives say, or do people driven mad in other ways then jerk off more? A truly liberated thinker might even have suggested that masturbation was a sensible response to confinement and boredom.

            The most important lesson in this parable is that there was no lesson in the statistics: in terms of whacking off, inmates of insane asylums turned out to be pretty much just a normal adult human (male) population.

            Since 95% of American males over age-whatever will admit to having masturbated at some time or other — see above on making up statistics —and noting that there's much truth in the joke that most of the other 5% are quadriplegics or lying, then there is no significance to having a population of the certified insane (etc.) with similar stats.

            Obviously here, which is why a factoid on stupid early research went into academic folklore, or why some teacher made up a highly plausible and true, if not necessarily factual, parable.

            It's a kind of parable that needs repetition, just with different obvious examples with different audiences, because we still make similar mistakes.

            E.g., in the early 1970s there was much speculation on just how badly the 1960s education reformers had screwed over American high schools that college professors were seriously trying to determine "Why Johnnie Can't Read" or write or spell or do math. My friend Dan and I had a strong feeling that high school was the institutional equivalent of one of the great dinosaurs, seen when we were growing up as slow-witted lumbering beasts, moving along at low speed but incredible inertia.

            "High School," we were convinced, "doesn't change." So we went back to our old high school, and, allowing for hasty generalization, over generalization, and some exaggeration — yeah, "High School doesn't change." At least ours hadn't much: different ethnic mix, murals on the wall, rumors of better-grade weapons among the hoodlums, a new public address system — but that was pretty much it.

            Far more scientifically, the great scholar Richard Ohmann wrote an essay for The Chronicle of Higher Education, entitled, "The Literacy Crisis Is a Fiction, if Not a Hoax" (25 October 1976). If there were problems with the skills of incoming college frosh — and there were and are — there have been such problems for a long time, and the in-quotation-marks "problem" in the early 1970s wasn't so much with Johnnie as with Jane.

            Earlier in the 20^th c., the academically best and brightest among women high school graduates were likely to go to college, but, generally, the academically best and brightest only; by the 1960s, college professors were seeing a more normal population of American high school graduates: primarily more women, to some extent more Black and Brown students. The professors often didn't like what they saw and groused, but an earlier generation of professors had groused after World War II and the G.I. bill, and the professors often out-groused and out-curmudgeoned by conservative politicians and editorialists at, say — for those G.I. bill students at the University of Illinois — The Chicago Tribune.

            There was a long tradition of complaints every time US college and university admissions had opened up to new groups, and that tradition had come on strong in the early 1970s and has recycled since.

            A MORAL here: don't View With Alarm!!! and try to explain a phenomenon until you're sure it's actually happening.

            The "Literacy Crisis" of the 1970s wasn't new and it wasn't a crisis and it didn't reflect radical changes in US high schools. That perceived crisis in basic academic skills reflected a chronic failure of American schools over long periods of time to educate normal students to a high academic standard. Over the last eighty years or so, US students have improved at thinking — they keep getting better at IQ tests, anyway, but our standards for mediocrity are still way too low. That's not good, but it calls for different responses than rhetorical attacks on reformers trying to deal with chronic problems.

            (Critique and criticism: Hell, yes! Most new ideas in education are bad ideas, and that should be pointed out. But critique is different from jumping to the conclusion that small changes in high school education and culture in the 1960s were having huge effects by the 1970s, and then lemon-picking, so to speak, horrible examples to prove the point.)

            In the mid-1990's Mike Males talked about a Scapegoat Generationand America's War on Adolescents, and allowing for exaggeration and an additional generation since then, his arguments were and remain valid. One of his most important arguments is that in most areas of social pathology, older US teens are a normal adult US population. Indeed, the kids of the 1980s and '90s were doing better than the Boomers did as kids and in some areas were doing better than the Boomers were doing as adults.

            So, "What's the matter with kids today?" — significantly a song line set in the 1950s — may be asking the same sort of wrong question as asking whether masturbation causes mental illness or mental illness causes masturbation.

