I believe that the 1960’s are a misinterpreted decade in time, ten years usually thought of as a liberalized drug fest gone even worse in a leftist fantasyland with Hell’s Angels guarding something- ensuring events stayed crazed- and the decade is often inadvertently seen as an era when conservatism was nearly killed off. This notion stems from people’s distant memories during the decade’s final years, the most drug drenched and socially chaotic years out of any in the 1960’s.
But in reality, every year of the 1960’s, in the start, middle, or end, were good ones for conservatives, and in fact the last three narcotized years of cultural mayhem of the decade weren’t nearly as harmful to conservatism, or as beneficial to liberalism, as is generally thought; in fact the truth is far from that.
In fact if it wasn’t for those last, obnoxiously drugged out, socially chaotic, final years of the 1960’s the unspoken fact is that conservatism might’ve died long before Reagan took office in 1980. In spite of the thoughts of flower children, anti war protests, countercultural lifestyles, and heavy psychedelic usage that makes it seem like a leftist Disneyland time, it was an era that empowered the conservative movement for decades after it ended.
Without the effects that only the events of the 1960’s could have caused, the conservative movement wouldn’t ever have been galvanized together enough to do what its done.
Since the 1960’s end, conservatism has been the cultural and political ideology which has dominated American society since the election of Ronald Reagan as President of the United States in 1980 until present day. Not that conservatives were quiet in the 1970’s; it was a strong force throughout the decade after an early conservative ‘call to arms’ that unexpectedly happened in 1971 revealed the unknown strength of the movement. After its reestablishment of what a real American’s mythical beliefs were, the conservative movement never looked back.
I’ll definitely return to the cataclysmic event of 1971 that gave conservatism such a boost, but even without that event happening its likely the movement would’ve gained equal strength or near it. As I said, the late 1960’s weren’t a nightmarish period for conservatism, and nor was it a time when lefties thought they’d found heaven on Earth as many Americans mistakenly think today. The final years of the 1960’s enabled the conservative movement to gain the strength it needed to succeed so well in the following decades.
Many have found it hard to agree with my claims; they only see the 1960’s as some era when they and their friends almost ‘changed the world’ in a decade filled with notions, even if unsuccessful, that there could be a better world and that was the generation ready for the job. In fact, many who disagree with me say they would’ve done just that if the Military Industrial Complex and rightists hadn’t of dragged us into Vietnam. My response to that counterclaim: not a chance of 1960’s peace core peacenik’s changing anything around in anyway that would’ve make the years following that decade any different.
Sorry, Charlie.
I’m usually asked why it is I believe that to be so, once in a while by peace core workers in the 1960’s who get so defensive I wonder if they want to kick my backside, and if so, is mine the first butt they’ve ever wanted to kick?
Kind of an honor if so, right? Luckily I have good reasons that all add up and make sense too most people from the right or left, and no peace core punches have split my lip…so far, anyway.
The simple truth of the matter is that liberalism, like anything connected to the ‘counterculture’ and drugged out flower children, was doomed, fair or not, and things not associated with long haired, acid zonked hippies, fairly or not, were destined to succeed after the 1960’s. Both the Christian church and the Civil Rights Movement were unfairly damaged from the public’s perception of how they interacted with the counterculture.
While no ’solid’ evidence proves this, articles damaging to both group’s reputations can be found in numerous articles in the early to late 1970’s easily located using Google. Other groups and people instead unfairly were boosted by the perception of their behavior in the 1960’s and intentionally manipulated the public’s image of them as well as their belief system’s to help them achieve their own goals. One such group stands out above any others, and they’ve only manipulated the public on deeper and deeper levels since then, reaching their own goals and making it nearly impossible for the true conservative movement to reach its.
That group has gone by many names, but their real moniker is “the Straussian’s.” This is because they believe in the teachings and political beliefs of a political philosopher who taught at the University of Chicago, a man named Leo Strauss. The Straussian’s are a tight knit crew of close friends who met when they were students at the University of Chicago studying Strauss’s political ideologies together, or else met the other Straussian’s through U of Chicago alumni and Straussian’s also.
