LIBERAL BETRAYAL of AMERICA
and the
TEA PARTY FIRESTORM
How the Student Riots of the Sixties Generated a Civil War
to Destroy A Great Nation
WILLIAM DAVIS EATON
Copyright © 2010 William Davis Eaton
Smashwords Edition
To
Richard and Arlene Heath
and
Renée G. Eaton
Preface
On Income Tax Day, April 15, 2009, multitudes of people across the United States from all races, creeds, and political convictions, from cities, towns, and countryside, threw a Tea Party. This remarkable and spontaneous cross section of America came to express anger at their betrayal, and fear around the kitchen table. They see their American Dream dissolving into a nightmare of terrifying uncertainty. These Tea Party Americans want to how it is that an administration of proclaimed liberalism is systematically destroying fundamental American values and institutions. These loyal Americans have come to understand, reluctantly, and then angrily, that their own government is waging war against their liberty and everything else their country stands for and has shown to the world. The Tea Party firestorm is lit to shine the light of liberty on the truth of how deeply, how profoundly, the “liberals” now in power have turned against their country and their own ideals. It is to lay the foundation for their defeat.
Liberalism has both a political and an economic history. In both aspects liberalism has undergone a remarkable transformation in the last half-century or so. In his book The Liberal Imagination, published in 1950, American author and critic Lionel Trilling termed liberalism the only viable philosophical and literary tradition. Trilling, often cited as the preeminent cultural commentator of his time, saw liberalism as “a political position that affirmed the value of individual existence in all its variety, complexity, and difficulty.” Trilling called liberalism so understood “not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition.”
The Scottish philosopher Adam Smith formulated the classic principles of economic liberalism in his book The Wealth of Nations published in 1776. These principles include private property, the rule of law, limited government, and the free market economy. Curiously, it was in the same year, 1776, that the American Declaration of Independence proclaimed the God given rights of all men to include the right to, “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.”
Two centuries later the 1976 Nobel Prize economist Milton Friedman, shows in his book Free to Choose (1980) that the energizing elements of both kinds of classical liberalism are in steep decline. An “ever bigger government,” he warns, threatens “to destroy both the prosperity that we owe to the free market, and the human freedom proclaimed so eloquently in the Declaration of Independence.” Finally liberalism, in both the political and economic sense, has behaved like a man performing a slow half-somersault who ends up standing on his head. Turned upside down liberalism has steadily emptied its pockets of America’s founding principles of economic freedom and individual liberty that once defined itself.
The rebellion of the new liberalism, some now call it progressivism, began the1960s riots against authority on hundreds of college campuses. As the original rebels of the sixties graduated into society, they and their progeny of the next generation began a radical ideological and political assault against the entire American tradition. They entered upon what is often termed their “long march” through American institutions. One of the more remarkable successes of this long march has been its gradual conquest of policy-making positions within the Democratic Party. From that stronghold “progressive” liberals have been able to radicalize the Party and to use it toward achieving their goal of power and domination.
Former Maryland Governor Robert Ehrlich sees the Democratic Party of the 21st century as a different animal from its former self: “It’s a hard-Left, AFSCME (public employee unions), trial-lawyer, teachers union party, and they play for keeps, unlike business.” Novelist Allen Drury perceives that liberalism itself has been transformed into a “rigid, ruthless, intolerant, and unyielding orthodoxy.” Author and Yale professor of computer science David Gelernter finds that the resulting confrontation between the rebels and American society “is turning into a full fledged war.” And so it has.
America is once again “engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated can long endure.” Fortunately this new Civil War is not marked (as yet) by such bloody battlefields as Gettysburg, where Abraham Lincoln spoke those words on November 19, 1863. In the Civil War of 1861-1865 the Confederates of the South fought simply for independence from the Union. There was no intent to transform the culture or structure of the North, as the new Civil War intends to do for the entire nation.
In its earlier stages what was to become a Civil War was commonly called a culture war, and had no centrally organized command or purpose. Each contingent attacked on its own front in its own way. But the separate insurgencies all shared the inherent goal of civil war, which is to weaken or dissolve existing social values and institutions and transform society.
Gradually the liberal assault against America has heavily infiltrated or captured the public schools, most of the print and broadcast media, the arts, the universities, the environmental movement, organized labor, leading elements of science, and much of the judiciary and the federal bureaucracy. The insurrection has destroyed or corrupted supporting ideals and institutions affecting religion, sexual relations, the family, the rule of law, how words are used, and patriotic loyalty. Underpinning the Civil War, and adding strength to it, are persistent efforts in core scientific disciplines to denigrate and even mock the value of human life.
The rebels promote massive growth of government power at the expense of individual liberty. Knowing that its true intentions lack support, the rebellion is intolerant of opposing speech, writing, or broadcasting, which it seeks aggressively to suppress.
The culminating assault of the Civil War was carried out in the election of 2008, its true intent concealed behind a glittering facade of “Hope” and “Change.” When the political branches of the federal government were decisively captured in that election the insurgents achieved a centrally controlled national base for their revolution. In a sophisticated “bait and switch” maneuver the agents of this “full fledged war” against America moved rapidly from idealistic campaign rhetoric to the consolidation of raw power. Destruction of the America we have known—economically, politically, and morally—is well under way. It is the horrifying specter of America destroyed that ignites the firestorm response of the Tea Parties, and the millions more of true Americans that have been awakened to strike back in defense of liberty and country.
The engine that powers this assault against America was assembled and set in motion at American colleges and universities during the 1964-1965 academic year. A well-planned uprising led by a few thousand students was carried out on hundreds of campuses across the country. It was a rebellion calculated to challenge the legitimacy of authority on each campus attacked, and by extension the authority of society as a whole. The target selected for the first strike was the Berkeley campus of the University of California.