            The bashing of kids may be the same sort of wrong-headed approach to policy as seeking to reduce US violence with stricter controls on the mentally ill: At least it’s been argued that "there is overwhelming epidemiological evidence that the vast majority of people with psychiatric disorders do not commit violent acts. Only about 4 percent of violence in the United States can be attributed to people with mental illness." Hence, "mental illness is […] a risk factor for violence," but a small one. "Only certain serious psychiatric illnesses are linked to an increased risk of violence."

            Our problem with violence in American may well lie with normal Americans — especially Americans of the male persuasion: normal people with normal desires to strike back at people who have really pissed us off — but, for whatever reasons lack the self-control, inhibitions, and/or social constraints to keep such violent impulses in check.

            "Man" is not a rational animal, Jonathan Swift wrote to Alexander Pope (29 September 1725) but only an animal capable of reason. And from the Age of Enlightenment on — with Francis Bacon and Baruch Spinoza preceding even Swift — it's been clear to serious thinkers that clear thinking is difficult. Still, we can do better, starting with determining carefully just what it is we are trying to think about.

            A lot of the time we try to avoid thinking about us: i.e., we avoid recognizing that people behaving in ways we don't like are folks not all that different from us.

"Don't Panic the Herd" (Unnecessarily) [24 July 2014]

             In a way this post supplements my rather insistent request for some apologies from the late 20^th-century "Lefter-than-Thou" Left, this time adding in some issues of pretty much just style.

            Part of what's going on is old resentment on my side. No one on the Left ever threatened to kill me, nor even put a riot baton upside my head, but what I did get from some of my radical colleagues on the was, back when I was visible among the local 1960s peaceniks, quiet contempt for "the short little Lib with glasses" and, later, a kind of active disregard.

            You may now ignore that opening; I included it for, not full disclosure; no one can do that, but to admit some of the personal, and petty, that is always part of the political.

            The more political portion of the political that concerns me here is that some to my Left both did necessary and important work, for which they will usually take credit, but also messed up a bit, about which we hear less.

            One job they did was crucial for me: the loudest and most radical were always useful to those of us dealing with The Powers That Were (and Still Are) trying to negotiate what we hoped would be progress.

            It is always essential in such negotiations that "the Man" in his various incarnations look out the window and see and hear a mob — however small or nonexistent the crowd out there — and think, "If I do not compromise with these relatively moderate Moderates, I will have to deal with THEM outside."

            Indeed, on one occasion there was just too little rabble being roused for even the most paranoid administrator to grow concerned, so on the way to a meeting I had to take off my jacket and tie and go outside and whip up the crowd a bit myself.

            "Always have someone to your Left" if you're on the Left, to the Right if you're a conservative: either way, radicals that make you look eminently reasonable (even if the radical arguments are often more logically consistent than moderate compromises).

            And to a great extent many of us tried hard to look like moderates. 'Cause — in part, as usual — many of us growing up in the gray middle of the 20^th century grew up with the unspoken or spoken rule, "Don't panic the herd."

            Among my friends, the maxim was spoken and should have been expanded: Don't panic the herd unnecessarily, or even (unnecessarily) annoy them.

            We were quietly cocky little bastards, my friends and I, but it's hardly bragging to note that we were smart enough to figure out that our high school's student council was a "toy government" and that class president and similar faux-democratic offices weren't even that.

            And toys are to be played with, and, being wise-asses, we played.

            We saw ourselves as something cooler than kids at play, though; if we were conscious of it at all — and here we were pretty unconscious — we thought of ourselves as cowboys moving along the little dogies, or, just maybe, now and then, a lion sneaking up on the herd at the water hole.

            Anyway, we quietly, offhandedly, and in our spare time, manipulated graduation-class politics and student politics more generally — what there was of student politics at Lake View High School in the late 1950s — and figured if we couldn't be "the popular kids" we'd be the quiet manipulators.

            It was a Chicago high school, Lake View High, so such exercises were good training for adult life if we stayed in the neighborhood; and it was crucial if very basic training for my future political life in downstate Illinois, the academy, and what is now John Boehner's Congressional District. (Hint: However negative the news coverage can be of Mr. Boehner, it's better than we were used to in the Ohio 8^th CD: no phrases in the media like "contributing to the delinquency of a minor" and "counts of bribery and conspiracy.")

