(I am including all my posts from Sakai in this post to catch up) I have been thinking a lot about this Richard Viven article that I read about the arc from the 68′ generation to the current situation. One of the rather ironic factoids noted in that Daniel Bendit Cohen, an ardent 68er and anti establishment figure, who now in his old age has pledged his political support to the technocrats technocrat, Emmanuel Macron. There is a very interesting ‘the day after the revolution’ dynamic. Now that the 68 generation has had control of the system for so long they favor stability and expertise over change. I think that there are two things that have been going on for a while now. First, the 68ers were never as anti establishment as they let on. There is the great Tom Wolf essay ‘Radical chic’ that very much skewers the many establishment figures who aligned themselves with the revolution, it wasn’t that they were anti-establishment as a principle, they simply did not agree with the current one. The second is that age and self interest took a lot of fire out of the belly of even true believers of that generation. The hippies of the 60s and 70s were often the same people in the money obsessed boardroom culture of the 80s and 90s. The boomer generation has had an incredible demographic clout more so than any generation and you can very much see how they shifted that clout as they aged and their desires changed. I suppose I would conclude by saying that it is no surprise the revolution did not hold together. There were always to many disjunctions between factions along economic and ethnic lines for it to remain coherent for long. The upper class students rioting in Paris over access to co-ed dorms were as much a world away from the Prague spring. Same with Americans who went to Woodstock and those protesting segregation in working class Birmingham Alabama.
Responding/ commenting on the ‘Us vs them blog’
I thought this was an interesting blog post. I think that the us vs them mentality is deeply engrained in human psychology and morality. The controversial political theorist Carl Schmitt coined the friend/enemy distinction as the central distinction in politics. Sometimes it can be over economic interests, rich v poor, other times it can be racial, white vs black. What ever the case may be, the distinction between friends and enemies is the central feature of any political conflict. What is to be done then. I suppose we either try and make the right enemies and fight only for just causes. The other option I suppose might be to try and transcend the distinction all together. What would that look like? For King it might mean making our only enemy the devil and people of every color our friends. My political theory professor suggested that we make climate change the enemy and all of humanity our friends
Response:
To Slavery and perspective: I do agree I think the Irish slavery claims are heavily overblown. Is the argument actually that they are still oppressed? I took the argument to be more of a bootstrap argument kind of claim, that is that the Irish too were disdained disliked and oppressed because of their heritage when they arrived here in America and that through buying into the culture and working hard they achieved social acceptance so as not to be oppressed. Certainly chattel slavery was much worse but does that mean that indentured servitude was not a harsh and exploitative practice used to take advantage of the poor of Ireland?
A revolution against who and what?
I was intrigued by something I heard the other week from the UK 68ers we heard from. I found it quite humorous when one of them called out Bill Clinton who was at Oxford at the time for not being a real 68er. That must have been quite a time to be alive in the UK. Their parents generation was one that grew up in an empire that ruled a large part of the known world. By the time they came of age that empire had fallen apart, hit rock bottom and what few possession were left, like Northern Ireland, posed nothing but problems. Despite being one of the original bearers of the liberal tradition the UK also has an ancient regime of aristocracy and of church and state. It seems like there was a lot of weariness with the old regime.
One thing that puzzled me was when the lady who was speaking to us started bemoaning Brexit. She was talking about advocating for ‘the peoples vote’ to overturn Brexit, which I guess poses an interesting question of if its real democracy if the question of membership gets posed over and over again until the elites get the answer that they want. Think what you will of Brexiters, but what kind of radical supports the EU? The EU is the institution of global capital and financial interests. I made the point earlier in the course that the 68ers were not that far from the Reaganites and Thatcherites but where the former advocated for social liberalization the later in the 80s advocated economic liberalization. That is to say that for all of their surface level differences the two camps represent two wings on the same bird of liberalization and liberalism writ large. So I would pose the same question I did earlier in the course, were the 68ers ever really a real threat to the economic establishment? If the corporatism of the 80s and 90s that resulted from the era are any sign, then probably not. For that reason I would argue that for all of his hyperbolic and uncharitable rhetoric about immigration, Enoch Powell was more of a radical and rebel towards the establishment than any of the 68ers we heard from in his staunch, principled opposition to the highly anti-democratic institutions of the European Union. The 68ers were never a real threat to capitalism or the political establishment as the example of former radical Daniel Bendit Cohen in his now vocal support of the technocrat Emmanuel Macron has shown.