Liberalism today is anti-American revolutionaries on a tear, tearing down the structure of our democratic society and free enterprise economy. The true purpose of its leaders is their drive for power; the power to command and control the daily lives of the American people. The essence of the destruction being wrought, an understanding of how this has come about, a feeling for the horror of the intended results, and what might be done about it is the subject of this book.
I. A Declaration of War
1. Opening Shots
Revolution
In the summer of 1964 Clark Kerr, President of the multi-campus University of California system, received an alert warning him that radical student groups across the country were planning a concerted, nation wide uprising. There were to be protests and demonstrations on hundreds of campuses to challenge and disrupt campus authority during the upcoming 1964-1965 academic year. The Berkeley campus of the University of California had been designated as the leadoff target. The plan for Berkeley was to form a rebellion of overwhelming strength and support sufficient to force from office both the Chancellor of the Berkeley campus, Edward Strong, and University President, Clark Kerr. President Kerr and Chancellor Strong were accustomed to juvenile eruptions on campus and took the alert they had received to predict nothing more than the same passionate, idealistic, unfocused student radicalism they had seen before. It would be noisy, senseless, mostly harmless, and something that would die out of its own accord. Their judgment could not have been further off the mark.
On the morning of December 3, 1964, the campus administrative hierarchy gathered in the Chancellor’s Suite in Sproul Hall, the Berkeley campus administration building, to consider how to deal with an escalating student rebellion.
“Hey! Hey! Ho! Ho! Western Civ Has Got to Go!!
Hey! Hey! Ho! Ho! Western Civ Has Got to Go!
No Justice No Peace!
No Justice No Peace!
Savio! Savio!! Savio!!!”
The roar of thousands in the plaza below penetrated the walls and windows of the Chancellor’s suite with passionate intensity.
The University authorities had determined, even though they thought the summer alert to be needlessly alarmist, to damp down any such protests before they could gain traction. To limit the areas of potential protest the Berkeley administration activated rules prohibiting on-campus solicitation of money or support for off campus political purposes. The rules applied only on campus. On the public sidewalks or streets bordering the campus such protests would be free speech protected by the First Amendment to the United States Constitution. The campus radicals set up tables for distribution of literature and solicitation of money and membership on public sidewalks at the very borderline between the city of Berkeley and University property. To the surprise of no one, except perhaps campus officials, those tables and their associated activities gravitated onto University property. Campus authorities cited and disciplined students attending the tables for violation of the rules.
Prodded by the leaders of various protest groups, clusters of angry students began to form, accusing the University of violating their rights of free expression. As charges were repeatedly brought against student violators, leaders of the dissident groups began holding protest rallies in Sproul Plaza just outside the front doors of Sproul Hall. New accusations against alleged University abuses were shouted out almost daily. Growing larger by the week these rallies attracted increasing support for the protest movement.
“Hey! Hey! Ho! Ho! Western Civ Has Got to Go!!
Hey! Hey! Ho! Ho! Western Civ Has Got to Go!
No Justice No Peace!
No Justice No Peace!
Savio! Savio!! Savio!!!”
The roar of the crowd grew more ominous with each repetition.
The rebels adopted the bold and deceptive tactics typical of insurgent groups, including delay, exaggerated grievances, false claims of abuse, and impossible demands in order to inflame student reaction at the ever-larger noon rallies. What the rebels needed was a motif, a motto, a battle cry that would bring the various campus movements such as nudism, socialism, anti- Vietnam war, drugs, women’s rights, presidential politics, or free speech under one banner of unification. The growing rallies claimed ever more insistently that the students being disciplined were denied free speech. And free speech it was that became the catalytic issue around which to consolidate the various protest movements into one central organization. As the protests grew in number and emotional appeal, a coherent leadership emerged led by Berkeley philosophy major Mario Savio. The now legendary Free Speech Movement, the FSM, was born. The attack against the Berkeley administration intensified.
On December 3, 1964 where there once had been hundreds at the noon rallies on the plaza below the Chancellor’s suite now there were thousands. As the noon hour struck the crowd (those above called it a mob) was immense, radiating anger, yearning to be led, eager for action against what they saw as an unjust and repressive University administration. Few would have predicted how far the events of that day, December 3, 1964, and the following day, December 4, 1964, would advance the rebels’ attack on the University. Even fewer, if any, would have predicted the inferno that this demonstration, and others to follow across the country, would set ablaze.
In the Chancellor’s suite, in addition to the campus administrative hierarchy, there were the Chief of the Campus Police, representatives of the Alameda County Sheriff’s department, and officers of the California Highway Patrol. The University had already experienced an embarrassing mob incident involving a captive police car two months earlier. Those aware of the danger did not wish to see a repetition of that event.
On October 1, 1964 police drove a squad car onto Sproul Plaza to arrest a member of the FSM for violation of the speech rules. A crowd of several hundred gathered around as police put the suspect into the car. Someone shouted “Sit down!” The crowd sat, and the police car could not move. The arrested student and the officers inside the car were held there while the campus administration struggled to manage the situation. There were discussions, charges and counter-charges, proposals and counter-proposals between campus officials and FSM leaders.
Law enforcement personnel, as well as a few faculty members, urged Chancellor Strong to take decisive action to break up the crowd and release the car, using force if necessary. The law enforcement officials cautioned the Chancellor that anything less would allow the rebellion to gather strength. Far more aggressive, perhaps violent action would be the result. Chancellor Strong, a former professor of philosophy, responded that he wished to take the longer more considered view. A candid dialogue, an honest exchange of views, he felt, would allow the students to state clearly what they really wanted. Their grievances could, he was convinced, be resolved in mutual consultation, and peace would return to the campus. The University sought a compromise over the police car incident. The FSM demanded that the trapped student be released and freed of all charges.