            We called our group "Delta Chi Omega Sigma Mu," from the initials of our initial motto of "Don't Cry Over Spilt Milk" and because it has a rhythm (at least with an Omega and not an Omicron) appropriate for singing, so we kind of automatically had most of a club song.

            One high point in our brief corporate life — Year Clubs are people, my friends — was when one day junior year I was sitting in the school cafeteria and a kid came up to me and asked me if I was president of Delta Chi Omega Sigma Mu, and I replied "I think so." This actually wasn't a wise-ass answer since DCOSM handled transfers of authority in the tradition of the late Roman Empire, but without the violence, and I was pretty sure I had just been impeached. I finally decided I was as close to a president as we had at that moment and asked him what he wanted. He said he was running for some school or class office, and I said, "Well …?" And he asked, "Is that all right?"

            Ah, if only The Godfather had been out, and we had gotten our class rings! It hadn't and I don't think we had, so I just said, "Uh, sure" and tried to look warm and sincere and earnest and wished him luck.
            That was my personal best, but what's relevant here — I will get around to the point, honest — what's relevant here is a group achievement, and its eventual celebration.

            One day, one of my club brothers (one of the guys behind the impeachment) came up to me and asked me for a name everyone in the school would know, or think they knew. I paused and said, "Carlson. Robert Carlson — Robert A., A for Allen, but everyone calls him 'Bob'" and asked why. And my friend said that we were running him for Sgt. at Arms of the Student Council.

            I noted that I'd made up the name, and he said he knew and that that was what he wanted.

            So one of the year-club brothers wrote up a student folder for Bob and filed it appropriately, along with other subsidiary documentation. I didn't follow this part: no "Need to Know," you know, and our, well, forger was very professional about the operation (he went on to become a significant expert in encryption and had a notable run-in with the NSA before that was fashionable). Others worked on the Carlson campaign and wrote a speech for Bob to deliver at the school's election assembly.

            Getting the speech given was something of a challenge, but poor Bob came down with some medical affliction, and we got a hotshot from the current Student Council officers — a guy the speechwriter didn't like — to deliver the speech. The Council officer did an excellent job, and it looked like Bob was a shoo-in.
            And this brought us to a decision point for the, well, conspirators. Some of us wanted to get Bob elected; others noted a problem.

            Lake View did a good job running realistic elections for our toy student government, and we used actual Chicago or Cook County voting machines. Those came cheap, but there was a rental charge; and if it became clear that there'd need to be a new election based on the non-existence of the winner, or even the death or nonexistence of one of the candidates; and either way the machines would have to be rented again or there'd have to be a hand count.

            And costing the school money or making the Student Council election committee count by hand over 2000 ballots: neither was going to be taken as just good clean fun.

            So we killed Bob.

            After all, he'd been too sick to deliver his election speech, and even back before well-publicized school shootings and some poor schmuck's managing to OD on caffeine, high school students did die with sufficient frequency that the story was plausible.

            Fortunately for us, this was before the time of bringing in grief counselors for basically routine deaths; and also fortunately we were able to stop the collection of money for flowers or a contribution to … whatever-Bob-had-died-of fund — and we "pulled the string" as they used to say and whispered it around that good old Bob whom everyone knew had a terminal existential issue.

            There was an investigation, spearheaded by the current Sgt. at Arms of the Student Council, the guy who initially came up with the Carlson-for-Office idea. And we went to ground and kept our mouths shut.
            And the herd was quiet, and we sort of celebrated getting away with the prank by buying ΔΧΩΣΜ club shirts (knitted short-sleeves in blue with black letters: ugly — really ugly — but appropriate for us).

            And then someone got a bad idea, and we upped our celebration of our success by all of us wearing our shirts to school on the same day.

            Hubris yields Nemesis as the Greeks used to say, or in a more decorous formulation: Chutzpah — dumb-ass arrogance — is the pride that goeth before a pratfall.

            We made it obvious who had gotten elected to many of the offices of the toy government and such, and the herd wasn't panicked so much as the flock spotted the owls out in the daylight and mobbed the shit out of them. Less metaphorically and far less melodramatically put, we pissed off a number of our classmates, and the next election that came up — senior class officers —we were out.