They adopted their current name toward the mid 1970’s when they saw the wind blowing toward the conservatism movement, and with some U of Chicago Straussian alumni already well known public figures who’d been holding down top posts in Washington at the end of Nixon’s Presidency and then through that of Gerald Ford’s. Members of the Straussian gang such as Dick Cheney and Lewis ‘Scooter’ Libby had made names for themselves, but it was Bill Kristol and Donald Rumsfeld’s rise in those years that truly legitimized the group of Straussian’s in Washington as a force, and planted the belief in the public’s mind that they were conservatives. They were far from planning for anything conservatives then wanted, but manipulating the perception of them as conservatives to accomplish their own goals was text book Leo Strauss ideology.
Hence, they publicly came out together as conservatives, but a special kind of conservative club which was only open to those who were known Straussian’s. They called themselves the Neo Conservatives, and they managed to use up conservatism’s gains until today so they could reach their own goals and start their own long made plans. Many Conservatives like to point at the inner city riots in the 1960’s as proof liberalism was a failed ideology, due to the failure of the anti poverty programs enacted by President L.B. Johnson. The belief and accusation that liberalism was proven to be a failed ideology by both the failure of LBJ’S ‘Great Society’ anti poverty programs and the riots of the 1960’s is widely accepted today, albeit incorrectly.
Bill Kristol, an ex liberal and well known journalist, silently jumped onto the Straussian ship while the riots were tearing America apart; it was his public claim of liberalism being proven a failed ideology by the riots on top of the failure of LBJ’S ‘Great Society’ programs that led it to be so widely accepted as correct for so long. In truth Kristol, called ‘the Godfather of Neo-Conservatism” by many today, was totally incorrect in attacking liberalism as a ‘failed’ ideology; in fact Kristol’s allegation is so wrong it’d be pathetically laughable if not so sad.
The ideology of ‘liberalism’ isn’t what was defeated by the failure of the Great Society programs or by the inner city riots of the 1960’s, and it wasn’t what sparked them to start, either. After kicking the Straussian’s out of the United States or imprisoning them, both the left and right need to take a hard look at the real causes in the 1960’s riots as well as look at some issues causing civil unrest today. It won’t be liberalism or any ideology they’ll see as the cause of current civil unrest or of the 1960’s riots; and it’ll takes balls to look at the cause and publicly say what America suffers from.
A mean little thorn called ‘Ingrained Societal Racism’, a thorn in America’s side for centuries now, is the culprit.
Liberalism wasn’t to blame for the ‘Great Societies’ failure, and conservatives aren’t responsible for the horrors in New Orleans; Americans inability to see or accept the institutional racism cemented in our national roots is too blame.
Most Americans aren’t racists; that’s why they don’t see it!
Racism didn’t die with Slavery or end with the Civil Rights Movement’s victories. Those things only masked what ingrained racist national policies still existed, which allowed ingrained racism to continue to permeate every pore of American society to the benefit of under 1% of all Americans and to the pain of at minimum 25%.
That’s a column for the future which deserves more focus than I can properly give it in this one, and this column isn’t about blatant racism so deeply ingrained in American society it caused Martin Luther King Jr. to say upper class white liberals from the North were far more dangerous to Civil Rights than were any Southern ’redneck’ or ’gentleman’ in the late 1960’s, and to American society overall.
Definitely an issue that’s earned a column coming soon, and one I look forward too writing. Finishing this one first is the next step towards its posting, so lets get back to the original question. Racism, Straussian’s, conservatism, neo conservatism, or liberalism aside, back to why conservatism was primed to dominate the post 1960’s decades even if the peace core worker’s had succeeded at all they planned too do,
Lost behind the memories and footage of dosed out hippies dancing topless on acid after ‘dropping out’ of the average middle or upper class lifestyles they’d been living to join the ‘counterculture’ after taking Timothy Leary’s advice and ’tuning on’ too ‘drop out’ is was the memories and footage of many other Americans.
There was the million’s of slightly displeased, horrified, to suicidal parents they left in their LSD fueled wake.
