The Woodstock Swindle

1

In the village of Woodstock, New York, there are probably more peace symbols than in any other place on Earth. In the shops along the main street, visitors can buy a large array of merchandise — shirts, hats flags, glassware, pottery and sundry object d'arts — emblazoned with the once ubiquitous circular icon. A symbol that formerly signified opposition to imperialism, capitalism and the wars that supported them, has been reduced to a shill for local commerce. We ought not to begrudge the local store owners for cashing in on their claim to fame as a center of 1960s counter-culture, nor the many tourists who may enjoy basking in nostaglia for unabashed liberalism during a time of Democratic defeat and democratic retreat. The village, though lovely and touching in its way, is no less a surrender to the unstoppable march of human greed and the imperative of survival than a shrine to a lost era of unfettered idealism.

At the risk of sounding pedantic, one would be remiss for failing to point out that, while the town called Woodstock did indeed lend its name to the eponymous 1969 music festival — a number of prominent folk and rock musicians of the day, most notably Bob Dylan, did in fact live in the vicinity — the actual event was held 60 miles away in Bethel, New York. The promoters had some difficulty finding a venue and getting a permit for such a large audience (which, in the end, ballooned to more than 10 times its expected size). We should also pause to note that the peace symbol was originally designed in the late 1950s for the British Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, and only later appropriated for left-wing causes in general and the movement against the Vietnam War in particular.

These are not merely bits of unremarkable trivia about the era's most famous rock festival, but ironic metaphors for the entire shambolic undertaking that we broadly refer to as the 1960s: a concert festival attended by half a million hippies and other anti-establishment and casually rebellious free spirits, that was in fact conceived as a money-making enterprise by its organizers; a name far removed from its geographic source but permanently implanted into the world's imagination as a synonym for youthful excess and utopian fantasy; and a symbol widely derided by pro-war anti-Communists ("the footprint of the American chicken") and regrettably very similar to the Mercedes Benz hood ornament (a company whose sordid history is hardly associated with peace and tolerance) but nonetheless transformed into a universally recognized emblem of progressive causes, hopeless or otherwise.

In other words, a mess of irreconcilable contradictions.

2

Throughout the four My Brilliant Friend novels of Elena Ferrante, as well as the intensely dramatic television series it inspired, there is ceaseless political foment. The saga follows several characters from Naples in the aftermath of World War II through the next several decades. While the books are about much more than politics, several of the main characters are consumed in a protracted debate about the ills of society and argue heatedly, both in private and in public, over (mostly leftist) solutions for them. Points of view range from benignly liberal to passionately Communist. There is no mistaking the impression that nearly everyone involved in these innumerable discussions, exhaustively battling one another in their characteristic Italian staccato, is utterly convinced that they can literally talk their way to a better future. (Though one character commits acts of terrorism and spends most of his adult life on the run from the police, having decided, correctly, that talking alone was insufficient to bring about permanent change.) They are certain that they are living in momentous times, and that many of the evils that have beset mankind since the dawn of civilization are on the verge of elimination: war, poverty, racism, inequality, exploitation. They speak with the zeal of the newly converted, and can hardly contain their excitement over the new dawn that, one way or another, but without a doubt, is soon to arise.

By the end of the story, however, mere exhaustion overwhelms all of these characters and their lofty intentions, and the promised utopia is no closer to realization than it was in their heady youthful days of the 1960s and 1970s. What was it all for? All the endless conversations, all the lectures, meetings, marches, protests, sit-ins, interviews, editorials, pamphlets, books, songs, concerts and posters, not to mention the riots, bombings, kidnappings and assassinations? How was society changed, actually, by all of this activism and talk about activism? Are we in the West now any less capitalist, less consumerist, less destructive to the environment? Are we more decent, more compassionate, more generous? Did we really think we could change human nature by reading Thoreau and Skinner and Marx, and then speaking out about it at the top of our voices? Did we learn nothing from the disastrous Communist experiments of the 20th century, from the collapse of the Soviet Union into today's Russian thug-ocracy, from Mao's "Little Red Book" being replaced by an unwritten manifesto of authoritarian capitalism, from the smoldering ruin that is today's Cuba, or from the vast dismal prison camp that is North Korea? Is there anything to emulate here?

The major action in the novels ends in the early 1990s, right around the time of the political rise of Silvio Berlusconi. Is this a coincidence? He and his populist movement do not figure in the story, but it is more than a little disconcerting to realize that almost nothing now remains of the society-rebuilding enthusiasm of the left, which has long since disintegrated and fallen like dust into the lap of authoritarianism. Where once we saw the bright hope of social progress we now see, in retrospect, a movement undone by hubris, excess and certitude. For more than three decades now, Italy has been governed almost continuously by one right-wing populist party or another, and most of the rest of the so-called West has experienced various forms of conservative backlash against the left-wing idealism that had dominated politics for the previous half century.