            It made little difference who became class president, although the candidate elected instead of our guy made that his first step on a successful career in the cop business and then as owner of McDonald's franchises. Important for me here were lessons about the dangers of arrogance, the limits to how far people (not cattle or zebras or sheep) can be annoyed, and how something as banal as ugly short-sleeve shirts can have unanticipated effects.

            Which returns me to heavier matters.

            "The sixties" as a period in political history didn't correspond exactly to the decade of 1960 through 1969. If you need dates for it, one might say the sixties started in late 1963 with the assassination of John F. Kennedy, got caught in a backlash in 1968 with the election of Richard M. Nixon as President of the United States, got shot down at Kent State and Jackson State Universities in 1970, twitched a bit and then got indecently buried in an electoral landslide with the re-election of Richard M. Nixon over George McGovern in 1972. With some important ups and downs, primarily with the Watergate Scandal, the sixties were well over in crucial aspects by 1972, symbolized by Nixon's successful "Southern Strategy" for Republicans and the successful campaigns for President — to overstate — of Southern Eisenhower-Republicans by the Democrats.
            The Reagan Revolution of the 1980s f. (the Margaret Thatcher Revolution to give credit more accurately) helped "roll back" a good deal of the sixties and "the Movement."

            Why? Too big a topic for my pay grade, but let's start with "the Movement's" being far from monolithic — a good thing — and at its roots too incoherent (not a good thing). Hippies were not Radicals; the Civil Rights movement and Peace Movement overlapped but were not identical; Malcolm X was emphatically not Martin Luther King, Jr., and Black Power as a movement was not Civil Rights and integration.

            And finally moving into the topic announced in my opening paragraph — the social and cultural movements of Hippies, feminists, gays, and associates (GLBT) overlapped with the other small "m" movements in American society but were far from identical, and not always in agreement on goals and tactics.

            "The personal is the political" is true indeed, but the personal also can and does compete with the more purely political, defined in traditional terms of broad-scale power and economic issues. Identity politics are politics, but they are necessarily particularistic and complicate coalition politics.

            And religious politics are always and necessarily incredibly problematic and dangerous, as can be seen by a quick look at the body counts from the 17^th-century European Wars of Religion as well as those from the older Crusades and battles within Islam.

            Short form here: Some of my colleagues on the Left weren't colleagues at all but provocateurs, and there's a history to be publicized of infiltration of Movement groups by people assigned to act offensively and provoke trouble. More, though, were sincere people who got important work done, but work with costs.

            Obviously, the wise-guys of ΔΧΩΣΜ had the right to wear our shirts to school individually and conspire to all come to school in them on the same day. It was, however, not prudent to do so. Old adolescents and young adults have the right to wear their hair as they like, and it is progress that people nowadays can wear a wide range of hair styles without worrying about what sort of political statement they're making. And that you can display tatoos and that mi-level executives can be pierced — etc., except that fights over hair and clothes and fashion are far less of a drain on the status-quo Right than on the Left, and for the serious politics of Who-Gets-What are largely a distraction.

            And the "life-style" fights of the 1960s and following much too frequently panicked the herd. Indeed even far more serious conflicts — ones with excellent results like getting acceptance of gay marriage — came with upsetting traditionalists more than prudent.

            It can be useful and often necessary to "appall the bourgeoisie," but bourgeoisie is a Frenchified way to say "middle class," and it can be a very bad tactic to appall a middle-class that must be brought into any effective alliance against the reactionary among the very rich.

            It can be galvanizing to attack any orthodoxy, including religious orthodoxy, but go back to the old image with "galvanize" and picture putting electricity through people. They may object, strongly.

            After the American Left lost the power to threaten widespread disruption — basically after Kent State and Jackson State and convulsions that followed them — it was time to cool it and avoid unnecessarily annoying the conventional.

            Plenty of annoyance is already necessary.

            So, a sensible atheist can deal with theist by mildly re-formulating the probably apocryphal assertion by Pierre-Simon Laplace, "I have no need of that hypothesis" — the God hypothesis — and then shutting up unless the theists are trying to control your behavior.

                        * Effective politics are coalition politics, and there are a lot of religious people out there who can be drawn into progressive coalitions on the basis of their/our beliefs.

                        * In the United States, there are a lot of religious people, period.

