We Live In The Emotional And Economic Wreckage Of This Broken Home....

Mind if I share this?

Lifestyle questions WERE and remain, a matter of economics. My right to hold a job, my right to get equal pay for equal work, my right to remain free from unwanted pregnancy or get credit without permission from a father or husband...these are more than just frivolous lifestyle choices to me, and I am very glad the left fought for those rights for all us women.

The questions of civil rights and rights of women had important economic elements.

Caricature necessarily exaggerates some elements and suppresses others to convey a point, and I stand by the point of the grounds on which the marriage of the left and the white working class, evident and strong in the New Deal era, broke apart in the Sixties and collapsed in the seventies.

Genius of discernment and great writing. I am in awe of you, no lie.

I guess I am trying to say, let's not go back to denying rights to women and gays and people of color, just to get those who left over these issues, back into the fold.

I wonder what percentage of the US population falls under the category of female, person of color, gay or lesbian? It seems to me these lifestyle changes have actually served to benefit a clear majority of the population, while enraging only white males, from what I see.

Or am I seeing things wrong?

Because the proportion of society which has indeed benefited from the liberation and life-style gains is growing, while the proportion of even the white working class still in thrall to the Reaganite delusion is dwindling.

I certainly do not think we should downplay gains made, and efforts made, in these matters, as a means of courting people who, by now, probably are unreachable anyway.

I do think, however, that we on the left are going to have to find a way to press questions of economic justice, as we did formerly, and do it for the sake of our country and its people --- not as a means of courting an ex. The ex can come along if it wants, but it is not the point....

In spite of what the lazy binary-brained politician$ and their $ycophantic media want you to believe

The rights you speak of are embraced by more citizens than not

There's no automatic assumption among the populace that, say for instance, single payer healthcare would mean women shouldn't be able to vote. Nor that a WPA style jobs program should mean someone, somewhere gives up their human rights achievements

Conservatives for decades (military) I have often felt my rights as a woman were always on the verge of being taken away, and that many would applaud that. I am relieved to know I was wrong.

I am all on board with preserving the rights we have won, along with forcefully pursuing economic fairness and justice.

But how is gay or person of color (I hate that phrase, it's me, not you) or female a lifestyle change?

When we focused on the rights of women, minorities, gays and lesbians, and other oppressed groups.

So following that logic, it was a mistake to fight for those rights.

A step further and one could conclude we need to stop pushing back against those who would take away those rights for women, minorities and gays and lesbians and that is how the Democratic Party could be strong again.

The poster uses the phrase "lifestyle choices" to describe the fight for civil rights for women, minorities and gays and lesbians.

As if our rights are frivolous things and easily discarded with no harm.

And the biggest divide right now as far as I can tell is between urban and rural.

I described what happened, and consider it a simple statement of fact that this is what led to the break, which clearly exists, between the left and the white working class in this country. I am by no means arguing that civil rights should not have been fought for, and certainly not arguing that we should reverse field now. To my view the gravest mistake was made by those members of the white working class who placed a higher value on white supremacy and male dominance than on the economic well-being of their families and themselves. But it is true that there were hard feelings and hurtful actions and attitudes on both sides of the thing, when the split opened.

"Oh, great, the men on the left think it is our fault we lost too many elections."

Because there are so many on the right saying everything is the fault of women...including the mass shootings...

And certainly at the time of the split, life-style was the common usage, even among persons participating in the various liberation movements. To be a feminist was to adopt a new life-style, referring to the 'homosexual life-style' was a solid step from 'those perverts', and so on and so forth.

"enraging white males"

Uh huh.

Who was it who just elected and re-elected Obama?

It was white males.

15% of Obama's vote total came from white males.
11.5% of Obama's vote total came from blacks of either gender.

Of course 17.94% of Obama's vote total came from white females, but they are considered part of the coalition.

Yet, white males, for all they are spit on by so many of the left, were sorta key to the victory. Some might do well to remember that.

I might also note that white females - they voted for McCain 53-46.

Obama did not do nearly as well with white males in 2012. Maybe some of his supporters spent four years alienating white males, or maybe the first term was not that good as hoped for. But white males were still 11.9% of Obama's vote total compared to 12% for blacks of either gender. White males did NOT vote for Romney in the same way that black males voted for Obama.

White males were twenty of McCain's forty-seven percentage points of the vote.

A third of white males voting for President Obama over McCain were in the young voter range, which was only about a sixth of total voters. Thus, among white males much over college age, McCain garnered well over the two in three proportion he took in white males over-all.

In 2012, more than three fifths of white male voters voted for Romney, and since whites ran about seven tenths of total vote, something close to thirty of Romney's forty-seven percentage points of the vote would have been white males.