The world did indeed change, somewhat, but it is an open question how much of that change was the result of activism and how much to a gradual shift in public opinions. Pushing the envelope too hard and too fast doesn't always lead to the kind of lasting change that a natural evolution of cultural norms may leave in its wake. After Roe v. Wade was decided, for example, liberals thereafter considered the right to abortion to be inviolate, but opposition was not only deep and lasting but has poisoned our politics to the present day. Similarly, the "me too" movement has changed what many people consider acceptable sexual behavior, but half the population clearly has no reluctance about voting for a transparently sexist presidential candidate, while many young men, rather than contemplate their own place in the spectrum of masculinity, blindly embrace the ideas of misogynist "influencers". By contrast, tolerance for interracial and gay relationships, and the acceptance of women in many professions which were once closed to them, is now far more widespread than ever, as personal experience has changed the definition of what is normal.

But the fierce backlash against the progressive agenda has undone much of the progress of the last century, and promises to undo much more. Conservatives have been itching to unravel the New Deal for nearly a century. From the left, the Great Society programs, for all their imperfections, represent a major advance towards social progress and equality, but many on the right never got the memo and still view them as anti-American abominations. Women's rights, civil rights, and gay and transgender rights are individual threads in the tapestry of personal freedoms that is steadily being picked apart, bit by bit, law by law, ruling by ruling. Even as the population becomes gradually more tolerant, the law is becoming more stridently hostile.

What was won, exactly, in all those decades of liberal hegemony?

3

Alexis de Tocqueville was charmed by what he saw of America, but mistaken on a central tenet of his famously effusive study of the country in its early days. In Democracy in America, he supposes that there is something uniquely democratic in the American character, which not only predisposes citizens to an egalitarian and fiercely independent frame of mind, but also inoculates us against monarchism. Supposedly. There has been much in our history to support this thesis, to justify the notion, once posited by a professor of mine, that what makes us uniquely American and binds our disparate backgrounds into a single nation is that we are "ornery". We, or our ancestors (other than Native Americans), all made the difficult journey from somewhere else because we were determined not only to be prosperous but free from state tyranny. But any "innate" democratic characteristics exhibited by Americans in the early 19th century may have been the result merely of living in a vibrant and newly democratic nation, in which the democratic ethos was pervasive and unavoidable. There is a tendency of people in all societies to mimic and reinforce the predominant views in one's own culture. In a monarchy, most subjects revere the king; does this make them "innately" monarchist, or just products of their particular time and place?

Consider the example of Austria in the 1930s: in the years after World War I, the country responded to the calamity of losing its empire by embracing an early version of social democracy, with a strong commitment to public housing, welfare for the poor, and so on. But when the Germans marched in and subsumed the government in 1938, much of the population seemed to happily embrace Nazism and its commitment to state terror and genocide. So what did that make the populace: more "innately" democratic or authoritarian? Probably neither. The average citizen, with no power to influence the political constitution, mostly adapts to changed circumstances. Part of that adaptation is conforming to the prevailing view of the moment, as it is difficult for most people to openly confront authority. Being a dissident and an iconoclast, by definition, is reserved for a very few hardy souls.

We see this play out in real time in our own time, as ordinary citizens are frequently heard to ape the talking points of their leaders, even if those points directly contradict previously held opinions. Who would have thought that a presidential candidate could succeed after trashing the reputation of a decorated war hero who was his party's standard-bearer a mere eight years earlier? It is not so much that people are hypocritical (though they are at times) or even merely fickle (they are that, too). The problem is that their political "beliefs" are not always deeply held core principles but convenient guideposts to navigating a particular political moment. If your party veers left, you lean left; if it then veers right, you lean right, otherwise you risk being tossed over the side. The outlines of political discourse are drawn by powerful people over whom the typical voter has little sway and in whom they often have only passing interest. People may seem to be unduly devoted to a particular demagogue, but only until the next one comes along. The past, after all, is a foreign country, and the future does not exist. You only get to live and vote in the present moment.

4

So did the liberal wave achieve nothing of note? What about the Vietnam War and the flashing of all those peace signs — didn't the protests help end it, and push Lyndon Johnson out of the presidential race in 1968? Maybe, but the television footage of the actual fighting on the nightly news was probably a more potent factor. LBJ was more concerned with the opinions of middle class voters watching the war on television than in the perspective of hippies and college students. You may remember that it wasn't the left-wing Eugene McCarthy who won the Democratic nomination for president in 1968, but Vice President Hubert Humphrey, a liberal but decidedly establishment candidate. (Robert F. Kennedy might very well have won the nomination had he not been assassinated in June, but of course we will never know. In any event, he was hardly a radical leftist, either.) And what did the protesters get for trashing Johnson and the Democrats? Nixon. And how did that work out? Once again, a fundamental political truth was confirmed: if centrists can't come up with a good solution to a problem, extremists will come up with a worse one. A mere dozen years after the debacle of '68 we got Reagan in the USA and Thatcher in the UK, and capitalism was unleashed in all its cold, indifferent fury.