There was the millions of ex friends, school and teammates that saw Rob the starting fullback and best friend suddenly change his name to ‘Starlite’, eat LSD all the time, quit the team and friendship, and vanish.
There were the millions of friends and relatives those now saddened people were comforted by, who were also impacted by the growing drug using counterculture that had claimed someone close to them.
There were a lot more of those people than were there peace core workers, counterculture hippie freaks, or anyone who had a hint of leftist on them; the emotionally hurt right outnumbered those on the left ( whether those who were guilty by association by being in the Peace Core, or those who were high on really good stuff ) by like 250 million to maybe 1 million.
They were conservatives now even if they didn’t know it, and they were steadfastly on the right, and after the cultural phase and chaos of the 1960’s ended…they had the advantage.
On top of that; what about the men who made the American dream come true? I mean the old blue collar union workers, who drank their beers, smoked a little weed, maybe partied harder than that, but they always worked hard and well and loved their country!
They were proud they did live like they did and that they loved their country.
They weren’t enamored with the ’flower children’ in any way, Rich kids who were playing rebellious druggie drop out, full of anti war talk about a war they’d never have to fight in and if they were drafted into it would just go to Canada and avoid it anyway. They always were singing the praises of LSD and wishing they could spit on some troops returning from Vietnam as they called them baby killers, while ranting on about hating America.
Unlike the union workers the ’flower children’ partied but did not go to work because they had no jobs and weren’t looking for work. Many flower children had recently dropped out of expensive colleges despite the high tuition cost they stuck to their parents, on the advice given by a stoned friend or Timothy Leary. Rich kids and temporary college drop outs, all unemployed and not seeking work, taking drugs all day long and having ’free love’ all night.
Mu uncle, a steelworker into Marvel Comics in the 1970’s, recalled the ‘hippies’ like some nightmarish caricature’s of a kid who’d fallen into a bad crowd of drug users and drinkers growing up in the inner city. The difference between the flower kids and those kids were that the kids from the inner city were poor and didn’t cry about hardly anything. The flower children, on the other hand, were rich and also cried about everything.
Union workers saw them to be closest to pestilent dandelions which scattered everywhere, were ugly, and filled the air with their irritating pollen and wispy white one time yellow flower things. So did every other local from a city or town where the human dandelions arrived at for whatever reason they’d come, and they made less friends the longer they stayed in a place it seemed.
Integrating themselves into the community wasn’t high on the dandelion children’s agenda, which was fine for blue class collar guys except for one thing. They still forced themselves into your life by always dancing in front of the gas station or in the middle of the town park that kids no longer went to play in.
They not only ‘danced’ in front of everyone at whatever place had the most public traffic and forced you to watch them do so, they made it even worse. To start with they weren’t dancing the lindy, or doing the Jitterbug, or dancing any dance previously known to the rest of mankind. They danced alone, even if six girls and two guys were dancing, and they also each danced in a different style than each other, and like all of their dance’s, no dance that any of them danced individually had ever before been observed by human eyes.
All of the dead dandelion rich children except one would sway about in a circular motion that was notably un-rhythmic in any way, and it wasn’t because they were dancing to music in their heads and had no music to actually to, they actually did….kind of, anyway. That was thanks to the lone non dancing rich kid who happily embraced and advertised his choice to turn into a drug using societal dropout by beating on a big Bongo style of drum, like one you’d see or buy from Africa. His pounding away on the Bongo drum provided a beat that allowed his other zonked out friends with a chance to miss his rhythm’s as they tried to dance to his drumming in their unique form of dance based on LSD overkill from the look of things.
The dancers would semi sway about in a ¾ circular like rarely seen motion as they did their different dances almost to the rhythm of their drummer, but the key difference in the way humanity until then had usually danced and how they danced wasn’t that they danced alone, even if oodles of the drugged out little pests were doing their dance thing. That they always danced alone seemed irrelevant and unnoticed by any of them; the real deal in their dance was how they moved and shimmied their legs and feet around while they danced.