Talks continued as lack of resolve by University officials drained the hours away. The captive student and his police captors sat in the car for 32 hours. Finally a “settlement agreement” was reached and the FSM leaders announced its terms to the crowd sitting around the car. Their message was also directed to the much larger number assembled to see the spectacle, and to an expectant media, by then always on hand at Berkeley.
The University had capitulated.
The student in the car was absolved of all charges and released to the victorious roar of hundreds of ecstatic rebels and increasingly sympathetic onlookers as the police car made its ignominious escape. Though the police car incident had occurred by chance, the FSM had been handed a perfect recruiting issue that was instantly and expertly exploited by the leadership. Throughout the months of October and November the rallies grew larger and more intense. Anger and outrage against the University was intensified by clever oratory, false charges, and increasing passion. Mario Savio solidified his leadership as a glib and charismatic orator. The rebels worked to gain off campus support as well. That proved not difficult since the noon rallies always appeared on the evening news, more frequently than not with a slant favoring the protesting students. Fortified by widespread support, not only from the students, but also from many on the faculty as well, and assured of sympathetic media coverage, the FSM prepared for a major confrontation.
“Hey! Hey! Ho! Ho! Western Civ Has Got to Go!!
Hey! Hey! Ho! Ho! Western Civ Has Got to Go!
No Justice No Peace!
No Justice No Peace!
Savio! Savio!! Savio!!!”
Chanted over and over by a chorus of thousands the litany had about it a hypnotic effect that insinuated itself even into the atmosphere of the Chancellor’s conference.
The officials gathered there had urged the Chancellor take decisive action before the thousands packed into the plaza got out of control. The camps Police Chief advised the Chancellor that units of the County Sheriff’s riot control squad and officers of the Highway Patrol had been put on standby and were awaiting his orders.
The Chancellor smiled and re-lit his pipe. No orders were given.
As the crowd multiplied and tension tightened the Chancellor explained the situation to those around him so eager to use force against the students. Despite the noise and bluster the uprising was nothing more than the usual generational rebellion against authority, as President Kerr had repeatedly assured them. The Chancellor was reminded that those in the Plaza were the same people he had tried to reason with in the police car incident back in October. Pressed with his defeat in that confrontation, the Chancellor retained his philosophic approach. Nor did it disturb him when it was pointed out that the hundreds in the October incident had become thousands, angrier by the day.
“No Justice, No peace!
No Justice, No peace!
Free speech!
Free Speech!
Free speech!
Savio!! Savio!! Savio!!”
A speaker on the steps of the building, exciting the crowd to ever-higher ecstasy, extended his arms as though to embrace the thousands waiting in explosive anticipation. A dozen campus police guarded the doors to Sproul Hall behind the speaker.
“And now, comrades in Justice, brothers in peace, the time has come, the message you’re waiting for, our leader, our… ”
“Savio! Savio! Savio!
Justice! Justice!
Free speech!
Free speech!
Free speech!
“Savio!! Savio!! Savio!!!”
The crowd clapped, roared, stomped their feet, and raised clenched fists toward the upper story of the building.
The Chancellor was advised once again that riot police were at standby stations awaiting his orders. He persisted in his belief that by patient dialogue with the students he could ascertain what it was they really wanted, and that a resolution based on honest exchange of views could be reached. He proposed that a delegation be appointed to consult with the FSM leadership.
No orders are issued. On the plaza below Mario Savio walked slowly through the crowd as it parted like the Red Sea for Moses to allow him to pass. He walked with studied confidence up the few steps to the podium. His back to the crowd, Savio stared at the upper windows of Sproul Hall for several moments. He slowly extended his right arm, closing his fist in calm defiance. The crowd roared. As Savio lowered his arm and turned to face his audience, the assembled thousands became eerily silent. Their leader looked over a sea of glistening eyes, as though to catch each one eye-to-eye, to assure his command, and to prepare them for what he was about to say. The crowd’s deafening ecstasy, transposed into reverential adulation and awe, stood in utter silence. As Savio began his speech he waved his left arm back toward the administration building behind him.
“We have an autocracy which runs this university, that manages it like a business firm.” He let the odious image sink in for a few moments. “The Board of Regents is its board of directors, President Kerr is its Chief Executive, and the Chancellors of the nine campuses are his managers. Now I’ll tell you something. The faculty are a bunch of employees and we’re the raw material; we’re here to be turned into whatever products the corporations and their rotten system say they want. But we are a bunch of raw materials that don’t mean to be made into any product, and we don’t mean to end up being bought by some clients of the University, be they the government, be they industry, be they organized labor, be they anyone! Because we are human beings!!”
Wild applause, shouts, and slogans. After a few moments one hand, palm toward the crowd, quiets them.
“There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part; you can’t even passively take part, and you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop. And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you’re free, the machine will be prevented from working at all!”
Prolonged shouts and growls of approval. Savio holds up both hands for silence. The crowd, intoxicated though it is, obeys.
“We have a plan. It is to be massive, and it is to be peaceful. Remember that. No violence. Don’t allow yourselves to be provoked. That would play right into their hands. Now, no more talking. We’re going to march in singing ‘We Shall Overcome.’ Slowly; there are a lot of us. That way. Into the building and up the stairs.”
Singing “We Shall Overcome,” and Bob Dylan’s “The Times They Are-a Changin’,” some eight hundred to a thousand protesters marched up the steps of Sproul Hall, gently forcing the few guards aside, and began to fill the building.
Those in the Chancellor’s conference room, advised that the mob was breaking in and coming up the main staircase, were ushered down a back way and taken by police vehicles out of harm’s reach. The University informed the few employees who remained that the building was closed and they should go home. The FSM leaders designated various areas for specific activities: one for movies; another for a Spanish class; one for quiet study; and an area for square dancing.
