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Forty years ago this month, Paris exploded in left-wing student riots that led to a nationwide general strike. The revolutionary fervor of France’s soixante-huitards (’68ers) spread widely, including to American campuses. If you’re wondering when the Good ‘60s of peace, love and civil rights gave way to the Bad ‘60s of anarchy and violence, May 1968 is as good a historical pivot point as any ... the restless spirit of ‘68 haunts this year’s presidential campaign, especially the White House bid of Mr. Obama, who, having pretty much missed the ‘60s – “Civil rights, sexual revolution, Vietnam War. Those all sort of passed me by,” he told The Atlantic’s Andrew Sullivan last year – was supposed to take us beyond those divisive traumas.It’s not working out that way. His former pastor the Rev. Jeremiah Wright is an unreconstructed ‘60s radical, a fire-breathing disciple of James Cone’s period-piece black liberation theology. Mr. Obama wrote in his 1995 autobiography, Dreams From My Father, about his attraction to the leftist pastor’s church as a vehicle for social change. If black nationalism would uplift the race, he wrote, “then the hurt it might cause well-meaning whites, or the inner turmoil it caused people like me, would be of little consequence.”
That’s a remarkable admission of a racialized “ends justify the means” morality. It helps explain why Mr. Obama was willing to stick with a crackpot like Dr. Wright. It also might explain why an up-and-coming Barack Obama found nothing particularly wrong with rubbing political elbows with Bill Ayers, the Chicago university professor and onetime fugitive member of the revolutionary, communist Weather Underground.
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[The soixante-huitards] may have failed at revolution, but they succeeded in changing the culture. (A famous soixante-huitard slogan: “Live without limits, and enjoy without restraint.") They did so in large part by, to use the Marxist Antonio Gramsci’s phrase, “marching through the institutions.” Pulpits. Professorships. Publishing and media. And in some cases, politics.
It’s not “guilt by association” to inquire to what extent Mr. Obama – whose moral and political conscience was shaped by his education at elite universities, his street activism and his tutelage at Dr. Wright’s knee – shares the views and assumptions of the soixante-huitards. In terms of style, he’s plainly not one of them. But his deeply liberal voting record marks him as at least a fellow traveler.
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Mr. Obama’s radical baggage is more politically damaging because it deflates the hope many voters invested in him. He was once the man to deliver American politics from the storm and stress of the ‘60s generation – “Goodbye to all that,” as The Atlantic headlined Mr. Sullivan’s much-read pre-primary encomium to Mr. Obama’s transformational potential.
Not yet, alas. Against his own conscience, the ambitious but insecure young Mr. Obama compromised with the malevolent spirit of ‘68 for the sake of worldly gain. For the consequences are not proving to be as little as he expected.
Said the Devil to Faust: “In the end, you are exactly – what you are.” Yes.
Rod Dreher: “The company Obama has kept” |
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