No, Armando, you are not reading any of that right. First of all, I am not lamenting the emergence of the hippie, nor am I punching them. And I am not blaming the loss of the Democrats’ popularity in the South on the Vietnam War, although that war certainly didn’t help.
Let me do my best to explain, since I think it’s easy to misinterpret my meaning in this case. My main point is that Mr. Chait missed an important event during his retelling of history. Liberals may have bitched about FDR and Truman and JFK, but they didn’t see those presidents as illegitimate or as rogues or as evil-doers or as the heads of an out of control imperialist country. What the Vietnam War did was end a period of history in which liberals saw the country as good and in which they wielded considerable power. With good reason, liberals reacted to the Vietnam War by questioning authority, including their own role in the power structure. The tune in, turn on, and drop out ethos of the counterculture is the extreme end of this reaction, but the generalized suspicion of power has become much more mainstream.
At this point, let me also stop to make something clear. I am a great admirer of the counterculture and most people would consider me to have lived a life fully consistent with the values of the counterculture. What I am lamenting is not that people reacted to the power structures of the 1960’s with enlightened rebellion. Nor do I care to critique the shortcomings of that movement. What I am lamenting is an unintended consequence, a hangover if you will. The hangover is that liberals went from being the natural leaders of this country to being the natural critics or gadflies of this country. We are constitutionally suspicious of power to a degree that inhibits our ability, even our desire, to attain power.
Mr. Chait wanted to make the point that liberals are congenitally grumpy and dissatisfied, and therefore there is some illegitimacy to their grumpy dissatisfaction with Barack Obama. I see things differently. I think we are much more comfortable acting like critics than we are actually participating in governance. Some of it is that being on the outside allows us to maintain the purity of our convictions without being sullied by the dirty compromises that all progress requires. But what’s more important is that we don’t feel like power is a good thing. And I believe that people sense this about us. They sense it and they react to it by not taking us seriously. We can be right about all the big issues for years on end while the Establishment is ignoring us and falling on its face, over and over. But no one turns to us and says, “hey, you are the only people who’ve been right about this stuff, maybe you should be in charge.” They don’t do that because we don’t act like we deserve to be in charge or that we want to be in charge,
This can get bogged down in tired old arguments and accusations. The Republicans look at the way that we critique US foreign policy and say we don’t love our country and that we don’t believe that America is special and has a special role to play. They say we hate the military. Those criticisms are always over the top, but they relate back to something true, which is that the post-Vietnam War progressive movement grew out of the counterculture, and you can’t make a very good case for running the country if your disposition is counter to the culture and power structures of the country.
That’s why I say we need to get over being countercultural. I don’t mean that we should change our values. I am talking about our disposition, our attitude, the way we carry ourselves, what we expect of ourselves. When I say that we should make the countercultural cultural, I mean that we should have the confidence to behave like our values are mainstream and that we want to and deserve to govern with our mainstream values. We are winning the culture wars. We proved we could create a society color-blind enough to elect a biracial president. We proved we could turn tolerance for gays into a mainstream position. We proved we could enact a major health care bill. We don’t have to play the victim anymore. We don’t have to be the outsiders anymore. We can seize our place in the power structure again. We ought to be able to believe that the government can do great things again.
But, by and large, we’re not doing any of those things. People are wallowing in self-pity and petty recriminations. There’s a party on the right that is attacking us on every conceivable front, and some that aren’t even conceivable. I am not going to list them because you know the list. And so many liberals just ignore all that and find something they can fault in the president. If liberals want to be ascendant again, they have to embrace power again and step inside the system, take responsibility, get their hands dirty, and cut the holier-than-thou bullshit.
We have to act like the natural leaders of this country. When we do, we’ll discover that people are willing to let us lead.