This maybe borders IMHO as I’m interested in any stories you might have to share, but putting in GD since it’s inspired by developments in US politics in the past 10 years and asked in hope of getting some perspective.
So – when things went pear shaped in your country, how’d you know? How did it impact your daily life? Could be in terms of constitutional crisis, coup d’etat, riots in the streets, revolution, any major political upheaval.
And from what you see of news in the US, how does it compare?
Are you aware of what things were like in the US in the 60s and early 70s? What you’re seeing now ain’t nuthin’ compared to those days. I mean, nuthin’!!
We had riots in the streets, people blowing up buildings, campus protest like nothing even close to what you see today, complete with National Guard firing on student protesters.
The last 10 years? That’s a tea party (pardon the pun).
I guess one thing that comes to mind, though, and what I think would be different from the 60s, would be the sense that the legitimacy of the US’s political institutions is on shakier ground than they were 40 years ago. Hippies and Yippies and what have you were running riot in the streets, free lovin’ and rollin’ around in the mud and blowing up campus buildings, sure.
But Mr. and Mrs. John Q. Public, veterans of WWII and the Korean War eras, still had their quiet, squaresville conviction that their votes counted, Congress (of either party) represented them, the President (of either party) had the best interests of the nation at heart, and so on.
Naïve? Sure. But it was that naïve conviction among the Silent Majority (if you will) that ensured the Republic really wasn’t ever in any serious danger even when Abbie Hoffman was jumping up and down on his defense counsel table.
But what I’ve seen among mainstream thinking over the past (more like) 20 years has been like a slow rot in the public’s, and the political class’s, belief in the country’s institutions; and it’s been coming from both sides of the aisle. “Borking” a Supreme Court nominee. Impeaching a president over a blow job. Hanging chads. WMDs in Iraq. Politicians genuflecting to tea partier nuts. And now this Chicago-style backroom (shower-room?) strongarming and deal-cutting over President Build-Me-a-Legacy’s program. John & Jane Q. Public have had their full tour of the sausage factory, in their faces, inescapably.
Except prior to the Voting Rights Act, a sizable minority were actually not having their votes counted. That seems a far more substantial problem then the vague semi-paranoid complaints today, and part of what led to the upheavels of the 60’s.
The truth of the matter is that most people are too busy living their lives to worry about what politicians are doing. We have a lot of political junkies on this MB (me included), but I don’t think your average American has much time to worry about this stuff. Sure, they may listen to Rush from time to time, but they have jobs to do, kids to feed, and BBQs to go to on the weekends.
And back in the '50s and '60s there was blatant corruption on both sides of the aisle and transparent election-rigging by urban political machines and systematic disenfranchisement of large sectors of the population. How is the credibility of our institutions really any worse now?
It might sound naive or square, but actually it’s the likelihood of a cynical apathy setting in among the mainstream that worries me the most. Political institutions up to and including the Constitution may be artifical constructs at the end of the day, but when (not just the kids & hippies & slackers but) your typical businessman, office worker, enlisted man, entrepreneur and so on have also learned to smirk at these things as “just” constructs – then watch out, is all I’m saying.
To what extent was this common knowledge among the voting public, especially regarding the federal government? And within the political class itself, yeah, they were corrupt back then too – but were they setting on each other like rabid dogs as we see these days?
True, and not to minimize it, but wasn’t that perceived as a transgression of the individual states, in opposition to what the federal government was pushing for (especially under Johnson, but also Truman, Eisenhower and Kennedy.) If anything, the disenfranchised were looking to the federal gov’t as a champion to their cause, at least according to my impression.
ETA: Would a mod care to help out with the title, in view of how the thread’s going? Perhaps “Danger from US political institutions being “de-legitimized”?”
Yes. Read about McCarthyism or the uproar over the New Deal not to mention the huge fights over civil rights. Read about the inflammatory rhetoric against Kennedy at the time he was assassinated. The political infighting may not have been strictly across party lines because of the peculiar position of Southern Democrats and relatively liberal Northeastern Republicans but it was extremely bitter. The political system as a whole was more corrupt and largely excluded racial minorities. The idea that there was some golden age of bipartisan statesmanship is a myth. US politics is looking pretty ugly right now but the political system as a whole works better than most periods in US history.
Koxinga, there’s nothing going on right now that could be seen as political upheaval.
I grew up in the late 70s/early 80s so I didn’t get to see much of it directly, but it looks to me that the situation in the 60s/70s was much more volatile than now.
You guys were in a massively unpopular war (with conscription!) with (compared to now) huge amounts of casualties on your side and very messy civilian casualties on the other (with actual direct reports from the front line on the TV news every night, not like the occasional clean reports from some hotel you see now), extremely violent race and student riots all over the place, a shift in youth culture with large amounts of people willing to drop out of society altogether or fleeing the country to get out of the draft, a president who was assassinated and another who was pretty much kicked out for being the most dangerously corrupt president in US history and the permanent threat of an enemy that had the power to destroy the US on its own in a day or so.
The problem you’ve got now is FOX News and a few terrorists who are mostly staying where they are on the other side of the world.
Check out Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus, by Rick Perlstein. I would suggest that all the political rancor today that Koxinga speaks of is but an echo of what that “unmaking of the American consensus” unleashed in the 1960s, including the civil rights movement and all the accompanying sociocultural results, as well as the legitimization of hard-right politics to a degree not seen since before the New Deal.
This strikes me as nostalgia. I think the biggest difference between now and then is that the Internet provides a forum for ordinary people to make their opinions and their discontents heard more easily.
You are confusing an increase in the visibility of crazy people (ahem, “political radicals” and/or “reactionaries”) with an increase in the number of crazy people.
It’s not that people are nuttier now, just that the nuts can get together via the internet.
The “genuflecting of politicians to the tea partier nuts”, as you put it, is unusual, but hardly unprecedented*. There was a Klansman in the Louisiana House of Representatives 20 years ago. Not a Klan sympathizer, but an actual honest-to-goodness Klansman (and he didn’t disavow the Klan’s goals like Robert Byrd).
50 years ago you had Strom Thurmond running for President, disavowing the humanity of black people (while he quietly fucked one).
If we were ever going to have a constitutional crisis, the 2000 election was it. The legitimacy of an election was disputed, people were up in arms - and the Supreme Court got to vote in the election for a second time and the matter was settled. People didn’t riot; they just went about their business (rather to the detriment of the nation, as it turned out).
*the following is not to suggest that I am equating the Tea Party movement with the Klan, although I believe there is a strong racist element to it. I’m just using the Klan as an example of another extremist viewpoint.