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The out-of-power right has built a counterculture, just as the left did in the '60s
By Michael Lind
Street theater. Communes. Manifestos. Denunciations of "the system." The counterculture is back. Only this time it's on the right.
Political factions that are out of power have a choice. They can form a counter-establishment or a counterculture. A counter-establishment (a term that Sidney Blumenthal used to describe the neoconservatives in the 1970s) seeks to return to power by reassuring voters that it is sober and responsible. A counter-establishment publishes policy papers and holds conferences and its members endure their exile in think tanks and universities.
In contrast, a counterculture refuses to acknowledge the legitimacy of the rules of the game that it has lost. Instead of moving toward the center, the counterculture heads for the fringes. Like a cult, it creates its own parallel reality, seceding from a corrupt and wicked society into morally and politically pure enclaves.
In response to the long era of Republican presidential hegemony that began with Nixon, many on the American left adopted the countercultural strategy. Some withdrew to raise rabbits and home-school their children in rural America. Other radicals on the left made pilgrimages in search of utopia to this or that illiberal communist dictatorship -- Mao's China, Cuba, Nicaragua.
Many devoured books by Noam Chomsky and the late Howard Zinn, who taught them that Washington and Lincoln and FDR were all capitalist warmongers and that America was the greatest menace to world peace. They cheered on Jesse Jackson as he denounced an insufficiently multicultural curriculum at Stanford, with too many overrated dead white European males (DWEMs) like Aristotle and Dante and Shakespeare on the reading list, by chanting, "Hey, hey, ho, ho, Western Civ has got to go!" Coming at a time when the right was becoming increasingly scholarly and policy-oriented, these antics by the countercultural left backfired by identifying liberalism with the lunatic fringe in the minds of many middle-of-the-road Americans. (It was its association with the countercultural left in the 1960s and '70s that made the word "liberal" so toxic that it has been dropped by the center-left for "progressive"; New Deal liberal programs like Social Security and Medicare remain popular with Republican and Democratic voters alike.)