                        * Historically, going back to the rediscovery of Greek philosophy, science, and "Reason," a standard response to overstated Enlightenment and "modernism" has been calls for a return to unquestioning faith and various fundamentalisms. Hold your ground civilly, but don't encourage that return. You don't have to say the "under God" part of the pledge of allegiance — or any of the Pledge — but you can stand there quietly when others indulge the patriotic impulse.

            All Americans of any, all, and every sexual orientation can cool it with Public Displays of Affection when PDA means public fondling.

            Having established the right to decorate one's body however one pleases, in public cover up anything overly outrageous — and do not think that making an artwork of your body is some sort of significant contribution to a just society.

            And so forth.

            The "sixties" in one sense lasted maybe five years, and after that it's been largely backlash. Most of that backlash was and remains inevitable; those of us Left of center, should not add to it.

            Back in high school, Delta Chi Omega Sigma Mu had the excuse of inexperience in unnecessarily goading our classmates. Older folk have no excuse. Unless it is really necessary, do not panic the herd.

            Unless you have a mob at your back — or your opponents imagine one — civility and restraint are always good options in dealing with people who just might give you what you want.

            You don't have to love your enemies or even your neighbors or "the stranger who resides with you" as on alien in or midst — not unless you Believe. Still, you can be nice to them, where possible, and, prudently, avoid unnecessarily throwing them into a panic, or a snit.

            Pranking people and arguing with them is fun; but it's better to deal with them so they'll give you their aid. 

Unfriendlies on the Left: A Rant for Liberal Wonks (8 Oct. 2014)

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"No enemies on the Left." — Slogan from late 1930's Popular Front

 "There's clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right,
Here I am [...] — "Stuck in the Middle"