It remains a fact of political life that, if only whites voted, Republicans would hold just about every office in the land, and if only white males voted, they would carry those offices in landslide vote totals.

"In 2012, more than three fifths of white male voters voted for Romney, and since whites ran about seven tenths of total vote, something close to thirty of Romney's forty-seven percentage points of the vote would have been white males."

It also remains a fact of political life that Democrats still need lots of votes from white males in order to win. 87% of black men voted for Obama. If 87% of white men had voted for Romney his 47% would have been 56%.

Rather than being "enraged" by the Democratic Party, many white males are voting FOR it. Often, enough so that the Democratic Party wins.

One might wonder "could the Democratic Party win MORE of the white vote". Maybe, if after an election the internet was NOT filled with articles cheering "woohoo, we beat those white racists" or "ha, ha, ha soon whites will be a minority". Maybe instead we could cheer "woohoo, we beat those plutocrats."

Interesting though, that Gore did worse among white men than Obama did in 2008. Does that mean that some white men voted against Palin?

Women vote in larger numbers than men, and while more white women voted for Romney than for President Obama, white men voted for Romney by a much wider margin. White voters provided such a large proportion of Romney's votes that the thing can be apportion without too much reference to non-white voters. Close to thirty of his points is a good enough approximation; if I were to actually bother with pencil and paper I would expect something between twenty-five and thirty, which the last time one of my grandsons brought me his homework in arithmetic would round up to thirty.

You are in the uncomfortable position of trying to present a minority behavior as having similar or greater weight than a majority behavior. It is not really a sustainable endeavor. No one denies a good many white people do not vote for Republicans. I am one white man who does not vote for Republicans myself. But it is a simple matter of observable fact that most white people do vote Republican, and it is an observable fact that this trend began with the shifting of white votes in the South to Goldwater in '64 because he voted against the Civil Rights Act, and continued down the years with Nixon's 'Southern Strategy' and a calculated Republican campaign of appealing to whites holding racial animus against blacks which continues to this day. Appeal to racial animus among whites, albeit in more coded and oblique forms now than formerly, remains the principal means by which the Republican party manages to sustain some mass following among the electorate as a whole.

this very subthread was began by an assertion that democrats were enraging "white males". Not SOME white males. Not a majority of white males. But white males, full stop.

My position, which I am not at all uncomfortable with is that supporters of democrats need to stop pretending like white males are the enemy. When, in actual fact, white males are a very large, very important part of our coalition.

As for the shift in the south. It ought to be an uncomfortable fact of history as to why southern white males voted for Democrats for all those years.

And Carter won most southern states in 1976 and Reagan in 1980 won such former confederate states as New York, Maine, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Oregon, Washington, Wisconsin and Michigan. Look at that "southern strategy" go. It just ain't all about race, much as that has become the favorite trump card of the left.

You may swim in it all you like, though, without further bother from me, save for a note that the shade eau de Nil is one I am fond of, though I suspect it is seldom actually the color the Nile's water presents....

They thought they were equal to the CEOs, golf buddies, whatever. Then they got their hats handed to them, with their heads still in the hats.

And since the union leadership simultaneously kissed off their members while kissing up to the CEOs and the Politicians, the unions collapsed. There was no point in paying all those dues to be betrayed to management's every ploy by these wannabe elitests.

And the CEO's exported the jobs, and Reagan fired PATCO, and the world was destroyed but not remade.

Union mismanagement, I should say.

You really make the Left sound like a bunch of idiots dreaming about rainbows. Maybe in your world....not mine.

Partly because corporate pressure on what remains of industrial unions leaves them nowhere but left to go, and partly because a large portion of what unions remain are comprised of government employees of one sort or another, who must oppose a rightist 'small government' line of budget slashing and lay-offs if they are to survive.

But the voting patterns of union households in the '68, and through to '88 at least, were pretty depressing, from a left point of view.

The movement to organize low wage workers today, such as janitorial staffs and fast-food workers, is an encouraging thing. It is something the left is getting involved in, and may well herald a new alignment with a growing class of workers of a new character and attitude towards left economic views.

Democrats running for office on every level for decades.

But in the industrial unions particularly, they cannot deliver the votes of their members at anything like the proportions they ought to be able to do.

It is a simple fact that if only white people voted, Republicans, the right wing, would hold damned near every office in the land, and it is working class whites who have been key to this unfortunate situation.

Public schools being still the leading employer.

you just don't include them and their actions in your descriptions of the past few decades.

