It's Always the 1960's
http://www.boomantribune.com/story/2013/5/19/192843/191It's Always the 1960's
by BooMan
Sun May 19th, 2013 at 07:28:43 PM EST
Thinking about this piece by Armando, I was suddenly reminded of something. During the 1990's, when the Republicans were attacking Bill Clinton for being a non-inhaling pot-smoker and a draft-dodger and a philanderer, a lot of analysts saw it as little more than a continuation of the cultural wars of the 1960's, a self-obsessed battle among aging Baby Boomers. People my age, born at the very end of the 1960's and beginning of the 1970's who were beginning to vote for the first time, kept hoping that this stale debate would burn itself out. We didn't want to fight about school prayer or Roe v. Wade or who fought in the war.
But things didn't get better when Obama became president. Our generation is starting to dominate is some ways. You can see it in how attitudes have completely changed on gay marriage and marijuana use and interracial dating. You can see it in the demographic makeup of the Obama coalition. But the behavior of the Republicans has just continued to get worse.
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I think what annoys a lot of progressives about any kind of post-partisan talk is not just that fails to unreservedly take their side but that many of the people proposing post-partisanship seem to think that the correct decisions are right smack dab in the middle between what some mainstream Democrat like Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia thinks and whatever unhinged lunacy is being blasted across right-wing radio. I never thought that Obama thought like that. I thought Obama knew how to build a winning coalition and that he thought that a winning coalition would be able to do more to pressure the Republicans than actually turned out to be the case.
After all, a winning political coalition says something pretty definitive about the culture of the country. If a previously losing coalition becomes a winning one, that means the culture has changed and a new politics should be possible. But Obama seems not to have won with a previously losing coalition so much as he discovered a winning coalition that had never been tried before.
And then he had to try to get it to work in the midst of the biggest economic collapse since the 1930's. I don't think we can ever forget that things would have been different in unknowable ways if Obama had taken office in good times.
Still, as the country changes, the Republicans show very few signs of moving with it, and many signs that even conservatives who weren't alive in the 1960's will never get over that decade.
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Those of us who were promoting social change in the 1960's scared the Repukes to death. They have never gotten over it, nor forgotten it. They have been fighting us ever since those times. In fact, many conservatives seem to have never stopped fighting the Civil War...
I have never stopped wanting to see the hopes and dreams of my generation from those days get realized and brought into manifestation.
What is most upsetting is how many people still believe the Fundy Fanatic lies and swallow the Reich Wing swill. 
As near as I can see, the Repukes are incapable of being reasoned with in any way.
I wish President O would see this and just quit bothering to work with them. It seems like he would generate a lot more popular support for his projects if he reached out instead to those of us who actually voted for him.
And, as some on this board have pointed out, we may have to focus on the next major election cycle, in order to restore Democratic control to both the House and the Senate, if we want to make any actual progress.
It certainly seems clear that the only game the Repukes will play is obstructionism, and holding their breath until they turn blue, and stamping their feet until they get their way on everything, even though their candidate resoundingly lost the election.