None of this should have been surprising. Echoes of the 1960s have reverberated in every presidential election since, and usually in ugly and unilluminating fashion: Reagan's denunciations of the Great Society and its "welfare queens"; George H.W. Bush spitting out the word "liberal" with a sneer; Clinton's draft-dodging and having to pretend he never liked smoking marijuana; Junior Bush's Air National Guard escape from Vietnam engineered by his father's friends in high places; the current incumbent's "bone spurs" that kept him safe from the draft board. It is as if we are surrounded by a gigantic debris field — the remnants of a social and political explosion that nearly tore society apart — and we pretend, on both the right and the left, that we can gather all of these millions of pieces together again into some kind of coherent whole.

On the right, this has consisted of outright denial that anything good ever came from the government in the last 100 years, accompanied by continual attempts to roll the clock back to some imaginary, prelapsarian paradise by gutting laws like the Voting Rights Act and the Clean Water Act, and reversing judicial rulings on which much social progress depended, like abortion rights and gay marriage. It also leads to self-mocking absurdities, like "Keep the government's hands off my Medicare" (an outburst recorded on video during the Obamacare debates which, perversely, probably did more to convince a generation of Republicans not to touch entitlements for senior citizens than any political argument could have done). Ruth Bader Ginsberg pointedly summarized the conservative effort to crush the fruits of liberalism in a famous dissent, in which she likened the weakening of voter protections to throwing away your umbrella during a rainstorm because you're not getting wet.

On the left, preserving the liberal project of the 20th century amounts to defending every last shred of every law and regulation, with only rare acknowledgement that not every good intention led to unquestionably good results. By allowing the imaginary great to become the enemy of the achievable good, moderate liberals ceded the middle ground to zealots of both right and left. Consequently they have watched as their genuine successes have been steadily eroded: first by blindness, then by inertia, and finally by hostile takeover. This has led not only to legislative and judicial backsliding but also to the scourge of political correctness and "wokeness" which has provoked the most severe conservative (and moderate) backlash that we have witnessed to date. Failure to go to the wall for every progressive piety is now a crime whose punishment is reputational execution. But a movement that is more intent on burning heretics than seeking converts is doomed to irrelevance.

5

At the recent funeral of Ozzy Osborne, his widow Sharon was caught on camera flashing the peace sign — another misappropriated bit of 1960s ephemera, having meant "V for Victory" during World War II. It would be difficult to conjure a more potent metaphor of left-wing collapse than the Osbornes, who turned a decidedly nonconformist way of life into a reality TV juggernaut, becoming household names, and presumably much more wealthy than they were already, not for their music but for exposing their private lives to the public gaze and cashing in on the rise of "reality" TV. This is the very same misnamed genre which gave a platform to another "reality" TV star who rode it all the way to the White House, where he is currently attempting to reverse or undermine all of the social progress which people like the Osbornes and many of their fans purportedly believe in.

Like all radical movements, the counterculture of the 1960s had a few true believers and millions of imitators, exploiters and hangers-on. Lawrence Kasdan's "The Big Chill", made all the way back in the dark days of the Reagan/Thatcher era, offered an unintended parody of the narcissism and hollowness of a group of friends who refused to let go of the 1960s, at least in their minds. Though intended as a paean to youthful idealism, the movie instead revealed that the counterculture was merely a colorful backdrop in some people's formative years.

How did these die-hard liberals respond to the unbound capitalism and growing inequality of the 1980s? By becoming rich and/or famous, of course. Every character in the movie — but one — has been hugely successful in one field or another in the decade or so since the optimistic '60s melted into the desultory '70s. They were more likely to show up at a city council meeting to demand more soccer fields for their kids, or to prevent low income housing from being built in their neighborhoods, than to take a stand for civil rights. The one character who bucked the trend, played by William Hurt, is not lauded by his former fellow peace-marchers as someone who has proudly stuck to his principles, but pitied and derided as a loser. If you watch the movie now, you will almost certainly laugh in all the wrong places, if at all. It is as cringeworthy as watching someone flash the peace sign and say "groovy" long after such expressions have disappeared from the wider culture. And with good reason.

Liberals have longed mocked conservatives for believing in American exceptionalism, but the truth is that they believed it, too. They swallowed de Tocqueville's flattery hook, line and sinker: that we are fundamentally good, that for all our differences we are still one people, that we are immune to authoritarianism. While they were congratulating themselves on the impregnable edifice of liberal progress that they had built, an unholy alliance of populists, supremacists, sexists, conspiracists and religious zealots was plotting, successfully, to blow up the foundation.

We never cease to profess our concern for the downtrodden and the fate of the environment, but our actions speak for themselves: collectively we are as capitalist, consumerist and indifferent to nature as ever. Whereas once we may have enjoyed a moment of schadenfreude when the stock market took a dive, now our own retirement accounts, and our entire way of life, depend on the continued success of market capitalism. And "we" means everyone, including the self-proclaimed justice warriors who are more concerned with being right than with electing someone to office who might actually narrow the widening gulf of inequality and attempt to put out the fire that is consuming the planet. In politics, to quote a coach of long ago, winning isn't everything, it's the only thing.

At what point is "fighting the good fight" no more than hopeless nostalgia for "the lost cause"? Enjoy your stroll down memory lane; before long, memories may be all you have left of your utopian dream.