That was usually the key in most dances; they may have been bratty burnouts who protested the war just to get laid by drugged out teenaged high school girls who were trying to be ‘cool’ and ‘popular’ by going to the same protests, but they were human; I saw it in their leg and foot movements as they missed the bongo drummer’s beat again and again. They may have had no brain cellular functioning left, or weren’t able to speak coherently enough to have conversations with most in society, but they were people like us all. They’d yet to completely disconnect themselves from humanity because of a similarity they revealed in the annoyingly poor attempts they made while doing their dance thingy.
See, where most dancers had traditionally kept the ‘rhythm’ by moving their legs, tapping or skipping their feet to the beat, and building any other dance moves up from that, the dirty stinky Welfare hippie rich kids had absolutely NO rhythm. Zero. For all their talk of being a free spirit, of using drugs and freeing their minds, of wearing what they wanted in their ’own fashion’ they were all a bunch of young human adults who didn’t want to feel rejected by their peers, or ridiculed by them either.
This made dancing a tricky proposition; they acted like it was so key in their lives, and they sent off the message that they danced alone so they could be ‘fully free’, but the flat truth was that none of them could’ve followed a beat to a peanut butter advertisement, much less follow the beat from an untrained bongo drummer. To attempt to do so meant failing in public while your friends watched, and failure was virtually the only option. Except the other option I realized they’d engineered.
They chose to not try and follow the beat at all with the lower part of their torso right at the hip, only using their legs to loll about or spin in a circle; occasionally one of the girls would throw out a flex of her pelvis with a naughty smirk, like she was Cleopatra or something. No, they flayed their arms around, looking like they were chasing invisible fireflies, tapping the air with their hands as if they were catching the drum beat from their friend, but not coming close to it. Sometimes someone would break out into a hyper speed skip, like a 5 yr old girl on mommy’s speed pills, or spin around super fast until dizziness dropped the spinner into a nauseated pile on the ground.
But basically, they hung out in the most populated part of a town when they came somewhere, got high, someone started playing a bongo drum, and the others faked like they could dance in a plethora of fraudulent no steps and feigned shimmies. This is what the flower children did all day, everyday, for years on end; they truly believed that those who watched them thought they looked mystical or possibly spiritual as they spasmodically flung their upper torso to and fro. The lack of lower body motion, like the lack of feet or leg activity during their LSD dance of humility, made it look like they were only doing one thing.
They looked like they were trying to fake being dance masters and sent off an air of being past any critiquing at the same time, because the obvious reality was that none of them could dance in the slightest.
This was the left’s heydey?!? Did any of you see it like that? Well guess what; think about it again. The rich spoiled hippie kids using drugs while they faked dancing to an intermittent bongo drummer’s pounding right in the most public places of any community. They thought everyone who saw them was secretly jealous of them in some way; for their dancing ability, for their courage to dance using that ability in front of the general public, for their free living lifestyle, or jealous about something!
In truth everyone who had to watch this knew they thought like that, which only made their irritatingly bad dancing that much more irritating, which made everyone forced to watch this resent and laugh at them that much more. Over just the last year of the 1960’s flower fools like these kids must’ve permanently offended tens of millions of other, ’normal’ Americans who had to endure watching it. You thought this might’ve been the left’s crowning moment of glory??? No.
Actually it was the fuel which energized the conservative movement into a suddenly new powerful force, galvanized together and their differences put aside thanks to the bond now formed in the hatred of the annoying, spoiled, rich, stoned, drop-out, bad dancing, dodge drafting hippie or flower children. No one realized it, but Rockefeller and Goldwater conservatives were no longer combatants, they were allies in a valued mission: To get rid of those darned hippie dancing whack jobs!
That truth was sprung on a surprised and weakened left, any remaining flower kids, and too all conservatives in a delightful turn of events in the summer of 1971; that’s when an event served as a call to arms rallying conservatives, Christians, and average working class people into action. It alerted them that they had the upper hand now, and it was time for American society to change.
What was it that stirred America so in the summer of 1971?
The release of Clint Eastwood’s “Dirty Harry.”
More next posting! Ta- ta, time to try and dance again!