In reading through popular or introductory writings on them, I have sometimes found myself distressed or dismayed that this or that detail or element of the thing was slighted, or even omitted, and wished the author had weighted his piece differently, or included something, or otherwise done it differently. I have also had occasion to try and explain things I am very interested in and knowledgeable concerning, to people who know little or nothing about them. The latter experience has left me much less likely to take great umbrage at 'mistakes' or 'omissions' in popular or introductory materials by others. Getting something short and sweet, getting the essential in and available at a quick read, moving things on a direct rout without sidetracks or elaborations that could break the pace and flow; this is a serious trick and a high art, a skill all its own. I expect I could write something which left nothing out, but it would take some years, and probably would not convey the essential elements I wished to present so clearly.

"I regret the length of this letter, but had not time to write a short one."

--the Reagan Era was the WW2 generation's revenge on those hippies who had led their children astray...taught them to avoid being big consumers and not cut their hair.

But it turned out to be a very ugly legacy to leave their own children. Anyone who thinks the boomers have had it easy since Reagan is nuts.

And now...

Time for the pendulum to swing the other way. But much damage has been done.

A lot of young people who ranged themselves on the left took their family issues and generalized them into a political world-view, which, to put it kindly, left a good deal out of consideration.

A truly messy break-up is never the fault of one side only.

I think you can always blame older people more than the young. The older generation has lived longer and should know better. The younger generation SHOULD be idealistic and hell bent to make changes for their future. And forgiven for their lack of world-savvy.

A "correction" of youthful overreach is one thing--but I think the Boomers were literally trampled by the WW2 generation's vengeance--by the Poppy Bushes and co., to put it simplistically--on those "hippies" who had alienated their children. In reality not many Boomers really met the full definition of marijuana-smoking communist hippie. It was more like the insane fear of Terrorists behind every bush. And the biggest fear by the Corporates was that the Boomer generation would not participate in worshipping the God of Consumerism. They wanted controls on the MIC after Vietnam & Nixon. And they wanted controls on industry to benefit the environment--cannot have that!

The rebellious young of the 60's & 70's were slapped down hard in the 80's and schooled in the power of the corporate state that they rightly feared. It was the biggest generational rift in history and the parents were going to return the world to the safety of old fashioned conservatism (not realizing that a new & much more dangerous conservatism was on the rise). The Clinton era was the only time of an upswing in hope and hard-won gains. If Gore had been accorded his rightful office...

and the Boomers remembered the assassinations.

"The rebellious young of the 60's & 70's were slapped down hard in the 80's and schooled in the power of the corporate state that they rightly feared."

http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2010/12/20/baby-boomers-approach-65-glumly/

and the implications of the crash of 2008 = the main reason for the country's glumness (which I would call full-blown depression). Let's place blame where it belongs.

The Boomers have it harder than their parents (plus are often taking CARE of their parents). Their retirement years will be nothing like those of their parents. Meanwhile their young adult kids are struggling in the job market and even moving back home. I see it all around me.

The Boomer "glumness" has very good reasons. As for 2010 elections, you have to look at other variables such as redistricting, the RethugliCon Tea Party tactics and the fact that liberal voters were disaffected.

Go Gen X and Millennials. Liberal Boomers are with you.

a depression was called a Depression, not a Recovery.

Except for all the advantages of the times available to them. They just tuned out.

And raised a generation of youth that now are bringing the change the Boomers didn't deliver.

This all started in California with Prop 13 and the vicious classism you refer to.

As a blue collar white man that stayed Dem right through it all, I became a kind of vestigal appendage at local caucuses as men like me became a disparaged, old, irrelevant, probably racist , probably animal killing, probably sexist, certainly suspect type of participant.

In reality, all I was was a Democrat who does manual labor for a living. And my calls to avoid hating on the laborers, hunters, motorcycle riders, sports fans etc. fell on deaf ears. There was no need to heed my calls because the theory that manual laborers were scheduled to disappear entirely from the economy was becoming the new Democratic fantasy.

But the Voodoo economics were so clearly aimed at taking us all down- all of us, that I stayed a Dem. Then the Dems fully took up Voodoo economics!

So, Why am I a Dem? Well, I could never tolerate racism, sexism, homophobia. And the political party where so many like me retreated to is a full-on circus of those things.

And. Franklin Roosevelt. A friend to laborers everywhere. My personal hero. My wish for the future.

But I digress......

Both sides contributed mightily to the break-up.

People long ago could run and win the rural white vote in the South on a platform of enmity to big business and thieving corporations....

N/t

ERA, No-Nukes, environmental issues, legalizing pot
(seventies and the eighties are blurred in my memory today . . .

