The Weiner Problem is a bigger problem (no pun intended) than one man's sick folly: It is a metaphor for a whole post-60s generation of American progressives that became more interested in winning culture war battles and fucking around personally than in the traditional lefty agenda of unions, organizing, workers, change, political voting rights, and a fair economy.
There was a time when the Left was all about jobs, unions, working men and woman, racial equality and protection of civil liberties, not to mention protection of children, fairness and progressive tax codes, regulation of business, worker safety and -- of course -- a commitment to the Democratic Party.
Then the Left became all about sex and greed, right along with the rest of American corporate "culture."
Yes, this is a generalization. Yes, as Rachel Maddow says -- it's also "punching the hippie." But it's also true.
As Chris Hedges points out in his important book Death of the Liberal Class, the Left went inward in the 1960s. After the American Left became involved with legalizing abortion, gay rights, women's rights, as in reproductive rights, the cool thing to do was to embrace one form or another of sexual liberation, gender issues, etc., as the new lefty agenda.
Don't get me wrong: I believe in abortion rights and gay rights. But I don't believe in the Left's allowing sexual liberation to trump every other concern as a priority.
Hedges writes:
"Those who chase the glittering rainbows of the consumer society, who buy into the perverted ideology of consumer culture, become, as Dante knew, moral cowards. They are indoctrinated by our corporate systems of information and remain passive as our legislative, executive and judicial branches of government--tools of the corporate state--strip us of the capacity to resist. Democrat or Republican. Liberal or conservative. It makes no difference. ...We must defy the cant of consumer culture and recover the primacy in our lives of mercy and justice."
The sexual selfishness of the New Left and their self-involvement didn't play well with the old union types, replete with their dismissal (for instance in 1968 in Chicago) of the New Left, as a "bunch of fags" (to quote one union boss) and or a "bunch of communists" (to quote another union boss). Yes, the old back room boys were a bunch of homophobes, misogynist Neanderthals. They also had pushed the Democratic Party to ban child labor, keep workers' wages high, curb the uglier side of capitalism.
As Kevin Drum writes in a very important article in the Mother Jones:
"By the end of the '60s,... New Left activists derided union bosses as just another tired bunch of white, establishment Cold War fossils, and as a result, the rupture of the Democratic Party that started in Chicago in 1968 became irrevocable in Miami Beach four years later. Labor leaders assumed that the hippies, who had been no match for either Richard Daley's cops or establishment control of the nominating rules, posed no real threat to their continued dominance of the party machinery...
Why does this matter?... Over the past 40 years, the American left has built an enormous institutional infrastructure dedicated to mobilizing money, votes, and public opinion on social issues, and this has paid off with huge strides in civil rights, feminism, gay rights, environmental policy, and more. But the past two years have demonstrated that that isn't enough. If the left ever wants to regain the vigor that powered earlier eras of liberal reform, it needs to rebuild the infrastructure of economic populism that we've ignored for too long. Figuring out how to do that is the central task of the new decade."
As for all those "draft-dodging hippies," (as the old union types thought of them) they more or less dropped out of traditional American politics when it came to unions, workers rights, fair pay issues and stuck to themes of personal -- mostly sexual-- liberation. Fucking (and/or abortion rights, no fault divorce etc.,) was just so much more interesting than the growing gap between the super rich and everyone else.
Enter the living embodiment of the 1960s, Bill Clinton, and today's "Clinton," Anthony Weiner. Then there's John Edwards. They follow in a long line of liberals more interested in fucking than governing, with the granddad of them all being Edward Kennedy.
Sure the ever-more-disgusting "family values" Right has done the same thing, (I just wrote a whole book Sex, Mom and God about the Right's sexual hypocritical games.) talked values but then done whoever is nearby. But just Dominique Strauss-Kahn betrayed the French socialists, what Weiner has done is to not just betray himself or his party but to vote with his penis for a "lefty" agenda that is more about selfishness than anyone's rights, much less the good of the working people of America.
The point being Weiner let his people down, and that is the only point, not the "morality" of what he did. In politics you play by the rules and don't crap and eat in the same place.
Chris Hedges is correct: the "liberals" and the American Left have been betrayed by people more interested in selling out to corporate America (who have been busy selling sex to us, and sexualized all selling) than in workers rights or the economy.
Like the French that, in the name of progressive liberation and open-mindedness, wink and lousy male sexual predatory behavior, the American Left should now start to take sexual scandal seriously as betrayal of a bigger agenda. The American Left should also consider the lost war for workers rights in view of the culture battles they have won.
The Left won the culture wars. Porn is everywhere, and fucking is deregulated. But so is Wall Street.
Maybe it's time to re-regulate Wall Street and the banks, and reintroduce something shocking to progressive sensibilities -- a few taboos.
For instance, maybe it isn't cool to seek sexual pleasure outside of an intimate, loving grown up relationship. And even if it's okay to screw around, maybe it's time to pay more attention to electing mature adults more interested in the larger progressive agenda -- say how do we stop the top 1 percent of the wealthy from clinging to more wealth than the bottom 80 percent of the population -- than in the "right" to personal sexual selfishness.
Frank Schaeffer is a writer. His new book is Sex, Mom, and God: How the Bible's Strange Take on Sex Led to Crazy Politics--and How I Learned to Love Women (and Jesus) Anyway
Follow Frank Schaeffer on Twitter: www.twitter.com/frank_schaeffer
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Again, you are spot on, here. Thank you, as always for such insight. I'll say it again: you are a true visionary, I don't care what anyone says. And by the way, I just finished Chris Hedges book, "Death of the Liberal Class," and I was blown away.