State law enforcement officers advised California Governor Pat Brown, by law a member of the University Board of Regents, of the situation. The Governor authorized police action to clear the building. But the action was not to begin until after dark to minimize public or campus reaction.
At around midnight, as law enforcement contingents moved toward the campus, the Chancellor appeared with a bullhorn outside Sproul Hall. He looked up at the bright lights in his suite, and raised the bullhorn to speak. He urged the students to evacuate the captured building, to be reasonable, to speak frankly with him about their grievances. He waited. It was a last, desolate attempt to breast the tide of his rapidly vanishing authority. There was no response from inside the building. He spoke again of honest dialogue and peace on the campus. Again there was no response. The Chancellor looked up once more at the bright lights of the building. This man a quirk of fate had named “Strong” dropped the bullhorn to his side, turned back toward his residence.
Chancellor Strong did not understand that what he faced was a revolution; and that revolutions do not play by the rules. Their very purpose is to break the rules and impose new ones.
At approximately 2:00 a.m. some six hundred California Highway Patrolmen and Alameda County Sheriff’s Deputies cordoned off the building and began to arrest the protesters. The FSM leaders advised their followers to resist by going limp so as to make the arrests more difficult, also more likely to lead to minor injuries to be exploited later. Each protester was identified, booked for trespassing, and taken away in a patrol wagon. Those who went limp were charged with resisting arrest as well. The resistance was designed principally to draw out the process till the next day when students and faculty arriving for class, as well as the ever present media, would see what was happening.
They did see. Students and faculty alike were shocked and angered at the spectacle of massed law enforcement officers in riot gear arresting hundreds of students, dragging off by their heels some who went limp to lengthen the proceedings. It was a tedious process not completed until mid-afternoon on Friday December 4, 1964. A total of approximately 800 were charged and incarcerated, the largest mass arrest ever in the State of California.
The events of December 3 and December 4, 1964, achieved the immediate goal of the FSM, the plan about which the alert to President Kerr had warned. Chancellor Strong was forced to take indefinite “sick leave” early in the new year of 1965. Not long thereafter the Board of Regents terminated the services of President Clark Kerr as well, who mused, “I leave as I arrived, fired with enthusiasm.”
Having seen the FSM uprising as a standard juvenile protest against adult authority, upon reflection by then ex-President Kerr later termed it a “protest and outrage” that was “fresh and meaningful.” He confessed that its intensity “took us completely by surprise.” The same can be said of college and university administrators across the land, as blind to the power and import of subsequent revolts on some 300 other campuses as those at Berkeley had been. They did not believe that the events unfolding before their eyes and pounding into their ears were of great significance, and had no effective response. They had no tools, no concepts, and no resolve to deal with what was happening. A few observers did see that the nation wide uprising had within it the seeds as well as the words of a true revolution. Their warning was futile against the inertia of bewildered and benumbed authorities.
The speech of Mario Savio is a composite of several versions as recorded at the time by members of the Free Speech Movement and news organizations. The essence of the speech, though taken by some as a demand for redress of legitimate grievances, is a radical manifesto. Savio denies that a great public university has any obligation, or even any right, to prepare students to participate in the democratic structure and the free economy of their society. To do so would be selling themselves as “products” of a corrupt educational system to “consumers” of a corrupt economic system. So the solution is to “put your bodies” on the gears and wheels and levers of the “apparatus” and “make it stop.”
Savio’s speech, full of hubris and puffed up importance, transcending reason and common sense, even silly, seemed to be much as President Kerr had expected. But Savio’s speech and hundreds like it across the land were Marxist based exhortations to destroy the politics, culture, and values of American society, beginning in the colleges and universities. Savio’s speech was a declaration of war against the entire American nation until the whole “apparatus” is made to “stop.” The radicals of Berkeley and the rest of academia, in similar results in the years following, believed in what the speech said, and went forth into the nation to make it so.
How did the FSM capture the thousands who seemed to follow Savio’s radical purpose? Did they understand, in the rapturous flow of his soaring rhetoric, what he was saying? Did they agree? Who were the masses that supported the rebels, and what did they “really” want?
One morning on her way to campus during the height of the uprising a visiting professor of psychology gave a ride to a hitchhiking female student. The girl carried a placard on a stick that read, “Strike for What You Believe.” The professor, puzzled by the intensity of the movement and curious as to its motivation, asked the student what the uprising was all about. What did she believe that she was striking for? The student talked with animation about the FSM, oppression, free speech, and the alleged brutality of the “pigs” (their term for police) who were called from time to time to preserve order on campus.
Arriving at the place where the student wanted to be let off the professor stopped the car, and turned to look directly into the student’s eyes. She asked what her deepest motivation was, why such intensity, why the boiling hatred in the speeches, what did she truly want? The girl’s eyes blazed with an even brighter passion and she replied without hesitation: “Freedom!” The professor thought for a moment and, as the student opened the car door to get out, asked if it had occurred to her that she already had so much freedom she didn’t know what to do with it. A face that had been flushed and exuberant was chalk. As she got out of the car the student managed a barely muttered “Thank you,” picked up her sign and backpack and fled. The visiting psychologist paused to observe the young woman as she ran off to her rendezvous with reassurance.
The Berkeley riots were surely in some part a generational rebellion against adult authority, as President Kerr had analyzed it. But it was a rebellion far deeper than that; the rebels themselves perhaps only half conscious of its reach and destiny. It was a rebellion not only against parental authority, but also at its base a repudiation of the civilization for which their parents had fought World War II against fascist tyranny. The heroes of that “Greatest Generation” had given their children lives that were safe, free, and comfortable. But for the children, so dull and boring. They were privileged, idealistic, and restless. Their bountiful lives, together with their youthful innocence, had released them from reality. They were free to fantasize, to find fault with the workaday world, to yearn for a life more meaningful than being “sold” as “products” of the university to the highest “corporate bidder.”