I remember the budget process was pretty firmly in the hands of the Democratic congress which I followed on most of their confrontations of the republican economic agenda (capital gains, welfare cutbacks, Social Security). I thought those were pretty prominent at the time. It could have been my own perspective, though.

There was also a fight to preserve and defend affirmative action; defend small businesses; defend the education department . . .

I always thought our Democratic party back then had the most progressive skin in the game; although, we called ourselves liberals.


my recap of the reganomic years:

Jumping the Dead Reagan
http://election.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=104x1728392

the OP has overlooked the activism of the 70's and 80's. The real split didn't come until after RR.

Is much of anything about labor rights, about increasing wages, about the sort of economic concerns that once were the hall-mark of left activism. And in truth, many of the people who would have benefited from such activities would have denounced leftists working towards them as a dope-smoking layabouts who hate America and all it stands for.

you are massaging a split that you see very distinctly

But do not count on convincing many other people that is the world they live in, or that a real fracture did not occur in the Sixties and seventies, which can be traced to this day in popular expression and entrenched views and voting patterns.

and I didn't say whatever you said.

. . . and it's insistence on keeping economic concerns about opportunity and work at the forefront of their every activism and advocacy.

I do know that many like Bayard Rustin were rebuffed by a racist (at the time) and cliquish white union leadership and membership when he worked to forge alliances that he felt would advance his own peoples potential for economic successes.

I grew up in DC and remember the Tent City and the Poor Peoples campaign. I remember the economic issues underlying the fight for the ERA and for Affirmative Action. I remember Dr. Kings insistence that there be actual legislation to provide jobs with a living wage.

I'm not sure about white liberals, but, blacks during that time were all about opportunity and jobs. Most of my father's rise in the military and in government grew out of the civil rights movement at the time and Kennedy and Johnson's executive orders and the Civil Rights Act which ushered in a new era of employment prospects in government and elsewhere.

Always inherent to the Civil Rights struggle was improvement of the economic condition of black people, black poverty being in large part enforced by the regime of white supremacy established in law at the south, and on the wink and nod elsewhere. That is one of the elements in the situation which turned working class whites from the left; to the degree the left was perceived as working for black improvement, it was seen by many white working class people as working against them.

I would not argue against a sub-division setting a 'white left' category at the time. Certainly there were numerous schisms, and certainly a good many white leftists were put off by the Black Power faction. And at bottom, a great proportion of young white leftists never felt much identity with working class whites. 'Hippies' and 'Greasers' did not mix, to put it mildly, and most young people who were brought up in reasonably prosperous circumstances were raised to consider themselves not working class but middle class, and to aspire to professional or managerial or entrepreneurial careers.

. . . in that the civil rights struggle was often framed as an exercise in togetherness - stoutly resisted by many white Americans - to the exclusion of an economic rationale for the protests and other activism. I do note the divide which occurred when the Democrat party assumed the role of a refuge for that particular brand of social engineering.

I recognize that you're not trivializing the motivations behind the very prescient and meaningful protests of the emerging youth; just pointing to the message which was taken from those efforts by many in the white male 'establishment' which centered more on the cosmetics and theater of the protests and protesters, than it did the substance of the arguments made. Maybe that was a flaw of the younger generation, to equate their movements with their individual desire for more free expression.

I hesitate, though, to define that movement of youth from the perspective of the paranoid and chastened generation they were challenging. Point taken on the impetus for their alienation. It all seems even more petty, I think, when considering just how deeply we felt about the things we were advocating - how so much of the freedoms of expression and attitudes of today came out of the social changes that so many youth were pressing for.

The various 'liberation' movements, as the left here switched from economic to cultural matters, certainly were not trivial things, and were aimed at real problems and serious flaws in what young adults in that day had been brought up to believe was a society based on freedom: personal freedom, political freedom, freedom of expression, all rooted in the principle that everyone was equal and had an equal opportunity for success and happiness. In some ways, what happened was another unintended consequence of propaganda against a foe: people raised on the propagandas of the early Cold War, intended to fix clear distinctions between 'Communist dictatorship' and "American freedom', came of age and looked around and saw that the country they actually lived in bore scant resemblance to the utopian prospect they had been raised to believe it was.

. . . at the risk of belaboring your astute and valid impressions of that era.

I think Vietnam was the initial link that our generation made with whatever the Cold Warriors were trying to convey, and, we found both superpowers engaged in a futile and contradictory proxy war there which belied any notion that the weaponry which was touted as our defense had an unassailable relationship with keeping the peace.

