Don't know how I missed this at the time
Jun. 12th, 2005 03:30 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
omorkaThe Birth of the Conservative Think Tanks
About a third of the way into the article, he mentions the dissolving of the '60s "liberal establishment" in the mid-'70s under (a) the pressure of the failure in Viet Nam and the general death of everyone's remaining trust in government when Watergate hit, and (b) the co-opting of the counterculture into "Radical Chic." I was forcibly reminded of Mary Daly's dismissal of fundamentalism and her insistence that the liberal was the enemy of the radical, that liberalism was simply not enough. I remember that shocking me and then sort of washing away when I first read her. I sort of dismissed it by thinking "Well, this was written in the '70s, after all." But surely she had to know, even in the heady flush of the Swinging Seventies, what the danger was? The takeover of the evangelical churches by the ministers of Mammon was already almost ten years underway, and Richard Nixon had been elected - probably, by that point, elected twice.
I explained to Debate once that my politics are not well-described by the left-right distinction. When he asked me what I was, I responded something like "radical socialist feminist anarcho-occultist." Which is, in fact, correct. (His response was "fair enough;" I suspect he thought I was joking.) In terms of basically liking very little about this culture or political system and wanting it almost completely replaced, with something that in fact has never previously existed (sorry, my radfem sisters, but the Old European societies, even if in fact they were matriarchal or egalitarian, were hardly paradises, just better than the other options at the time), I am in fact a political radical. Probably I am more of one than most of the counterculturals were, although having been born too late, I can't ever really know. I do not belong in the Reactive generation I was born into, but I would have hated my fellow revolutionaries if I'd actually been in the last Idealist generation. Really, I belonged in the one before that. The one that successfully won the suffrage. I'd say I belong in the next one, the one that the kids I'm teaching now will someday give birth to (not the one they're birthing now; that's an Adaptive generation), except right now I'm afraid of what they'll be accepting or rebelling against, and what the consequences of their eventually accepting it will be.
Oh! Wait! Crud, no, that's what happened! That's what Blue and Red is really about! It's not the Boomers who are still rebelling against the Establishment versus the ones who dropped back in and turned conformist. (That's how I've been thinking of it. Baka. I know better than that.) It's two different models of rebellion against the "liberal Establishment" of their youth. One is rebelling from modernity (change of terms - gear shift - sorry) in the direction of postmodernity and cultural creativism; the other is rebelling in the direction of premodernity and fundamentalism. Neither one is keeping the G.I. Generation's value set; one is quite honest about this, and the other one thinks this is what those values would look like if they were in their prime right now. Eris! And most of the G.I.'s are just as split as the Boomers are, because this world really is so different from theirs. They tried to build a Normal, and it didn't work - but they're just as split as the Boom is as to why.
Okay. Anyway, back to talking about me (this is an LJ after all, ne?) - my point was that, while I don't really want the Blue vision of the world, in fact would find it quite unpleasant, it is not as bad as the Red vision, which would kill me one way or another if it became fully implemented. Fortunately, we are a Purple Nation still, and there are more shades of red than they are admitting (and some of the Crimsons are getting really pissed off at the Candy Apples, let me tell you), so I am hoping that with enough work we can start heading back towards Indigo soon. And that will require work from everyone who doesn't want the Red World - whether we are Blue, or Green, or honest Purple, or White, or Rainbow, or somewhere off in the x-ray part of the spectrum. Not quite a "the enemy of my enemy" thing - but a "they will step on all of us" issue. At least from Blue World I have a chance of fighting for what I want, instead of against what I don't want.
About a third of the way into the article, he mentions the dissolving of the '60s "liberal establishment" in the mid-'70s under (a) the pressure of the failure in Viet Nam and the general death of everyone's remaining trust in government when Watergate hit, and (b) the co-opting of the counterculture into "Radical Chic." I was forcibly reminded of Mary Daly's dismissal of fundamentalism and her insistence that the liberal was the enemy of the radical, that liberalism was simply not enough. I remember that shocking me and then sort of washing away when I first read her. I sort of dismissed it by thinking "Well, this was written in the '70s, after all." But surely she had to know, even in the heady flush of the Swinging Seventies, what the danger was? The takeover of the evangelical churches by the ministers of Mammon was already almost ten years underway, and Richard Nixon had been elected - probably, by that point, elected twice.
I explained to Debate once that my politics are not well-described by the left-right distinction. When he asked me what I was, I responded something like "radical socialist feminist anarcho-occultist." Which is, in fact, correct. (His response was "fair enough;" I suspect he thought I was joking.) In terms of basically liking very little about this culture or political system and wanting it almost completely replaced, with something that in fact has never previously existed (sorry, my radfem sisters, but the Old European societies, even if in fact they were matriarchal or egalitarian, were hardly paradises, just better than the other options at the time), I am in fact a political radical. Probably I am more of one than most of the counterculturals were, although having been born too late, I can't ever really know. I do not belong in the Reactive generation I was born into, but I would have hated my fellow revolutionaries if I'd actually been in the last Idealist generation. Really, I belonged in the one before that. The one that successfully won the suffrage. I'd say I belong in the next one, the one that the kids I'm teaching now will someday give birth to (not the one they're birthing now; that's an Adaptive generation), except right now I'm afraid of what they'll be accepting or rebelling against, and what the consequences of their eventually accepting it will be.
Oh! Wait! Crud, no, that's what happened! That's what Blue and Red is really about! It's not the Boomers who are still rebelling against the Establishment versus the ones who dropped back in and turned conformist. (That's how I've been thinking of it. Baka. I know better than that.) It's two different models of rebellion against the "liberal Establishment" of their youth. One is rebelling from modernity (change of terms - gear shift - sorry) in the direction of postmodernity and cultural creativism; the other is rebelling in the direction of premodernity and fundamentalism. Neither one is keeping the G.I. Generation's value set; one is quite honest about this, and the other one thinks this is what those values would look like if they were in their prime right now. Eris! And most of the G.I.'s are just as split as the Boomers are, because this world really is so different from theirs. They tried to build a Normal, and it didn't work - but they're just as split as the Boom is as to why.
Okay. Anyway, back to talking about me (this is an LJ after all, ne?) - my point was that, while I don't really want the Blue vision of the world, in fact would find it quite unpleasant, it is not as bad as the Red vision, which would kill me one way or another if it became fully implemented. Fortunately, we are a Purple Nation still, and there are more shades of red than they are admitting (and some of the Crimsons are getting really pissed off at the Candy Apples, let me tell you), so I am hoping that with enough work we can start heading back towards Indigo soon. And that will require work from everyone who doesn't want the Red World - whether we are Blue, or Green, or honest Purple, or White, or Rainbow, or somewhere off in the x-ray part of the spectrum. Not quite a "the enemy of my enemy" thing - but a "they will step on all of us" issue. At least from Blue World I have a chance of fighting for what I want, instead of against what I don't want.