In the daily rallies following their success in deposing the top authority, both at the Berkeley campus and University wide, the FSM grasped for some coherent idea of how to keep the movement alive and to define its mission. The noon tirades in Sproul Plaza continued, laced with obscenities to spice up a fading cause, and broadcast over loudspeakers that shook half of Berkeley. Free Speech was the only slogan that had seemed to stick. But since there was no longer any responsive censorship, limitation, or suppression of speech by benumbed University authorities the substance of that cry wore thin. There continued to radiate among these masses of juveniles far more passion than articulation.
By the spring of 1965 the evangelists of the FSM were as desperate for fuel to fire the energy necessary to their continued success as the girl hitchhiker had been. The prophets of revolution had to find for their apostles something with more hot blood in it, a core belief to match the passion of their motivation. Their search enticed them in all directions: opposition to the Vietnam War, feminism, drugs, the idealism of the Peace Corps, nudism, socialism, sex, women’s rights, and a growing adoration of almost any society other than their own. Everything they had tried and rejected the previous fall. They needed to find a battle cry that was permanent, spontaneous, and visceral. Ultimately, as much by instinct as by calculation, they did. They hit the hot button of an enticement whose magic they had been seeking, the chord of an impulse that touched to the core of their passionate longing for freedom.
Revelation
What at last twitched the nerve of visceral motivation needed to keep their rebellion hot and contagious turned out to be freedom after all. Sexual freedom. Not that there had been any shortage of sex passed around on the campuses of the rebellious sixties. And much of the nation, softened by rock “n” roll and the drug culture, was already drifting idly toward careless sexual indulgence. But the rebels struck deeper than that. Casual sex and indolent promiscuity were only the opening wedges of their revolutionary instinct about sex. Sexual freedom was to be of any and every variety, totally uninhibited. But the key was not merely in the practice of sex.
Sexual abandon must be recognized, accepted, and enforced as the new sexual normality. Sex, raw and flagrant, was to be flaunted and thrown into the face of a dying culture.
It just took a while for indulgence to coalesce into cause. That cause, when finally articulated, went straight to the libido. It required no explanation, no oratory, no persuasion.
Wow! Everything the young rebels had always wanted and had always been told was wrong. Right and wrong—how tedious such concepts were to those unsettled young. How boring. How repressive! And what a great recruiting tool for the incipient revolutionaries.
In settling on free sex as the hot button and driving force of their rebellion the rebels may have struck even more deeply into the culture they wished to annihilate than they realized. The act of family formation and procreation is the essential link that forms the chain of civilization.
If that ceremony of faith could be contaminated, its vows profaned and rejected by careless debauchery, perhaps that indulgence would metastasize into a general infection of the entire culture. It would affect religion and the churches, morality, how people value each other, children and their education, love, and much else. The Free Speech Movement turned out to have been the Free Sex Movement in embryo.
The consummation of the sexual revolution, its American Bastille, came soon enough. Woodstock. Ah, Woodstock. 1969. A celebration of “peace, love, and music” as advertised at the time, and as many still believe? Not quite. It was rain, mud, rock music, drugs, and a mass orgy of indiscriminate sex to rival the most licentious sexual celebrations of ancient legend, even to the point of gang rape. It was also an orgy of destruction of property, of trampling neighboring farmers’ fields, and of storming the ticket booths without paying to get in. Celebration of the 30th anniversary of the event, also advertised as a festival of “peace, love, and music” was reportedly more juvenile and irresponsible in every way than the original had been. More “adult” in the corrupted sense the word has been given to cover pornographic entertainment.
The ancient orgies in the name of Dionysus, god of passion, were confined to festivals of no more than a few days a year. The sexual revolution of the sixties, restraint abandoned to indulgence, wild and primitive, repudiated law, morals, and civility. Its effects were destined to strike through an entire society, to contaminate the core of its nurturing institutions. The sexual revolution spawned in the outbreaks of the sixties validated Mario Savio’s seemingly hubristic and silly Declaration of Civil War. The battles in which we remain deeply engaged began in earnest.
2. The Battle Plan
Question Authority
That the rebellious upstarts of this incipient Civil War must “Question Authority” with the intent to destroy authority has been bumper-sticker dogma from the beginning. Following the Berkeley uprising some 300 American college and university campuses across the country experienced similar rebellions. At Cornell University in 1969 armed “student” thugs demanded an independent black studies program, and the University administration gave in to them. The rebels’ tactics there made it clear that the new “studies” would be much more radical activist than anything that could be called academic. Cornell was a harbinger of the new “authority” to come. At Cornell, as at Berkeley, authority when questioned vanished. There was no longer any authority to question. The destruction of authority on campus after campus excited, in addition to their new sexual exploits, a lust for yet more destruction that drove these revolutionary students passionately onward.
Destruction of campus authority became a model for attacks against greater institutions of authority across the social and cultural landscape as the rebels swarmed out of the universities into the general society.
The civilizing concepts upon which democratic society depends must be eliminated. The sustaining faith, practices, and institutions of the existing society, effective in improving conditions of life, must be mocked as ridiculous, ridiculed as outmoded, damned as repressive, and hated. Horrors supposedly perpetrated by the offending culture must be magnified, or if need be invented, to degrade loyalty to the social structure. America must be condemned as a privileged nation oppressing those less well off. Under the guise of such mantras as a new world order and multiculturalism, praising other cultures of the world became for the rebels a useful adjunct to damning their own.
