Met Rick Perlstein at my Local Cafe
So I ran into Rick Perlstein at my local java joint this week. He was a familiar face to me; however, we never previously talked. Our conversation started over seating. We shared mutual feelings about how the cushy-chairs under HVAC have a tendency to either chill or dry you out, depending on the season.
That day, we were seated across from each other. I was reading Marcuse’s Reason and Revolution; he was enjoying Harry Potter. I learned later this author and blogger was on a long-deferred vacation. Looking back, I think it ironic that I was reading “the” philosopher of the old “New Left.”
Making Mr. Perlstein’s acquaintance was a treat for me. Rick is a senior fellow at the Campaign for America’s Future, where you will also find his widely read blog, The Big Con. A self-professed liberal and atheist with affections for Christianity, he is also author of Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus. It’s sequel, Nixonland: America’s Second Civil War and the Divisive Legacy of Richard Nixon is due out next summer.
We introduced ourselves. I explained I was a PhD student in theology and ethics, and immediately we began to talk politics. I consider myself a far-left leaning Democrat and social progressive - somewhat driven there by my disgust for the Religious Right. I was in good company.
More pertinent to our discussion, I’ve always been fascinated by how present politics, especially the Clinton and Bush years, is haunted by the 1960′s. On the one hand, I think its pretty obvious. The 60′s aren’t over; they never came to a close. We hear it all over again every time the Right puts God and America back in bed together. Iraq resembles Vietnam – imperial, distant, still in our living rooms. Except now, war protest has gone international. Neoconservatism has capitalized religiously and politically on September 11th with Bush’s “us vs. them” rhetoric and the spin of terrorism + Islam. Plus, without the Soviet Union as it once was, America is now an empire.
America obviously remains conflicted on how to remember the 60′s. Many Christians would like to bring WWII and Leave It to Beaver back again. Sure, we agree it was a time of change. The upheaval of that period was shared internationally. Yet, this nation remains perpetually tortured – tortured over the disconnect of its moral and political compass. The directional debate continues through the political. Our “issues” get aired at every national election and through congressional legislation. The symbolic winner gets to occupy the oval office. The critical issue holding the center for those who lean to the right is “moral values,” which has proven to have much more to do with sex (abortion, homosexuality, Presidential indiscretions) than with discerning any political substance in our nation’s actual sense of morality or values. To do that, of course, we might have to actually talk about the promiscuity of religion in the intercourse of war and economics.
Our nation’s current political situation takes is shape in the wake of a powerful and political generation – one that is still working out its religio-political issues. As such, national consciousness remains sucked in to an ambivalent conscience, a conscience at war with itself over the sexual revolution, pop drug culture, and war protests and its undone consequences. The rift that defines current affairs and its political spin penetrate deep into America’s churches. The nation’s rent political fabric, one might argue, first began to be felt so deeply there. The “moral majority” – so major and so moral - had to be declared. America’s evolving sense of freedom, shaken sense of national identity, even our trust in government has both religious dimensions and religious consequences – all, of which, were first shaped in the 60′s. Two subsequent generations, whose formative years are separated by the onset of MTV and AIDS crisis, on the one hand, and a booming economy and Christian music market in the 1990′s, on the other, are forever shaped in their wake.
In sum, the divide defining America’s politics has a genealogy.
And Perlstein gets it.