'Freedom' for our generation did indeed mean a separation from those flawed motivations of the generation preceding ours in defining our nationalism in terms of our antithesis to rival nations. Freedom meant a separation from the authority which dictated our allegiance to all of that on our behalf, and which demanded fealty to that exclusionary doctrine as a condition of our citizenship.

I remember that our focus was on eschewing the notion that our futures were tied to an economic track which promised a sort of indoctrination into a cadre of authoritarians. The dearth of focus on economic issues likely had a great deal to do with a disillusionment with the power structures themselves, who, some felt, could not be trusted to provide opportunity or successes which fell outside of their own realm of influence.

There was a lot of effort to establish separate communities and collective enterprises which aspired to transcend the traditional economic structures and provide for a more equitable distribution of wealth. Much of the collapse of that ideal came from the eventual intrusion of everyday problems and concerns about sustaining one form of escape from the establishment or the other.

Many drop-outs from society were compelled by economic realities to drop back in. Still, there was much gained from that pulling away as elements of that independent and innovative spirit were meshed with other more traditional economic visions. I think we see a lot of that reasoning in our modern labor movements today.

DULink: http://www.democraticunderground.com/10023685924

Partial to this one, myself....

and bit the recipient before he realized he'd been had.

Good choice.

Accurate, too.

Which we will see in 2014, if not 2016. Until the "hippies" and "Archie Bunkers" see that their lot is the same, we are doomed.

I feel like an idiot for having trusted the man and not verified his policies. The policies live on. In California there's hardly a building or road that you can escape without seeing his name attached. His real action on preserving Social Security pacified me for some time. But now that the very wealthiest have bought the government, and his policies are in full bloom, I can only offer my deepest apologies for my 2 votes. (80 & 84)

The Powell Manifesto is the blind elephant that dropped its dung on our democratic experiment. As for the "white working class" they understood perfectly well that those New Deal benefits had been designed primarily for them, the "them' being white blue collar men.
Too appease the South, African-Americans were paid at lower wages, refused mortgages in better (white) areas and mostly excluded from Social Security benefits. Women in the workforce were still largely invisible. It was the Voting Rights Act that began to change all that and the backlash is ongoing.

The degree to which the New Deal incorporated elements of Jim Crow is little remarked, and while it was a political necessity in the time, it should not be overlooked or forgotten.

Voting rights for African-Americans was indeed the flash-point.

Here are a couple of things I wrote a while back that I think apt here:

"Most expressions of support for 'other demographics' are not framed as 'implicit and frequently explicit attack on white men': many white men past a certain age, particularly in rural and southern locales, take them as 'explicit attack on white men' because they understand they do occupy, and feel entitled to occupy, a position of inherent superiority in a caste system of race and gender, which they cling to for solace against other unpleasant and disappointing facts of their lives. So long as they continue to draw much of their sense of self-worth from this caste superiority, it will not be possible for anyone to frame 'support for other demographics' in a way that such people will not take as 'implicit and frequently explicit attack on white men', because by their lights, that is exactly what 'support for other demographics' is, and from their point of view, they are quite accurate in seeing that to be so. It is not, in other words, a problem that can be fixed, at least on the terms stated. You are essentially suggesting that people be sure their complaints concerning being treated as inferiors be couched in terms that will not ruffle the feathers of those who feel themselves superior to them.

'When you've grown up preached to daily that the country is the paragon of freedom, the bastion of Christianity, and the unchallenged leader in all metrics of good and right, and that it is the white male's bounden duty as the privileged holder of the reins of power to keep it so, much of the message that it is guilty of enormous wrongdoing, lagging behand in basic humanity, and laughably naive theologically, however true, will not win your hearts and minds.' The problem is that the people we are discussing actually do believe this, and yet to all appearances are fully grown adults, often with grey heads and beards, and a person who can reach adult stature, even an elder's state, and still believe this labors under serious moral and mental deficiencies. They not only live in a state of profound delusion, they require it as an essential prop to their image of themselves and their place in the world. You might as well try and convince a person laboring under paranoiac delusion that the world really is not plotting against him: he knows damned well it is, and takes a certain satisfaction from the prominence this entails, and the best you will manage is to convince him you are an especially oily servant of the great Combine dedicated to his downfall. "

But surely. That it infects primarily those of my age or older (52).

I see many signs that younger generations are increasingly comfortable with women and minorities and gays and lesbians occupying positions of power.

Maybe I am mistaken but that is what I see around me and it is a hope I cling to desperately.

The attitudes are becoming increasingly less common in the young.