But these ideas are hardly new. That remarkably perceptive French visitor to America Alexis de Tocqueville in the early nineteenth century expresses apprehension regarding the American vision of equality. He fears that holding each individual to be of equal dignity and worth leads to a rejection of traditional morals and ethics. Americans, he says, are prone to rely on “their own judgment as the most apparent and accessible test of truth.” If all are equal who is to say what is right or wrong, moral or immoral? A population brought to that basis of morality is more easily manipulated than are people whose values are held to be eternal codes of human conduct based on transcendent authority.
Adam B. Seligman in his book Modernity’s Wager echoes these insightful, almost “post-modern” remarks of Tocqueville. The Boston University professor of religion examines a widespread disbelief in traditional religious faith, and in particular in its behavioral morality. He finds this to be consistent with the American belief in individual equality based on independent judgment that Tocqueville detects. Political scientist, editor, and author Damon Linker observes that many Americans have concluded they will be better off by treating belief in transcendent authority as a “useless superstition.” The conditions these observers reveal help to explain how easy it has been for the missionaries of passionate revolution to do their work. Moral and social values that had still managed to hold despite Tocqueville’s prophetic observations came to be widely discredited as rebellious waves of the sixties surged through large segments of the American population. Once such degeneration begins the institutions that support those values, and are supported by them, are at risk as well.
The sixteenth century French thinker Michel de Montaigne recognizes that “a man needs at least some degree of intelligence to be able to notice that he does not know.” The revolutionaries of the 1960s did not want to know they did not know where they were headed. Their orgies of sex, drugs, and destruction were conceived as a quest for freedom. The sixties revolution became so free that it pulled a mist of denial over the need to consider its destiny. It indulged a passion that would question and destroy authority without knowing what was to replace it.
The rebels often aligned themselves with genuine reform movements such as civil rights, equal rights for women, or anti-discrimination movements, but only as useful tools if they could be manipulated or taken over. The motivating animus of the nascent Civil War formed early and remained clear and direct. That was to question and subvert the religious beliefs, the history, the founding principles, and the entire culture of the United States of America until the authority of those ideas and institutions could be co-opted or destroyed.
Internal Combustion
The Free Speech Mvement, reincarnated as the Free Sex Movement, demonstrated soon enough that there is more fire and durability in the uninhibited sex of animal lust than there is in free speech or any of the other causes of that era. Free sex, once it became a cause as well as an indulgence, remained an enduring motivation of the Civil War. Adopted on a national scale in the rutting mud of Woodstock, free sex led the charge against the culture and structure of American society. Unlike the coerced revolutions in Nazi Germany or Communist Russia, the motor power of the sexual revolution of Berkeley and Woodstock had no need for coercion. Neither the brutal tactics of a KGB nor the jackboots of a Gestapo was required to gather disciples and guarantee their support. Converts to the new sexual morality at the base of the revolution came fervidly, their devotion often laced with LSD or pot.
To lead the proliferating forces of the Civil War there arose an elite corps of highly educated Civil Warriors. This cadre was formed from the mass-produced intellectual classes being ejected from American colleges and universities by the late sixties. These classes were driven by a passionate disbelief in the moral and intellectual benchmarks of the traditional culture. And they were prepared to apply the enormous energy of their uprising on a scale to match its sensual appeal. This intellectual rebel corps steadily became entrenched in tenured faculty positions in the colleges and universities, in television, print news, entertainment, and similar positions. They established in their newly fortified positions of power the motive, and now the institutional implements, to launch a nation wide campaign of disbelief in America. In his book The Long March Roger Kimball, managing editor of New Criterion, considers, as the sub-title promises, “How the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s Changed America.”
Kimball compares the sexual revolution to sexual orgies in the name of the ancient Greek god Dionysus. He finds that the sixties “prophets of Dionysian excess” tapped the universal clamor of youth against authority to a depth that changed human behavior. The leaders of this revolution of youth perceived that many not so young were also eager to cap their moral growth at the juvenile level. They, too, welcomed the promised release from thought and discipline. Even a once presidential hopeful (who had to settle for Secretary of State) Hillary Clinton has proposed a million dollar memorial to Woodstock as her contribution to that transformational event.
What better revolutionary device to hurl across millions of TV screens than the primal energies of sexual appetite, loosed and uninhibited? It became apparent that not only sexual barriers, but the entire structure of the American heritage was also susceptible to infiltration and subversion. As the revolution bore in, its lust of sexual energy was compounded by lust for the power to prevail and to rule. Authority was not only being questioned, but was cracking and crumbling in giant chunks. But as Seligman points out in his book Modernity’s Wager, authority and the need for authority “are irrevocable aspects of the self and the human condition.” The need is for belief, purpose, and a guiding star to shine toward the future, even if the beliefs adopted are not called religion.
Seek and Ye Shall Find
Guilt is a convenient incubator of the hate essential to maintain an assault against the core values of a society under attack. Guilt for every misdeed, real or imagined, ever committed in the name of America and the West must be piled high to fuel the flames of hatred and justify wanton destruction. If slavery was evil, paint every white man and woman today with the brush of their ancestors’ guilt. If minorities believe they have not been offered their free shot at the American “pursuit of happiness,” set them aside in multicultural holding pens and nurse their grievances to keep the pot boiling. Guilt for the country’s horrors and misdeeds, real or fabricated, and hatred of the self for having been part of that illegitimate enterprise, must burn bright and hot in the heart of rebels on the rise. Accepting guilt for a guilty past adds a patina of self-righteousness to the drive to destroy the authority and institutions that represent the guilty past.
To assure ascendancy over a guilt laden past a new creed is needed to replace the old. A new normality must be forged and made to appear legitimate and acceptable. Guilt and hate must first be leveraged to induce a vacuum of faith, a gnawing emptiness craving to be filled with new belief. Fear is also useful to feed the flames of hate. A gnawing fear that the defeated culture should rise once again to reclaim its inheritance justifies any measure taken toward its extinction. As one commentator has said, whatever it is these people disbelieve, they disbelieve in it passionately. So devout is their hatred and disbelief in existing authority, so poignant their need, and so ardent their devotion to revolutionary upheaval that masses of revolutionaries are not aware that their disbelief has gradually become institutionalized. Seeking to destroy authority, they have given birth to new authority. Their rejection of authority, deep, profound, and abiding, has gradually coalesced into new forms of faith and belief.
