Jane Galt makes some keen observation about the anti-war movement. Her ideas are consistent with the notion that the protests have been so loud and extreme because the movement is dying not because it is strong. The political realignment of America is truly underway.
Paul
Kevin Drum on the war protests:
To those of us who are not simply insane warhawks, our common sense reaction to the size of the anti-war protests has been "Jeez, that's a lot of people." Sure, more people watch Survivor than march in protests, but it takes a lot of energy and a lot of anger to get most of us off our butts and onto the streets. Survivor only requires a flick of the index finger on the remote.
That's common sense, but Kieran Healy has, um, sources, and they tell him that the common sense view is, in fact, absolutely accurate: those anti-war protests are really big. You can read all the details here, but the bottom line is that these protests are unusually large and should be taken seriously.
POSTSCRIPT: And an observation of my own: unlike the big Vietnam protests, the current protests aren't just made up of students. There are lots of middle class protesters involved too, and my gut feel is that these might very well be the biggest gatherings of middle class protesters ever. Something to think about.
Well, I wouldn't call myself a "simply insane warhawk", for my neuroses are much more complicated than you'd expect just reading this blog, but I digress. At any rate, the protests seem, to my jaundiced eye, much smaller than the protests in Gulf I, an opinion confirmed by aquaintances who have been protesting more or less continuously since our days back at the Penn Workers Collective. However, as we all know, everything was bigger and better when we were seventeen, so I'll take Kevin's word for it.
But that does bring up an interesting point: the protesters today seem to be losing the student vote. The New York Times and several other places I'm too lazy to look up have run pieces on how the students are, by and large, sitting this one out.
There are a lot of students, of course, don't get me wrong. But you didn't see grey-heads dominating either the podiums or the crowds at the Vietnam protests. What Drum sees as a sign that the anti-war movement is going middle class looks to me more like the anti-war movement is just getting older.
That's not a healthy sign for the anti-war movement, or for the left in general. Nor, I think, for the anti-war sections of the libertarian or conservative movements. If you can't get the kids into your movement, who's going to march ten years from now if your neo-imperialist nightmare comes true? You can't keep a movement going on Centrum Silver.
I'm very curious as to what's happening here. Are we seeing the apogee of a conservative realignment, like the liberal one that characterized the period between FDR and Reagan? Are people moving away from purist ideology on national security because they feel more threatened? (I certainly felt more comfortable being a quasi-isolationist civil liberties purist when I thought that Fortress America was invulnerable.) Did the anti-war movement just play its cards wrong? Or are today's kids just a bunch of indolent, ungrateful bastards who don't appreciate what the previous generation fought so hard to secure for them? It's hard for me to judge, since the entire 16% of the country that's still opposed to the war seems to live within five miles of me.
janegalt.net |
