Fans of the Rolling Stones should recognize the title of this post, from the song, “Mother’s Little Helper.” Of course, the Stones are now old enough to actually be the parents of the middle age mothers who are addicted to little yellow pills. And naturally, many of their fans, who once protested the Vietnam War, have aged right along with them, as freelancer Jack Langer illustrates, with a wink and a nod, in his post about last weekend’s Iraq war protests, published yesterday at Human Events.
I smiled, even chuckled, at the first half of Langer’s article. (Yes, however rare it might be, some conservatives have a sense of humor.) But when he moved from witticisms about aging Hippies to social commentary, he lost me, especially with claims like this one: “… the attempt to make the current war into a replay of Vietnam is failing quite dramatically. What’s missing is the key element that provoked many of the old radicals to oppose the Vietnam War in the first place: the draft. ”
And this one: “What do the old radicals have left to offer the youth? Socialism. One can understand the attraction of this credo back in the 1960s, when its American adherents only had the millions of victims of the Soviet regime to contradict their assertion that socialism would provide a positive alternative to capitalism. But now, we know of the atrocities of a whole new set of postwar socialist regimes … as well as the final collapse of most socialist governments and the turn toward capitalism of nearly all the remaining socialist regimes. Younger activists may have the Iraq War to fight against, but they need something to fight for – and with socialism, their older role models are not offering them anything appealing.”
First, I don’t think it’s “the radicals” who are attempting “to make the current war into a replay of Vietnam.” I think certain neocons and their failure to manage the war have succeeded, all on their own, at prompting those comparisons.
Second, socialism and communism are not necessarily synonymous, despite Langer’s attempts to make them so, nor do the more extreme strands of socialism have any real political traction in this country. Moreover, let’s not forget that the current Republican administration has far outpaced the prior Democratic administration in embracing socialist-style programs and the flagrant spending and arrogant inflation of federal government control that often accompany them.
If we want to find the “younger” protesters/radicals, no, we probably won’t find them gathering on the Mall in Washington, but we will find them swarming online with a reach and level of authority that dwarfs any physical swarm of our time. Granted, I wrote a post a few days ago questioning their impact. Subsequently, I heard a presentation by a former client-turned-counselor who has studied the Web 2.0 world far more thoroughly than most of us, and he illustrated, in both numbers and anecdotes, just how substantive the effect of Web pamphleteers can be, proving Glenn Reynolds’ thesis: “Bloggers have very little power. What they have is influence.”
Finally, regarding Langer’s other suggestion, that today’s young protesters are against the war in Iraq but don’t yet stand for something, again I have to disagree. Though I can’t yet prove it, I think they have found something to stand for, with or without the prodding of prior generations, namely: sanity, fairness, and balance between the divisive extremes that have defined their predecessors. And that’s why, I think, their heroes are frequently named Clinton and Schwarzenegger and Giuliani, rather than Hoffman and Leary and Fonda.
(Cross-posted at Central Sanity.)