When the Left Was Right

[Frenchy]

I've read this a couple of times now, and it amazes me how my perceptions have changed since coming home from the war in 1968.Things were so black and white back then. The nuances of political change and direction were lost on me, yet I had changed considerably in one year. The next few years were ones of anguish as I struggled with my identity and place.
Kauffman's article clears up some of that ambiguity for me personally.
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May 19, 2008 Issue
Copyright © 2007 The American Conservative


When the Left Was Right

The radicals of the ’60s had another side: decentralist, anti-interventionist, and almost Kirkian.

by Bill Kauffman
The ghosts of 1968 are haunting Barack Obama, which is tremendously unfair, I say as his coeval, given that our cohort spent the Chicago Democratic Convention sticking baseball cards in our bicycle spokes rather than pelting Mayor Daley’s finest with porcine epithets. But guilt by association is ironclad in these days when American political discourse is controlled by hall monitors and tattletales. Obama’s friendship—acquaintance?—with Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn is about to get extended play as the Republicans contrast Obama’s Weatherfriends with their nominee’s stint in the Hanoi Hilton.
By his own account, John McCain lived in North Vietnamese captivity longer than anywhere else in his itinerant life. This deracination and the resultant military-brat pathologies on display in McCain will go unexploited by the Democrats, whose nominee-in-waiting and maid-of-dishonor are just as placeless as Carpetbag John. And besides, the entire political class of Washington has all the indigenous flavor of the Crystal City Metro station. It would never occur to an attack-ad maker that there was anything wrong with rootlessness.

CONTINUED...
When the Left Was Right