Both the left and the right have sold 80 percent of us out. Of course, the left allowed it to happen, by falling under the spell, just as, unfortunately, our president has, of the rich, the power elite and corporations. The liberal class was a chance at real change, but they allowed Washington to make short work of that change. Even President Obama's own party let him down, tremendously.
It really doesn't matter anymore whether people are Republican, Democrat, Independent, Tea Party, conservative, liberal. It doesn't even matter anymore who's president. We've all, including our president been had!
Off topic here, I have your book "Crazy for God," and I love your story. I wish I could sit you down and share with you my journey, as a former 'crazy' evangelical, who now considers himself to be in religious exile. Notice I said 'religious' exile . . . not exile from God.
Sex outside of the marriage bed was happening, probably just as often, it just wasn't reported, partly because a different decorum existed(a decorum which did not sell enough news to make it profitable) , partly because it was just harder -- a camera wasn't something you could hide in your back pocket. The biggest factor: we have 24 hours of cable time and thousands of web pages to fill. Take a look at what qualifies for news on the Huffington Post. Compared to much of it, the Weiner story is quite substantive.
The behavior of the union bosses also changed quite a bit when the power and money came their way. They were often as bad as the corporate titans they were organizing against. Jimmy Hoffa was no Walter Reuther.
Finally, part of the reason the Dem's became more corporate is that the population did as well. When they go populist, they often are defeated, dismissed as class warriors. The public is of two minds: they want their wages to rise, but they also want their 401K's to earn that 10 %. The two are not always compatible. Perhaps this will change , but the 2010 elections tell me that we still are of two minds.
What Frank is saying is important, and I would hate for people to miss what he's saying, by - and here goes another cliche - throwing the baby out with the bath water.
So folks, be free, allow others to be free, and stop trippin'!
That being said, what happened in the sixties was perverted in the 70s. "Free love" and healthy experimentation became depersonalized love, wearing jeans as a symbol of solidarity with working people turned into "designer jeans" to make one feel superior, and the Love Generation turned into the Me Generation. "If it feels good, do it" may have sounded good at one point, but sometimes it feels good (at least temporarily) to cheat on one's spouse, or cheat on your taxes or steal from your company, and rationalizing doesn't make it right.
If JFK were alive today and said "Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country", he'd be laughed off the stage. And that's sad.
Mike Vogel
www.newyorkgritty.net
While I enjoyed the fairly long interview I read regarding his new book, Schaeffer's, and liked what I heard -- an interesting and thoughtful person talking about the real arc of change in a soul -- the conclusion of this article is flabbergastingly short-sighted.
So, under this rubric, we don't hire, say.. FDR? Can't do that. He's one of those 'immature ones." And speaking of which, forget JFK. Maybe forget anyone with initials only, though LBJ never was tied to anyone followed around as he was by those two gigantic ears of his.
Let's go back a bit. Thomas Jefferson?
He's out.
You get my drift.
"Not only does the old left of the 60's as he said, care more now about copulation than fair play in wages, or capital redistribution along equitable lines, or any labor concerns, but there's another group also contributing to Democratic long-term downfall-itis.
I guess Sex though, is a good trait to identify....." u.s.w.
my apologies
It's a good trait to identify, because have you noticed that everyone in the entire world does it, and according to several and one in particular famous psychologist named Freud, we are a little preoccupied with it as well (who knew!).
Anyway, the author got it wrong.
The crowd that really abandoned the principles of fair pay, capital concentration inequalities, labor, were...The Eaters!
Yes, The Eaters! We haven't had a good one in there now since Tip O'Neill. And those of us who remember, remember the rotund that was Tip. Ah, those were the days.
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Such sentimentalism, in strange form, to match your author...alas.
This is too funny.
Vietnam.
In his passionate invective directed at 60s liberalism, with its concommittant rejection of union bosses and traditional Democratic party pols, he is standing on the side of the Democratic party that supported Vietnam and hated the Chicago demonstrators. It bears repeating that George Meany was a strong supporter both of Nixon and the Vietnam war, and that the union movement in this country strongly opposed McGovern's nomination and didn't lift a finger for him in 72.
Some of us may have forgotten that. But I can assure Mr. Schaeffer that I haven't.
What I got out of it was Schaeffer's exasperation with the Left's culture war, which actually did hurt our common cause for decades.
You've cherry-picked your information to "prove" that unionists are reactionaries -- which just isn't so. Perhaps you'll also remember the "Hard Hats". They were portrayed as anti-hippie blue-collar workers, but nearly all of them were simply pretending to be union men. It was a cynical, classist, divide-and-conquer move, and it worked well -- 40 years well.
There should be no question among Progressives that we are all created equal, hippies and . If we want to win, we will leave the "lifestyle revolutions" to the Right.
Not everything is about football-team logic, where the only ideas you'll accept are the ones that will cause "your team" to "win."
The stakes are too high for stereotypes and simplistic thinking. We could potentially lose the life of the mind and our most basic human values, values that have been hard won ever since Dickens wrote of the conditions in England or ever since Thomas Jefferson wrote that no one should have to suffer intolerable rule.
The stakes, let me repeat, are TOO HIGH for all this bickering between factions that James Madison warned against.
It seems "we will protect you from the crooked timber of human nature" is bipartisan now.