            Back during the American Troubles of what I'll call the short 1960s (say, 1967-1972) I was a "non-corporate, anti-Establishment Liberal" doing some politics at the University of Illinois with a fair number of Leftists. Later, as a university professor, I worked in fields with a small number of aging New Leftists and the occasional old Marxist — I still edit for one — and, relevant here, increasing number of radical cultural feminists and politicized post-Structuralists. The details get complicated and contradictory, but the fine points needn't concern us; let's just say, I had some opponents to my socio-political Left.
            None of them ever threatened to put a bullet into me, as some jokers from the Central Illinois Minutemen did, so that was definitely "unfriendlies" or "opponents," not "enemies," and none were clowns, although I couldn't resist quoting the line from the Stealers Wheel's song. Still, during the American Troubles of the 1960s, "corporate Liberals" for sure were the main enemy perceived by the hard Left; Liberals ran the campuses, and it was Democratic presidents who organized the new economic order after World War II and took us into the National Security State — and the Vietnam War. And always, in the background, was the idea that "A Liberal is a Conservative with brains" — which is true insofar as Liberals know when and where to give in to moderate change, and Liberals know to support social justice: primarily by preserving The System by bringing more people into The System.
            Think Franklin Delano Roosevelt's trying to save Capitalism during the 1930s Depression and being despised by a whole lot of capitalists for his efforts — and tolerated by the really serious Left only insofar as was tactically prudent. Okay, now swoop on down, far down,  from the level of FDR to my territory, where I was to many of my colleagues "a useful idiot" or "the little Lib with glasses" (until I got contacts) or, as a high point, "an educable Lib."
            In towns like Champaign Illinois (to say nothing of Berkeley or Madison), the Establishment could be seen fairly clearly from the Left as Liberal, and the real opponent-wave of the future — the John Birch Society and Young Americans for Freedom and the well-scrubbed kids from Campus Crusade for Christ: those folk were either effectively invisible or dismissible.
            Anyway, as time went on, the attack was on not just Imperialism and Capitalism but "bourgeois democracy," leading by 1969 to a reduction to the absurd in the Weathermen and the Days of Rage and "Bring the War Home" and "Elections Don't Mean Shit" — and an appalling of the bourgeoisie that led to widespread and effective reaction.
            The US presidential election of 1968 was "a realigning election" that "permanently disrupted the New Deal Coalition that had dominated presidential politics for 36 years," as Wikipedia saith, and just how permanently was shown in 1972. In the 1968 US Presidential election, some 57% of the American electorate voted for either Richard M. Nixon or for George Wallace: basically for "Law and Order," which translated «Keep the uppity Blacks and youngsters down» or "segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever," which needs no translation, but also included putting down us commie-liberal-radical-hippie-pinko-fag-bums. (The Right wasn't much into fine distinctions.)
            The 1972 presidential election was a kind of referendum on "The Sixties," and "The Sixties" lost. Big: 520 electoral votes for Nixon vs. 17 for George McGovern, 60.7% of the popular vote for Nixon and Spiro Agnew, 37.5% for McGovern and Sargent Shriver; Nixon carrying 49 states, McGovern only Massachusetts and the District of Columbia.
            To repeat a line from the times (possibly mine): The Sixties died in 1970 at Kent State and Jackson State, twitched around for a couple years, and then got buried in 1972, in an electoral landslide.
            Most of the reaction was to riots in African-American neighborhoods, and against African-Americans, and there was a kind of inevitability to the race issues like a classic tragedy. What was not inevitable was otherwise intelligent people playing "Redder/More Radical than Thou" and convincing themselves that America was in a pre-revolutionary moment. What was not inevitable was appalling the middle and working classes so much that they would fairly frequently vote against their self-interest for the next two generations and more, and the best the "center-left" could do on the presidential level was elect a moderate Southern governor with a good heart (the Honorable Jimmy Carter) and two smart Eisenhower Republicans (Messrs. Clinton and Gore). Eventually, of course, in a further "realignment," we got Ronald Reagan and his importation of the Thatcherite Revolution — and then two Bushes.
            It didn't have to go that way.
            The American Troubles calmed down greatly after the exhaustion of the urban riots and the end of the Vietnam War.
            Not many Americans thought it through, not that I heard anyway, but it seemed the idea sunk in some time after the fall of Saigon that figurative dominoes weren't falling in South-East Asia, the world wasn't going Communist, the USA survived and, if anything, would've been better off if we had not fought in Vietnam. Therefore, by definition, no vital interests of the United States had been involved in Vietnam.
            We had fought a war of choice: hence an unjust war that left a lot of people dead (or wounded, maimed, poisoned, traumatized, displaced, immiserated) — all unnecessarily. Mostly of the victins were Vietnamese and Cambodians and other Asians, but 58,220 American dead, with the exact number depending on how you count. (They were mostly enlisted personnel, as you can see at the link: White-boy Army grunts, usually Roman Catholic or generic Protestant, mostly from the larger US states — but I digress).
            There was, after the fall of Richard M. Nixon and South Vietnam a brief opening when Liberals could make a comeback and maybe move the country toward significant reforms.
            What I experienced during that period, though, was not a re-established Popular Front, not even to the extent we'd had in the Civil Rights/Anti-War alliance. What we had was something initially hopeful with a rising political Feminism and struggle for the Equal Rights Amendment, and that Feminism in synergy with Black consciousness, Black pride, an incipient gay-rights movement, and the first Earth Day and the potential of the really radical, essential-for-survival radicalism of an environmental movement.
            And then political feminism and the movement for the ERA seemed to grind to a halt and get replaced by a radical cultural feminism that defined men as the central enemy, even as hard-core members of the Black Power movement had presented The White Man as the enemy.