There may even be a bit of a resurgence of a clear attitude towards the excesses of business and bosses among the younger people, at least if some recent surveys are to be taken seriously.

unfortunately, I possess a single x chromosome. To return to your previous allusion, I would suggest that rather than a "marriage" the engagement between the intellectual "left" and the blue collar whites was a convenient fling. To get the God-fearing white American raised (necessarily) to believe in his Manifest Destiny to join the 'godless socialist' at the altar would have required a bloodletting sufficient to purge the country's original sins. Perhaps, one hopes, after 7 enlightened generations.

If it was a fling, it was a long one, since it can be traced back into the nineteenth century.

On the other hand, a good deal we now associate with the left was not, back then, considered to be in the mainstream of the left. Not that you could not find left voices speaking for racial equality and women's rights, and even for an end to persecution of homosexuals, a century ago, but such positions were taken as being on the left's fringe, even by most leftists.

Racial equality inched its way into a mainstream position on the left here starting in the twenties, largely as a by-product of anti-colonialist agitation, which became a major line for leftists around the world in the early Soviet period.

That the Civil Rights struggle could gain wide support in the fifties and sixties was also a sort of by-product, a lingering and unintended effect of war-time propagandas against the Nazi 'Aryan Master Race' ideology --- that was just too close to Jim Crow at home for many to remain entirely comfortable with it.

Race had always been a central sticking point. In fact I would suggest that the left failed precisely because of it. Read up on Eugene Debs and the Pullman Porters. I also recommend Foner's American Socialism and Black Americans. You might familiarize yourself with Hubert Harrison and W.E.B. Dubois. Inasmuch as there was "left" there were African Americans and women right in the forefront. Upton Sinclair nonwithstanding.

But the main channels are what they are. Whites organized for themselves, more or less, and were numerically predominant. Feelings of white supremacy sat easily with opposition to capitalism in many white workers. There is no point in pretending blacks were the face or the sinew of left activity in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century in this country.

I was correcting your suggestion that civil rights was a not an issue and whether or not that contention contributed to the estrangement of the white working class from the "Left". Nowhere have I suggested that the Socialists or the AFL-CIO were overly concerned with the "negro". That does not mean it was not an hotly debated issue.

Are you stating that there was no estrangement between the white working class and the left in this country, occurring in the sixties and seventies during and just after the high point of the Civil Rights movement?

Are you stating that the anti-colonialist line which became a major focus of left activity and thought after the First World War did not have an effect on left attitudes concerning matters of race domestically?

the majority of the white working class was always at odds with the intellectual left on the "Negro Question". It was not a matter of the left-leadership being pro civil rights, it was largely not. The concern was whether the labor movement could afford to ignore a significant portion of the labor force. African Americans insisted that their civil rights be part of the deal and that's where the rank and file drew the line. (For many proud union member the term Socialism meant "race mixing'.) When President Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act all those submerged white fears were made manifest. That the civil rights movement was now on their T.V.'s made it all the more palpable.

It may even be that I consider the intellectual left placed less importance on the "Negro Question" than you think it did in the earlier periods we are discussing.

I agree completely that the racial divide was always there. Intellectual left leadership tried pretty hard to ignore it, and in fairness the portion of left intellectual leadership here in those days which was foreign born may not have appreciated quite how endemic to this country that divide was. To return to the original metaphore for a moment, as in many marriages, important differences and difficulties can be papered over or looked away from for quite some time --- until some incident makes doing so any longer impossible for one or both parties.

I will remain of the view that the wide left focus on anti-colonialism after WWI did have significant effect on intellectual left attitudes towards race questions here. Anti-Colonialism made great play with the color bar which was so prominent a feature of African and Asian imperial possessions, and the United States was unique among developed countries of the day in having an 'internal color bar' enforced by law in a section of the country.

I remain of the view as well that lingering and largely unintended after-effects of propagandizing against Nazi doctrines of Aryan supremacy during the Second World War had a great effect on the social and political climate in which the Civil Rights movement operated in the fifties and sixties, and were very beneficial to it.

the romance that the "mainstream" left was persuaded by anti-colonial sentiment and not home grown activism, I shall leave you with this:
In 1913 Oklahoma Democrats attempted to institute a poll tax similar to the one in Texas that severely restricted the negro vote. (sound familiar) In response the the Socialist Party joined with the Republicans to force its defeat. In the following year's general election they continued their campaign to restore black suffrage and in 1915 the Supreme Court ruled in their favor. But in the recurring theme of American history the victory only engendered a fiercer backlash that saw the Oklahoman Negro disenfranchised entirely.

The defeated attempt was led by one Oscar Ameringer considered the 'Mark Twain' of American Socialism. I'll give him the last word:

"The Socialists will vote to a man against disfranchisement of any section of the working class, be he white, black, yellow or red. If this stand will earn us the usual title 'nigger lover,' then be it so."

