Jack Moebes/Associated Press; Ed Reinke/Associated Press - SIT-INS College students staged a protest in 1960 at an all-white lunch counter in Greensboro, N.C. Rand Paul’s recent comments about the 1964 Civil Rights Act and its integration requirement for private businesses stirred controversy in Kentucky.
May 25, 2010
2010’s Debates Still Trapped in the 1960s
By MATT BAI
You would not think Richard Blumenthal and Rand Paul would have anything in common, aside from the fact that they are both running for Senate.
Mr. Blumenthal, the Democratic attorney general of Connecticut, is a respected, if somewhat colorless career public servant. Mr. Paul, a Kentucky eye doctor and a Republican, is a doctrinaire libertarian like his father, Ron Paul, the onetime presidential candidate. But last week, both men found themselves unexpectedly sucked into the vortex that pulls us inexorably back to the 1960s.
This wrinkle in the political space-time continuum was supposed to have been smoothed out, of course. Barack Obama based his presidential campaign on the notion that the nation needed to step past the cultural chasm of an earlier era, and younger Americans, in particular, endorsed that vision. And yet here we are two years later, arguing over Vietnam and segregation, our politics transformed yet again into a revival of “Hair,” except perhaps that it is not entertaining and never seems to end. (Actually, it is exactly like “Hair.”)
In both cases, the trite and simplistic debate seems mismatched to the more complex conversations that most Americans are actually trying to have.
Mr. Blumenthal’s troubles started when The New York Times reported that he had a pattern of implying (or stating outright) that he had served in Vietnam when he had not. There is a legitimate question of character here, to be sure; politicians ought not to embellish, and Mr. Blumenthal twice apologized. But the controversy, stoked by his Republican opponent, has as much to do with all the 40-year-old emotions around draft boards and deferrals, the lingering bitterness among those who served and the torturous guilt among those who did not, as it does with the straight-up issue of veracity.
This is all well-trod ground for voters who can easily recall the allegations over Bill Clinton and his draft letter, John Kerry and his Swift boat, George W. Bush and his missing time in the National Guard. But in a country where no one under 50 has ever seen a draft notice, it is increasingly irrelevant; to those Americans, we might as well be having an argument over who sunk the Maine.
In the era of the all-volunteer military, there is much less of a class or ideological divide in America between those who honor service and those who might shun it. (Consider that the loudest proponent of a draft now is Charles B. Rangel, the liberal congressman from New York.) Today’s more pressing debates are about how best to use the military in fighting unconventional wars and whether gay Americans should be allowed to serve openly, about the length of a deployment and the quality of body armor and benefits.
Mr. Paul, meanwhile, found himself hurtling into the past when, responding to questions from Rachel Maddow on MSNBC, he expressed philosophical reservations about the 1964 Civil Rights Act, specifically the provision that forced private businesses to integrate. (Later, he amended that position, saying he would have supported the act anyway.)
The ensuing cries of racism probably made perfect sense to those who lived through the ’60s. After all, if a white Southerner in 1964 opposed integration on constitutional grounds, odds were pretty good that bigotry was a motivating factor. And yet the national conversation around racism and its remedies today is considerably more nuanced than it was 50 years ago — or even 10 years ago.
Now Tiger Woods plays annually at Augusta, historically an all-white club. The African-American president of the United States has said that his own relatively privileged daughters should not benefit from affirmative action programs when applying to college. Americans the president’s age and younger are inclined to assume that one can question the responsibilities of government and private entities when it comes to race without necessarily being dismissed as a racist — even if it does make them, as in the case of Mr. Paul, something of an ideological outlier.
Why then, to quote the ubiquitous Bono, is our political debate so stuck in a moment it cannot get out of? In part, it is probably because so many of the Americans most engaged in politics — as well as those who run campaigns and comment endlessly on them — are old enough to remember Altamont. It is your classic self-fulfilling prophecy: the more the ’60s generation dominates the political discourse, the less that discourse engages younger voters, and the longer the boomers hold sway over our politics.
On a deeper level, though, this all probably has as much to do with our basic human tendency toward moral clarity. As much as conservatives may view the decade as the crucible of moral relativism and the beginning of a breakdown in established social order, there remains something powerfully attractive about the binary, simplistic nature of it all, the idea that one could easily distinguish whether he was for war or against, in favor of equality or opposed.
By contrast, war today seems more a question of degrees and limits, while equality seems less about the laws of the land than about disparities in economic and educational opportunities that are subtler and harder to address. The choices of our moment are not nearly so neat or so satisfying as they were a generation ago, which makes them less useful as a basis for one’s political identity, and harder to encapsulate in some 30-second spot or prime-time rant.
In a sense, the discussion of the past week underscores Mr. Obama’s continuing challenge as well. Implicit in the president’s vow to move us beyond the obsolescence of ’60s politics was the idea that he would replace it with something else, that he would reframe the debate of the 21st century in a way that would make our choices as a society seem clearer and more interconnected.
He hasn’t, or at least not to this point. And without that modern framework there is only an absence, the familiar vortex that keeps pulling us back to things we had hoped to leave behind.
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