            They had legitimate points, and it was not only inevitable but also right that women and minorities would go through periods of identity politics and group pride. The problem was those periods went on too damn long and prevented coalition.
            If the enemy was The Man, one should not only avoid sleeping with The Man — the enemy — but avoid cooperating with him.
            The great principle of seizing power is "Divide and conquer"; the great principle of maintaining power is "Divide and rule." The Left did the dividing to ourselves as games of "more radical than thou" moved into serious conflicts among identity groups competing for the time and effort (and sometimes money) of a limited number of Americans who were politically engaged and having trouble communicating with each other, let alone cooperating.
            And then this splintering got theorized and philosophized and "valorized" — and in the academy it metastasized.
            To summarize and oversimplify a combination of movements I really don't understand — this: as things stood on the ground, in terms of practical politics, so it was perceived in the ethereal regions of capital "T" Theory. The splinterings and divisions in practical political life were Good Things because the "metanarratives" of the past were "totalizing" Bad Things and "all critique is imminent."
            For a moment, trust me on what those formulations mean, and that they are fair: even as it's fair enough to note that the Left of the 1960s was sexist and needed a figurative kick in the ass from feminists (ditto for White privilege). From the "metanarratives" of Marxism to Freudianism to Behaviorism to Platonism to just-about-any-"ism," any Grand Unified Theory of anything more complex than physics is going to be incomplete and at least partly wrong. And all analyses of the world are "imminent" insofar as all of us are embedded in the world in complex ways and can't get a "transcendent," truly objective, God's-eye-view of anything.
            The problem — and a pattern is developing here — the problem was ideologues' pushing their theorizing too far, too recklessly.
            If the ideal of systematic thinking was masculinist; if the most "meta" of metanarratives was the idea of an objective world out there that can be understood through human reason; if scientific method asserted that people from different cultures could and should come to identical conclusions about the universe; if the whole idea of a universe was part of a Western Imperial super-metanarrative that ultimately justified an unjust world-system — then what?
            And if the suspicion remains that Liberals are the source of all evils, then the Big Mistake goes back to that source of modern Liberalism, the Enlightenment, and the whole scientific view of a universe out there with facts that can be established with experiment, logic, and reason.
            The alternative to Enlightenment "universalism" can be mental worlds of competing narratives — a real phenomenon — but with no way to choose which among those narratives might be most, in quotation marks, "true" — or correspond to "so-called 'facts.'" (People actually did write things like "so-called 'facts'" or say them with "air quotes.")
            Nowadays we believe that someone like Karl Rove would mock "the reality-based community" and, in different contexts, that we can talk about a Right-wing "faith-based community" vs. a "reality-based community." When Rove was just getting started, though, the attack on a materialist view of common-sense, fact-based "reality" was pushed by leftist academics of the late 20^th century: Theorists who saw themselves as the real radicals of the multiverse.
            In terms of practical politics, my Theoretical colleauges fucked up.
            If ordinary, normal people are going to forsake the Enlightenment and Liberal Democracy, it's not going to be for Postmodernism — at least not for Postmodernism outside of a few movies like Fight Club. Many people are uncomfortable already with the Modern, and if confronted by philosophies and, more to the point, counter-cultures even more radical, they are going to go back to the old, comforting metanarratives of the various anti-Modern Fundamentalisms. They're going to return to the old stories of American greatness such as that Great Communicator, Ronald Reagan, was so good at recycling.
            If ordinary, normal people are divided into groups, competing for decreasing shares of American wealth, they are going to stick with their groups and listen to the nearest TV demagogues and professionally-packaged politicians about how all their problems stem from something other than systems designed to exploit their labor.
            The members of our various elites have kept their eyes on the prize of wonky political stuff like marginal tax rates. They have sent the rest of us off on issues — especially Culture Wars — that divide us.
            Some of the divisions are inescapable: Americans have conflicting interests and world-views. And to give the devils their due, Karl Rove et al. have been downright brilliant in keeping us distracted and exploiting natural divisions.
            Still, to a great extent the Left in the United States undermined ourselves.
            It looks like within the next couple decades we will get full gay rights in the United States and equality for women and greater integration of Blacks and other minorities into the American economy. Good! Then can we get to matters like Who Gets What? Who Pays, Who Profits? Then, I think, most of us can accept as a practical matter, whatever High Theory or advanced physics says, that there is a world out there that can be understood enough to deal with, and in which some statements have greater "truth value" than others? We can deal with facts. Minimally we can we accept that "There's a car coming from the left" is different from and — if there's a car bearing down — definitely a more useful statement than "You're clear!" even for a postmodernist driver.

            In Ursula K. Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), on the imagined world of Gethen, a people has the saying I recall as, "You don't have to be kemmerings to haul a sledge": i.e., you don't have to be lovers to pull a sled together; and I'll ramp that up a bit to you don't have to be friends to work together, or even like one another. Some people on the Left haven't liked me, and, from time to time, I've returned the dislike. No big deal. "No enemies on the Left"; we don't have to like each other; all of us in various reality- and decency-based communities can work together, and we had better get back to it. Meanwhile, any remaining unfriendlies to my Left: cool it.