Something had to give and the revolution was messy. We are still fighting those same battles and, hopefully, a new generation of skeptics and activists is rising to ask and demand answers to the hard questions.

state of being. The stupid, it gets old.

A state of being abused by pompous windbags.

This white working class woman did not vote for that "old actor." In fact, I hated him.

. . . and that is your minimization of social justice issues as being mere "lifestyle questions." But you are correct that a split took place, and affects us even to this day.

At the time, liberation movements aimed to bring people freer, more individual life-styles.

"liberation movements"

To evoke the period, one can employ the language of the period in quotes from people of the period, but to use it as the author's voice is a choice that will make you, the author, seem backward at best and bigoted at worst. There are many terminologies that were once freely used by unchecked bigots that are now not acceptable. The term 'lifestyle' to describe people being gay is offensive in the here and now.

The term 'life-style', as employed in the early seventies on the left, took in a very wide range of things, of which sexual orientation was but a single strand. The idea was that people should be free to choose the 'style' in which they lived, viewing one's life as, so to speak, a work of art, with 'style' in the compound 'life-style' conveying the same sense one would take from speaking of the style of a painter or a writer or a musician.

And that is nice verbiage but it does not really fit the facts of how movement people actually spoke. It is your opinion, not reality. You want to hold tight to crappy terminology, that's your choice. Which is why I did not ask you to correct it, I simply pointed out that being gay is not a lifestyle no matter how many times straight folks use the term, just as I am man no matter how many times you call me 'ma'am' by 'accident'.
Being a pompous windbag is a style, being gay is a state of being one is born to. Style is learned, being in inherent.
I posted some quotes and a link to Harvey Milk quotes to show others what the 'movement' was actually saying back then about things.
“The only thing they have to look forward to is hope. And you have to give them hope. Hope for a better world, hope for a better tomorrow, hope for a better place to come to if the pressures at home are too great. Hope that all will be all right. Without hope, not only gays, but the blacks, the seniors, the handicapped, the us'es, the us'es will give up. And if you help elect to the central committee and other offices, more gay people, that gives a green light to all who feel disenfranchised, a green light to move forward. It means hope to a nation that has given up, because if a gay person makes it, the doors are open to everyone.

So if there is a message I have to give, it is that if I've found one overriding thing about my personal election, it's the fact that if a gay person can be elected, it's a green light. And you and you and you, you have to give people hope....”
― Harvey Milk

“Let me have my tax money go for my protection and not for my prosecution. Let my tax money go for the protection of me. Protect my home, protect my streets, protect my car, protect my life, protect my property...worry about becoming a human being and not about how you can prevent others from enjoying their lives because of your own inability to adjust to life.”
― Harvey Milk

And there was a good deal more to the time, and its common usages, than Gay Liberation.

leaders actually spoke in that time, which was not about lifestyles at all. Not at all.
"“Gay brothers and sisters,... You must come out. Come out... to your parents... I know that it is hard and will hurt them but think about how they will hurt you in the voting booth! Come out to your relatives... come out to your friends... if indeed they are your friends. Come out to your neighbors... to your fellow workers... to the people who work where you eat and shop... come out only to the people you know, and who know you. Not to anyone else. But once and for all, break down the myths, destroy the lies and distortions. For your sake. For their sake. For the sake of the youngsters who are becoming scared by the votes from Dade to Eugene.”
― Harvey Milk
“Let's make no mistake about this: The American Dream starts with the neighborhoods. If we wish to rebuild our cities, we must first rebuild our neighborhoods. And to do that, we must understand that the quality of life is more important than the standard of living. To sit on the front steps--whether it's a veranda in a small town or a concrete stoop in a big city--and to talk to our neighborhoods is infinitely more important than to huddle on the living-room lounger and watch a make-believe world in not-quite living color."
http://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/3450036.Harvey_Milk

red states. I believe all three of them and some more were voted out in 1980 the same horrible, horrible night Ronald Reagan was elected. I would say that these unabashedly liberal lions in socially conservative western states built their base as people who looked out for the interest of their state. But what confounds me is that people from those states were just as socially conservative if not more so years earlier when they voted them in - in the first place and reelected them any number of times. I suppose it was the rise of the religious right at the end of the 70's along with elements of tax revolt echoing from California's Prop 13 - that might have altered the political map.

