Those of us who lived through the 60′s realize it was a nasty, ugly, selfish abberation, certainly not anything we would like to experience again. Yet, if we do not tie Obama, Hillary, Pelosi and all the rest to it, they get a free pass to portray themselves as “the People’s voice” and the authentic representatives of the general will. That’s exactly how they got elected.

We cannot let them get away with it again — either at election time or now, as they strive mightily to shove every socialist pipedream out there down our throats with the indisputable argumnet that “We Won.”

He**, the budget problems we have now are a direct result of past social “security” type plans. The idea that everyone can be provided for by someone else’s tax money has been discredited long ago. Stacy Foster put it much better than I on M-1Garand.com:

“I talk to people much younger than me who don’t think Socialism was ever a menace. What’s worst, is older people who should know better, but were persuaded by 100 years of socialism in the form of unions, academia, and media/Hollywood influence. People don’t seem to realize that the only thing between today’s liberals and unadulterated socialism is the Republican party. If the liberals in Washington had their way, we would be a socialist state. More so than we already are.
It behooves our generation to bestow vigilance and not progress further down that gauntlet of socialism. We will face crisis and disasters, just as our grandparents and their grandparents did. We must learn from the past. Our past and the past of other nations and remember that socialism has never worked and will never work. It only enslaves the weak and empowers the leaders. It really is evil.

People should wise up and remember the old cliché: “if it walks like a socialist and quacks like a socialist, it’s a liberal.”

–Stacy Foster

These radicals were also never defeated. They cut their hair (a little), put on ties and coats, took advantage of the system they had denounced to make some bread, and just bid their time for a few decades until conditions were right to seize power. The Worst Generation is now in control of the government, large parts of industry, the media, and academia, and Barak Obama is nothing more than a member of Second-Generation Worst Generation. Hence the peril we are now in.

What does it matter what size the cohort was? The shennanigans of the few defined the generation popularly and the contemporary media are now sanitizing its degredations and sainting its’ hooligans. Besides, perception is reality — how do you think we got Obama?

Your next para beginning:
“The radicals, and there were plenty, of the era didn’t spring fully clothed from the forehead of Jupiter.”

Did you read my diary? One of my main themes was that many of these “radicals” were from upper-middle class homes! Although I agree with the notion that a goodly number of the professoriat were morally depraved and inculcated many young minds w/neo-Marxist clap-trap, many of the intellecual forces behind the New Left very nearly did “spring fulled clothed,” at least partially. They were known as red diaper babies.

In Joseph Stromberg’s review of Ronald Radosh’s book “Commies” on LewRockwell.com he lays it out plainly thus:
“The Red Diaper babies, as they were later called, were a pivotal factor in the now-receding Sixties. As Radosh shows, he and his friends grew up in an insular, self-protective, and besieged culture in which everything was politicized and one’s life choices had to do with finding the best way of assisting the triumph of communism in the United States.” Another helpful book you might read is “Radical Son” by David Horowitz. The man’s father was a red communist in Russia. As a child, David spent summers at Camp WoChiCa. (Workers Children’s Camp — clever, huh?) and on an on. He was the founder of the FIRST New Left publication called “Ramparts”.

Your next paragraph which seems to make my point and contradict your own is:
“There was a small, hard core of committed…”

Again, the motivation of avoiding the draft was another of my main points. I also lived through the sixties so I am familiar with the sexual currents at play, but again, so what? And I don’t know how much the “committed lefties hated the hippies” since A) they were mostly hippies themselves and B) the hippies were indeed their foot soldiers, reliable or not, and useful idiots to boot. Besides, you can’t say they were unreliable in one breath and that they showed up by the hundreds of thousands to dodge the draft and get laid in the next. Their numbers dwindled ONLY after the draft was ended.

You last para begins:
“Fundamentally, the college professors and hard core..”

That the New Left as a movement was “organized” by college professors would come as a surprise to Cornell’s President Perkins and other college presidents (and professors) who were taken hostage by armed and angry Black Panthers or the average professors who had to choose between safety, tenure and pension or taking a moral stand against the thugs.

And first you minimize the impact of “the hippies and radicals” as being “a miniscule part of the population,” then end your argument by positing that a tiny subset of that population (doctoral students/parents) ended the war because the parents became frustrated. Sorry, it doesn’t wash.

The war was “unpopular” to begin with and even drove the super ambitious Johnson to refuse running for another term. You seem to forget about Henry Kissinger, the Paris Peace accords, the hostile media (remember “body counts” and all that) an outright traitorous gang of celebrity protesters, e.g. Hanoi Jane, et al. With the release of the Venona Project documents and the secret Venona intercepts, we can read accounts of North Vietnamese Generals who state plainly that the war was lost on the ground (to them) but won in the streets of the USA.

At FreeRepublic.com, Stephen Goode relates that, “[Arnold] Beichman, author of books such as “Anti-American Myths: Their Causes and Consequences”, is talking about the amount of espionage and clandestine activity carried out by American members of the Communist Party in the United States from the time it was founded in 1919 and during the next seven decades. “It’s worse than we ever expected — the extent of it. No one knew.”

Organized? No. Caused interanlly? A qualified yes.

If you consider the enormous size of the teenage and twenty-something demographic cohort in the late ’60s, early ’70s, the hippies and radicals were a miniscule percentage of the population. We’re talking about almost 80 million people born between ’46 and ’64, the usual Boomer cohort, and the most they could ever get anywhere was a few hundred thousand depending on whose numbers you believe.

The radicals, and there were plenty, of the era didn’t spring fully clothed from the forehead of Jupiter. They were mostly very straight, high achieving middle class kids who went to college. Remember in those days colleges still had some admission standards beyond your ability to pay the tuition. Then they met college professors. Even in my small college in Georgia, almost all were liberals and some were out and out Marxists or anarchistic hedonists who thought that an essential part of education was giving 18 year old girls drugs and having sex with them. The Donald Southerland character in Animal House is VERY real and a lot of As were earned horizontally in those days.

There was a small, hard core of committed ideological leftists in the Trotsky/Mao/Alinsky bent that typified American communism. Everyone else was either into the anti-war thing because they didn’t want to be drafted or because big demonstrations and such were a really, really , really – I’m having a flashback here – good place to get laid. The committed Lefties HATED the hippies because the hippies were only into sex, drugs, and general partying and couldn’t be relied upon as foot soldiers in the Revolution.

Fundamentally, the college professors and hard core communists organized the children first around civil rights and then around The War and The Draft, mostly the latter. Ending the draft pretty much ended the anti-war movement and the hard core moved on to other things, notably environmentalism. The real explosion of anti-war sentiment came from the cessation of draft deferment for graduate students. When all those doctoral candidates in their tenth year of working towards that doctorate faced losing their deferment, they became radicalized. More importantly for the res publica, the well-off parents who had been paying for all that education to keep junior out of that nasty old Army and away from Vietnam became radicalized. The Country could have put up with misbehaving children for a very long time but when their parents began to oppose the war, somebody had to do something and Nixon’s Peace With Honor was the answer. Those parents didn’t want to be associated with a preciptous cut and run, but Nixon’s decent interval and the opportunity for junior not to get his little pink ass shot off was very attractive to them.

Anyway, I’ve written a lot about the Sixties here before and there’s not much reason to rehash it. Fundamentally, if you remember the Sixties, you weren’t there.