Obama’s Boys of Summer
Klonsky, whose disgust for mainstream politics led him to launch a new, Maoist Communist Party in the 1970s, today supports Barack Obama so enthusiastically that until recently he was blogging on the Illinois senator’s campaign website. And boycotting this November’s election, Klonsky maintains, would be a “tragic mistake.” He notes that Barack Obama isn’t Hubert Humphrey, 2008 isn’t 1968, and the strong movement he served back then is “relatively weak” now. “My own support for Obama is not a reflection of a radically changed attitude toward the Democratic Party,” Klonsky recently explained to me. “Rather, it’s a recognition that the Obama campaign has become a rallying point for young activists and offers hope for rebuilding the civil rights and antiwar coalitions that have potential to become a real critical force in society.”
Michael Klonsky is hardly the only ’68 radical supporting Obama this year. In 1968, when Mark Rudd organized the student strike that shut down Columbia University, the SDS chapter that he chaired ridiculed Kennedy and McCarthy as “McKennedy,” claimed that “neither peace candidate offers an alternative to the war policies of Lyndon Johnson,” and suggested “sabotage” as an alternative to voting. Rudd succeeded Klonsky as national SDS leader, presiding over the organization’s metamorphosis into Weatherman and performing “a liaison function” for the plot to bomb a Fort Dix soldiers’ dance that instead killed three Weathermen, including two of Rudd’s Columbia SDS colleagues. Today, Rudd renounces bombs, embraces ballots—and supports Obama. “Probably the biggest difference between Columbia SDS people in 1968 and in 2008 is forty years,” Rudd explained in an e-mail. “Most of us have lived with compromise our whole lives. As kids we were raving idealists who thought that ‘The elections don’t mean shit’ was a slogan that meant something to somebody. It didn’t.”
Then there’s Carl Davidson, who was one of SDS’s three elected national officers in 1968, when the organization first urged young people to refrain from voting. His disillusionment with traditional politics became so pronounced that, in the post-sixties hangover that followed, Davidson joined Klonsky in rejecting traditional politics for fringe Marxist movements. More recently, he helped organize the 2002 rally in which Obama first spoke out against the Iraq War and now serves as the webmaster of Progressives for Obama. “The last thing we need is a simple repeat of 1968, which saw Nixon and the new Right as an outcome, as well as the defeat of [Humphrey],” Davidson contends. “One thing I’ve learned. Social change is not made by elections, but it certainly proceeds through them, not by ignoring them or chasing the illusion of end runs around them.”
Former SDS president Tom Hayden is also in the Obama camp. Hayden organized the made-for-TV protest outside the 1968 Chicago convention. But the catharsis of throwing debris at the Chicago police, the purer-than-thou sanctimony that tolerated no distinction between Lyndon Johnson and Eugene McCarthy, and the exhilaration of “voting in the streets” instead of in election booths combined to ensure liberal defeats. Hayden’s orchestrated anarchy proved more damaging to Humphrey’s presidential aspirations than any dirty trick Nixon’s henchmen could have dreamed up. Klonsky remembers Hayden plotting to spread nails on a highway; another SDS leader recalls Hayden encouraging activists to firebomb police cars. If the Democrats couldn’t run a convention, many Americans wondered, how could they run the country? “Did the radicalism of Chicago elect Richard Nixon?” Hayden asked, clearly pained, in his 1988 memoir. “Having struggled with that question for twenty years, I find there is no ‘neat’ answer.”
Now Hayden is one of the organizers of Progressives for Obama. “The difference is that back then the Democratic Party was directly carrying out the Vietnam War, which meant there was no anti-war critic to vote for after Kennedy was assassinated and McCarthy defeated by the establishment,” he offered in an e-mail last month. “Today the Republican Party is directly carrying out the war, which obviously will make a lot of people favor changing the presidency despite the uncertainty of what the Democratic candidate will do when in office.”
Progressives for Obama resembles a Who’s Who of SDS luminaries. In addition to Hayden, Rudd, and Davidson, the group includes Bob Pardun, SDS’s education secretary during the 1966–67 school year; Paul Buhle, a radical professor who has recently attempted to revive SDS; Mickey and Dick Flacks, red-diaper babies who helped craft 1962’s Port Huron Statement, a seminal New Left document; and SDS’s third president, Todd Gitlin. Age and experience have mellowed some of the SDSers in Obama’s camp. Gitlin, for instance, has evolved into a respected Ivy League professor and milquetoast liberal. But others still glory in a past that can only damage Obama’s future. The aging New Left still practices a therapeutic politics that places a higher value on feelings of personal liberation than on restrained pursuit of political aims.
http://sweetness-light.com/archive/whos-who-of-1968-radicals-support-obama
In my earlier life I used to know Mark Rudd. For a period during Junior High school we hung around.