Two Commandments
The new order, though it claims no anointed priests, no philosopher kings, no red-hatted Cardinals, and no reliance on celestial guidance, has nevertheless called forth new authority to backfill its chasm of revolutionary rejection. To soften the truth of what is happening the new authority preaches toleration and compassion to present as its public countenance. Since the new order has abolished morality based on a transcendent order of God or natural law, who then can claim the right to admonish others, to condemn, to approve, or to judge? So it is that from some cloistered enclave of command and authority, with no identifiable point of origin, seal of authenticity, or index of official sanction, but imperative all the same, the First Commandment of a new order is delivered unto us: Be Not Judgmental.
Under the gentle indulgence of the First Commandment acts of one’s fellow creatures are not to be judged. To speak of good or evil, of right or wrong, would be “judgmental.” Yet imperatives have appeared. Some speech is allowed on university campuses, and some is not. Some groups are preferred over others. Designated opinions, organizations, and practices are approved, while others are not. Canons of behavior emerge in profusion, and are ignored at the peril—political, social, and sometimes physical—of those who transgress. None of this is based on a judgement of right or wrong in the old sense, of course. But even so guidance is required to replace the defeated moral strictures. Fortunately, guidance has come forth. Emanating from the same shrouded and ineluctable source as the First Commandment, Be Not Judgmental, there has been revealed a Second Commandment: Be Politically Correct.
That’s it. Ten Commandments boiled down to two.
With no modern day Moses descended from spectral heights to deliver them, it is difficult to say exactly how and when the Two Commandments became authoritative. It would appear that as the basis of a new secular religion, they were formed by accretion rather than by any singular act of revelation. To adhere to this new authority became known as being politically correct. The adoption of that term of enforcement for the Two Commandments is equally shrouded in mystery. There is, however, scattered evidence concerning the origin of the term itself, whether the form be politically correct, political correctness, or political correctitude. Some trace the phrase back to the founder of Chinese communism, Mao Tse-tsung. The term seems also to have been popular in most Marxist societies in one form or another to enforce correct speech and thought. Use of the term has rarely, if ever, been associated with an open democratic society.
Thus the wording and usage of the two Commandments and that of their enforcing mechanism, political correctness, simply grew spontaneously out of the lifestyle, ideals, and turmoil of the sixties. The phrases gathered authority incrementally as the Civil War grew more intense and the need to enforce compliance to its edicts became more pressing. Finally, one day the existence and application of the Two Commandments and their enforcement mechanism seemed always to have been part of the new culture.
The “protest and outrage” of the FSM at Berkeley that President Clark Kerr perceived after the fact to have been “fresh and meaningful” was even then taking shape and defining its meaning. The declaration of Civil War uttered by Mario Savio might have been laughed off as silly juvenile blather, which to a large extent it was. But the time had been right. Seeds of a new secular religion had been planted. Its guiding Commandments had been conceived in the tumult of revolution, and nurtured in a deepening disconnect between the old morality and the new. Their battle plan was ready. The masters and planners in the vanguard, who urged their disciples to “question authority,” knew that once they got their hands on the levers of power and became authority, the question period was over. That would come later. In the meantime there were many battles to be fought on many fronts.
II. War of Attrition
3. Silencing the Self
The Self
From the injunction of the Greek philosopher Socrates to “Know Thyself” to the Christian principle that all souls are equally precious the worth of each individual person, each self, has been central to the Western structure. Under the American constitutional system each individual is endowed with the right to make the best of his talents and capacities. And each must recognize that right in others, to be exercised by all with as little interference from government as possible. In return the individual is to accept certain obligations toward the state that supports his individual selfhood. That is the kind of individual self, and the resulting type of society composed of such selves, that the rebels of the Civil War must destroy if they wish to prevail.
The Civil War rebels aim for quite a different plan of selfhood in the population of the nation they wish to master. Their pattern for the American people is more that of Narcissus of Greek mythology, who fell in love with the image of a beautiful youth he saw in a mountain pool. Unable to possess the idyllic vision, and not realizing that it was his own reflection, Narcissus pined away and was turned into a flower. The self dissolved into itself is the image the rebels wish for their enemies, the American people. The hero turned anti-hero, immersed within himself, docile and easy to manipulate is the vision of the present American revolution and its mutation into Civil War. From the image of self love there is seldom reflected the obligation of social responsibility. The thinking, self-sufficient self must be destroyed. The dissenter, the draft dodger, the anarchist, the wasting young female “celebrity,” the failure, and the helpless “victim” become the new icons, the new models of attention and concern.
The requirement that the free individual find for himself the point of balance between Narcissus, dying over love of his own reflection, and his obligation toward the state must be repudiated and destroyed. It is that balance that makes a coherent society possible. The free individual has the right not only to search for his own true self, and to chart his own destiny. He is also is bound by the constriction not to transcend that point of balance. A developing self resists both the temptation of thoughtless submersion into a false inner self, and surrender of the self into some greater mass or cause as a substitute. It is in accepting that balance that makes the free yet participating individual the indispensable creation of Western and American culture. That sort of individual is an entity that does not automatically regenerate itself. Its nurture requires careful attention to achieve the necessary measure of both freedom and social integration.