People like Senator Taylor of Idaho, elected in 1944.

refocused it on social issues. Most of those western liberal titans were certainly socially liberal by the standards of the geographic areas from where they hailed. For some reason in the 60's and early 70's the boys down at the vets club were willing to elect and reelect congressmen and senators who opposed the Vietnam war and supported school busing to achieve immigration even if this was not their beliefs. Then for some reason - from the late 70's/ early 80's on - they in mass were only willing to support the candidates who reaffirmed their socially conservative views.

Our house is burning down



What happens when you get stuck
Get to the bottom of the illusion that you're in
From the roots now it's shook up
Know that what ails without will do you in

Well off my usual path; I would not have seen or heard it otherwise.

Thank you.

Rec

Glad you got a look at it.

hell just froze over.

KnR. I will return later in the day to view developments.

Glad you got a look in on it.

I salute you.

Thank You.

One important one was between white-collar, mostly non-union workers and blue-collar, frequently union workers. The white-collar workers usually felt superior to the blue-collar types, although there might be little difference in salaries during the height of unionization in America.

I know, I was a white-collar computer programmer for a company that employed both. We paid for our assumption of superiority when the companies started outsourcing our jobs in the late 80s. I actually managed to hold on to my position until 2005 (I got a chance at another year of employment as a contract programmer, no benefits, later.)

We could have used a union. We should have maintained solidarity with our blue-collar brothers and sisters.

You started a useful dialogue, Sir. Well done!

More on this later, but now im off to bed

And yes, this is what Hillary Clinton was referring to as the vast right wing conspiracy.

From the History News Network's site, a 2003 article by Dave Johnson :

http://www.hnn.us/article/1244

In 1971 the National Chamber of Commerce circulated a memo by future Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell among business leaders which claimed that "the American economic system" of business and free markets was "under broad attack" by "Communists, New Leftists and other revolutionaries who would destroy the entire system, both political and economic." Powell argued that those engaged in this attack come from "the college campus, the pulpit, the media, the intellectual and literary journals, the arts and sciences, and from politicians."

According to the Powell memo, the key to solving this problem was to get business people to "confront this problem as a primary responsibility of corporate management" by building organizations that will use "careful long-range planning and implementation, in consistency of action over an indefinite period of years, in the scale of financing only available in joint effort, and in the political power available only through united action and national organizations." It helped immeasurably, Powell noted, that the boards of trustees of universities "overwhelmingly are composed of men and women who are leaders in the system," and that most of the media "are owned and theoretically controlled by corporations which depend upon profits, and the free enterprise system to survive."


-snip-

In 1973, in response to the Powell memo, Joseph Coors and Christian-right leader Paul Weyrich founded the Heritage Foundation. Coors told Lee Edwards, historian of the Heritage Foundation, that the Powell memo persuaded him that American business was "ignoring a crisis." In response, Coors decided to help provide the seed funding for the creation of what was to become the Heritage Foundation, giving $250,000.(1)

Subsequently, the Olin Foundation, under the direction of its president, former Treasury Secretary William Simon (author of the influential 1979 book A Time for Truth), began funding similar organizations in concert with "the Four Sisters"--Richard Mellon Scaife's various foundations, the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, the Olin Foundation and the Smith Richardson Foundation--along with Coors's foundations, foundations associated with the Koch oil family, and a group of large corporations. (In this article, I will refer to this group of funders as the "Four Sisters Funding Group" or FSFG.)

-snip-

Now, after 30 years of effort, this core FSFG has built a comprehensive ideological infrastructure. There are now over 500 organizations, with the Heritage Foundation at the hub, all funded by this core group. David Callahan's 1999 study, $1 Billion for Ideas: Conservative Think Tanks in the 1990s, found that just the top 20 of the organizations spent over $1 billion on this ideological effort in the 1990s.

-snip-

Johnson quotes a 1996 study from People for the American Way, "BUYING A
MOVEMENT: Right-Wing Foundations and American Politics."

http://www.pfaw.org/sites/default/files/buyingamovement.pdf

The result of this comprehensive and yet largely invisible funding strategy is an
extraordinary amplification of the far right’s views on a range of issues. The various
funding recipients do not march in ideological lock-step, but they do promote many of the
same issues to their respective audiences. They have thus been able to keep alive in the
public debate a variety of policy ideas long ago discredited or discarded by the
mainstream. That, in turn, has been of enormous value in the right’s ongoing effort to
reshape American society. The success of the right-wing efforts are seen at every level of
government, as a vast armada of foundation-funded right-wing organizations has both fed
and capitalized on the current swing to the right in Congress and in the state legislatures.

Emphasis added.

That study was nearly 20 years ago, and the effect of right-wing media, combined with the effect of organizations such as ALEC

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=439x591230

only intensified since then.

There's been a very well-funded wrecking ball behind that wreckage.