The Year Is 1977. Politically. And because it’s 1977 again, I have to quit.
Now, as it was in ‘77, punching hippies is just about the only thing the GOP does well. It’s actually the one thing that unites both political parties.
‘Punching hippies’ is a technical term used to describe various instances in modern realpolitik. Applications range from when moderate Democrats throw liberals under the bus procedurally, to when party leadership elbows us out of power via triangulation, to when conservatives literally kill us with bullets, to when media calls us Marxist-Socialist Nazi Communist Fascists and suggest we should be hung for treason, or shot with aforementioned bullets.
All of those things can be described as ‘punching hippies.’
How is it 1977? I talked to a veteran politico friend about her career in politics. She got sucked into party and campaign politics because of Bobby Kennedy, but after the country went off the rails in ‘68, she stayed in politics – - transitioning into what i’ll describe generally as anti-Nixon extra-party structures – - mostly out of pure loathing for Nixon. She recently told me that right now feels exactly like how she remembers 1977.
After Carter pardoned draft dodgers, which she celebrated, she said that the rest of that whole year felt like one losing battle after another. Social justice liberals lost the fight against the Death Penalty. Liberals lost several battles against gay-bashing Anita Bryant, the Supreme Court started chipping away at Roe v. Wade on the Medicare Amendment, environmentalists lost the battle of the Alaska Pipeline. Even the violent crimes which conservatives sensationalized were blamed on liberalism’s effect on our culture. Reagan started running hard against Carter not long thereafter.
That is her recollection of 1977.
Very similar to her story, I got sucked into politics by Howard Dean – who also sought to represent the Democratic wing of the Democratic party – and then I was kept in politics by rage at the atrocities of Bush-Cheney.
But here’s the thing, Bush-Cheney, and the GOP in general, have never stopped fighting 1968’s culture war. Democrats seem to think that they won the war with the unforced error of Watergate. They could not be more wrong.
Conservatives and Nixon believed in Norman Rockwell’s make-believe America. Nixon believed that he was the last line of defense to preserve the precious painting. Thus Nixon justified his illegal acts as necessary, akin to how total warfare perpetrated by victors are later forgiven… by themselves. Firebombing Dresden, Sherman’s March, tapping the DNC’s phones, turning USAGs into an arm of the RNC, etc.
Nixon was waging a full on war from the White House against Americans: young people, poor people, and minorities – the enemy was the DFH (dirty fucking hippie). It wasn’t just rhetoric, this conflict was occasionally militarized – especially in cities and on campuses. Debased by Nixon, liberals were arrested, beaten and otherwise flogged relentlessly by conventional wisdom zombies in the press. This is where our modern understanding of ‘punching hippies’ comes from – schmucks like David Broder.
Tragically, liberal candidates and liberal political heroes were murdered in 1968 by conservatives and Nixon won the election. Nevertheless, a surprising majority continued to fight Nixon, often forming extra-party political structures like issue advocacy organizations. My friend I mentioned above was one of those people.
Next to the victory of impeaching Nixon, putting a Democrat into the White House after those eight long painful years was well-earned schadenfreude. This is how I felt when we beat McCain and got Obama in.
Had I been a professional political operative 1976, I don’t think I would have been able to stomach the constant belittling and undercutting attack campaign that the conservative movement waged against President Carter. To be honest, I would have probably joined Ted Kennedy’s campaign to primary Carter.
Conservatives attacked Carter relentlessly and called him hapless and timid. He reacted as they anticipated: poorly and timidly. Famous actor scumbag Ronald Reagan attacked Carter for the entirety of Carter’s pitiful term. It did not abate: after a few years, Reagan simply shifted his all-purpose bad guy from Carter into Mondale.
The gutter-style politics which Nixon resorted to, was perfected and elevated to an art by Reagan’s people. American politics in the 80s was a shitshow of epic proportions. Impeachable offenses, policy failures… horrible stuff – punctuated always with Atwater’s flawless character assassinations spun through perfect media control and heavily reinforced scapegoating.
Which now brings us to 1992.
A sanity recap: this cycle beginning in ’68 marks how for the next 24 years, most of the American political spectrum found common cause in the joyful practice of punching hippies. For 20 of the 24 years it was done directly from the White House! As a liberal American, it doesn’t feel good to have your country so rejoice in beating the shit out of you.
Enter Clinton. The GOP calls him a hippie and punches him, and what does he do? A brilliant maneuver – unless you’re a hippie – he too punches hippies. It works for two terms, he’s able to diffuse most attacks by joining with the attack slightly pushing focus onto a strawman… or some unfortunate actual living hippie. That brings us to 2000.
This was when America went completely insane for 8 years. The result of thirty-two years of violent anti-liberal attack propaganda; hate speech equating liberals & Democrats to murderers, rapists, terrorists, pedophiles, abortionists, communists, and of course dirty fucking hippies.
The result was that the very vocal minority who voted for George W. Bush cheered whenever he got his way over objections of the loathed Democrats. If “his way” was an illegal war, or torture, or financial ruin, impeachable offenses, often literally criminal acts, no matter – they cheered. The jumbotron told them to.
Today, the year may as well be 1977. Obama is so much like Carter it’s frightening. If he doubles down on Afghanistan without passing a healthcare plan with a public option he may end up more like LBJ without the Great Society legislation. Both analogies are pain.
Think of the losses Carter’s liberals soldiered through in 1977: the Death Penalty, gay-bashing Anita Bryant, the Hyde Amendment, the Alaska Pipeline!
Four years of losses like that, plus the all out attacks from professional dickhead Reagan and his conservative movement goons, and it all added up to a really depressed party base. Just as dispirited as we are today.
Based on my experience these past years, to be a professional liberal in American politics is to know mostly pain, loss, and sadness. I love my wife too much to share that kind of life with her. It is a life away from your family, underpaid; it is to be attacked by your enemies, and then betrayed by the “friends” who you put into power. It is to be attacked by your own party, even: Rahm, Obama, and Reid really do not like us. It’s an infuriating life.
However, there will be no Ted Kennedy-esque primary campaign against Obama. The identity politics would tear the party apart. (To be honest, odds are even that Obama may be able to win reelection without any accomplishments because he has such a nice smile.)
Things go in cycles, like circles around – then down – a drain. I think that where we are right now with our hapless, timid Obama is at the same point in the cycle that I described for Carter’s liberals, just 32 years later – and deeper down the drain.
Had I been born in the same year as Bill Clinton, I probably would have gone clean for Gene, switched to Bobby, and then spent the next 8 years of Nixon fighting the evil bastard tooth and nail. And then I would have walked away from the madness.
I’d rather not be like Carter’s liberals. I’m a Howard Dean guy. Thanks to him I fought Bush to his demise and then I helped elect a Democratic President. It’s not my problem that the man is Carter-redux and the cycle is beginning again. Instead, it’s everybody’s problem that we’re not allowed to have liberal leaders in this country.
The good news is that because it’s 1977 we’re only a few months away from some sort of analogue to the day when The Talking Heads began their collaboration with Brian Eno. That plus the recording of Led Zeppelin’s final studio album helped kill off disco for good.
I’m looking forward to the updated version of that – we’ll know it when we see it. Because it’ll be awesome. Already, people are making Avatar is the new Star Wars analogies. Star Wars, you remember, came out in 1977. Next year, I will be born.
Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.