There are developments in American culture that underpin the aims of the Civil War, even when their advocates do not necessarily conceive that as their purpose. Abraham Maslow, an American psychologist of the early to mid-twentieth century, was a prolific writer, a professor of psychology, and chairman of his department at Brandeis University. Maslow advertises a “humanistic psychology” designed to induce “self-actualization.” Each individual is to be encouraged to get in touch with his or her inner feelings, and to express those feelings openly, even aggressively. Some suggest that this is something akin to training a puppy to relieve himself. In either case training is quite unnecessary. Such children as Maslow would set free to “be themselves” used to be referred to as uncivilized. They are not to develop, only to prattle about the child they find inside. They will not be taught how to live responsibly in a democratic society.
Carl Rogers was also a prolific American writer along these lines at about the same time as Maslow, and a professor of psychology at Ohio State University and the Universities of Chicago and Wisconsin. Rogers advocates openness surging from a free-flowing contact with the emotions as does Maslow. Rogers asserts that morality, and even the nature of reality, is entirely the choice of the individual. That the individual might make bad choices does not concern those who promote such ideas, since they consider the inner individual to be genuine and authentic. Hence there is no call in these theories to consider whether either the inner self or the result of this psychology is good or bad, either for the individual or for society. “You are what you think you are.” That was the caption of an advertising poster of a cat looking at a mirror. The mirror image was a lion. What predators the “lion” might meet in the real world is another matter.
Other psychologists take a different view. Dr. Ronald W. Dworkin is a practicing physician and a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute. He doubts that an individual expanding on his or her personal thoughts and emotions can reach much of an understanding of the universe. Dworkin finds that by the end of the twentieth century the “bold and expansive ideas” of such as Rogers and Maslow, and the effort expended on searching for the higher self as an inner self, have resulted only in a “kind of drowsy selfishness.” For some, as Dworkin sees it, the result has been “a total loss of how to situate oneself in the world.”
The self, wrapped up in its own self-indulgence is not the kind of selfhood that is contemplated in the structure of American society. The American self is not a selfish self, but a responsible self with a sense of moral obligation both to himself and to his fellow citizens. That sort of self, necessary to underpin a free society, is being enticed to lose itself in self-indulgence. Peter Augustine Lawler, Dana Professor of Government at Berry College, has examined moral discourse among ordinary Americans today. He finds that “to an amazing and unprecedented extent” morality amounts to not much more than concern about “one’s own emotional well-being.” Popular concepts such as “self-actualization” and “free flowing emotion” leave human creatures missing that part of the self that was once the core of being human. They have lost connection to an integrated society and to a metaphysical moral world. They are creatures in human form emptied of human content. Boston College political science professor Alan Wolfe has surveyed cultural attitudes and beliefs in various American cities and regions. He finds that ordinary Americans are willing to adopt “a version of moral laissez faire” that is in reality “an excuse for not taking others seriously.”
Authenticity and Self-Esteem
Christina Hoff Sommers, resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, and Dr. Sally Satel, a practicing psychiatrist and Yale University School of Medicine lecturer, examine these matters in their book One Nation Under Therapy/ How the Helping Culture Is Eroding Self-Reliance. Daniel N. Robinson, distinguished professor emeritus at Georgetown University, finds the Sommers/Satel book revealing in examining the decline of the stoic, self-reliant individual who characterized America from around 1600 to sometime after World War II. People in a personal crisis today are often “helped” so much by swarms of counselors and other well wishers that the individual is often afforded little chance of learning to stand on his own. He fails to form the strength to confront what the American essayist and poet Ralph Waldo Emerson calls “the rugged battle of fate.”
In therapy sessions individuals in trouble are encouraged to reveal their true selves as a means for coming to terms with their difficulties. But Satel and Sommers find that if the individual is pressed to expose and deal with his real self, the real self is not what will be revealed. What will be asserted as the self is only a manufactured performance for public display that the troubled self hopes to pass off as its real self. Robinson summarizes the Sommers-Satel book as showing that what we must convey to these sufferers is not how to improve their performance but “the cost of living life as if it were a performance.”
Evaluation of the “performance” that is presented as the real self is often centered on the “authenticity” of what is being expressed. The theory is that if the performance presented is “authentically” that of the presenter that is all that is required. The reward is something called “self-esteem.” The director of an Oakland California singing contest reports on the effect when a contestant relies on “authenticity” to support his or her performance given to achieve recognition and self-esteem. The presentations of many contestants were so bad they could not carry a tune. Their lyrics were fractured and senseless. As they sat waiting their turn to audition it did not occur to these contestants to compare what they could do to the best they were hearing. There is no “best” (or worst) when authenticity and self-esteem are the controlling values.
These contestants, unprepared and ungifted, were infuriated when told of their elimination, and truly did not understand why that should be. Their singing and composing were, they insisted, “authentically” theirs. That is enough they insisted, and they should be recognized. Such people have become disconnected from reality in their cocoon of self-esteem where merit, comparative ability, and excellence have been suffocated for lack of outside air. They have been comforted by the efforts of therapists who caress their tiny egos with compassion and empathy. Having been taught to submerge deeply into themselves, they feel shock and disbelief when reality slaps them in the face. The pride of true achievement has never been shown to them. They know only self-esteem, an alluring inhibition to achievement.
Jeffrey Hart, a senior editor of National Review examines the search for authenticity. Indulging in what he calls “some Freud-speak,” Hart asserts that authenticity is a child of the id, the unconscious part of the human psyche, or mental process, that acts instinctively to generate psychic energy from long buried sources. The ego in Freudian psychology manages conscious thought, and acts as a moderator between the inner person and outside reality. The super-ego internalizes the morals and values of society, creating a conscience that may induce a sense of guilt, leading to a desire for more adequate connection with outside reality. The super-ego shapes a self by exposure to the best works of great men, that is, to the products of civilization. The id generates an indiscriminate appetite for scintillation, a drive to “go with the flow,” a craving to feed passions generated deep below the surface of civil discourse.