NYT Rings in Independence Day: 'The Downside of Liberty'
The New York Times marked Independence Day in its usual dismal fashion, with editor-novelist Kurt Andersen's op-ed, "The Downside of Liberty," claiming that the "libertarian coin" "minted around 1967" has made Americans shamelessly selfish. (It's the second-most emailed Times story as of noon Thursday.)
This spring I was on a panel at the Woodstock Writers Festival. An audience member asked a question: Why had the revolution dreamed up in the late 1960s mostly been won on the social and cultural fronts -- women’s rights, gay rights, black president, ecology, sex, drugs, rock ’n’ roll -- but lost in the economic realm, with old-school free-market ideas gaining traction all the time?
There was a long pause. People shrugged and sighed. I had an epiphany, which I offered, bumming out everybody in the room.
What has happened politically, economically, culturally and socially since the sea change of the late ’60s isn’t contradictory or incongruous. It’s all of a piece. For hippies and bohemians as for businesspeople and investors, extreme individualism has been triumphant. Selfishness won.
Andersen strangely skips racism in his paean to the good old days:
Consider America during the two decades after World War II. Stereotypically but also in fact, the conformist pressures of bourgeois social norms were powerful. To dress or speak or live life in unorthodox, extravagantly individualist ways required real gumption. Yet just as beatniks were rare and freakish, so were proudly money-mad Ayn Randian millionaires. My conservative Republican father thought marginal income tax rates of 91 percent were unfairly high, but he and his friends never dreamed of suggesting they be reduced below, say, 50 percent. Sex outside marriage was shameful, beards and divorce were outré -- but so were boasting of one’s wealth and blaming unfortunates for their hard luck. When I was growing up in Omaha, rich people who could afford to build palatial houses did not and wouldn’t dream of paying themselves 200 or 400 times what they paid their employees. Greed as well as homosexuality was a love that dared not speak its name.
But then came the late 1960s, and over the next two decades American individualism was fully unleashed. A kind of tacit grand bargain was forged between the counterculture and the establishment, between the forever-young and the moneyed.
Apparently freedom is good for young artistic lefties, but not ambitious, business-oriented righties.
Going forward, the youthful masses of every age would be permitted as never before to indulge their self-expressive and hedonistic impulses. But capitalists in return would be unshackled as well, free to indulge their own animal spirits with fewer and fewer fetters in the forms of regulation, taxes or social opprobrium.
....
People on the political right have blamed the late ’60s for what they loathe about contemporary life -- anything-goes sexuality, cultural coarseness, multiculturalism. And people on the left buy into that, seeing only the ’60s legacies of freedom that they define as progress. But what the left and right respectively love and hate are mostly flip sides of the same libertarian coin minted around 1967. Thanks to the ’60s, we are all shamelessly selfish.
- Clay Waters's blog
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Comments
The Woodstock myth
Submitted by Galvanic on Thu, 07/05/2012 - 2:25pm.
As soon as I read the words "Woodstock Writers Festival," the legendary Woodstock Music Festival came to mind. The myth holds that Woodstock welded a generation, when in actuality, for most of us who came of age around that time, Woodstock was little more than a double-LP album and a movie.
What the writers choose to remember comes from the mythical past they sustain. They try to convince those too young to have witnessed it, that somehow, all the under-30 crowd was of one mind and changing the world. The ywere not.
American individualism existed before, during, and after the late-'60s despite the pop culture hype from a minority that deluded itself into believing it was changing the world.
the real sixties
Submitted by MidAmerica on Thu, 07/05/2012 - 2:49pm.
I didn't like hippies then and I haven't changed my mind now.
I have always told my kids don't believe what you read about the 60's because the 60's are not portrayed as they really were. The overwhelming majority of the country did not support the freaks and hippies. We just liked the music.
Woodstock was nothing more than an outdoor music concert. It didn't define anything.
My generation, the Boomers, have been a pestilence upon the whole world. My goal is to live long enough to see if the world can recover from this most destructive generation.
You can't have the 60's
Submitted by DontFeedTheTrolls on Thu, 07/05/2012 - 4:18pm.
You can't have the 60's without the Manson Family, the Hell's Angels and the Black Panthers.
How convenient they weren't invited to the writers festival.
Right. I was born in '74 and
Submitted by tcm14 on Thu, 07/05/2012 - 2:48pm.
Right. I was born in '74 and so wasn't around for Woodstock but I will say this: While I like music and easygoing people, when I view the Woodstock documentaries what I see is a lot of overly self-important people behaving like asses.
sex drugs and rock 'n roll
Submitted by MidAmerica on Thu, 07/05/2012 - 3:11pm.
Woodstock was a humanitarian disaster in the making but was averted because outside sources of money, food, medical care, transportation and police were donated.
To hear the self-important musicians and organizers blather on about how they were a New Way of being a society is to just look at them the way people do a teenager who lives at home, gets a part time job and then thinks he is financially independent.
And when it was all over somebody else payed to have the mountains of garbage collected and hauled away.
Come to think of it Woodstock is a good metaphor for Left-wing thinking, no personal responsibility and whoever has money should share it. Share it when those who don't have any money is because they just aren't into that 'work scene'. Work is so not groovy.
History repeats
Submitted by jon_torlin on Thu, 07/05/2012 - 3:37pm.
Actually, when you described all that, I think about the times the libs/dems(but I repeat myself) would have their events, including the coronation, and the place is just absolutely trashed afterwards. Unlike when the TEA party or conservatives would do something and the place is a lot neater than before when they leave.
So hippies, dems(and if some of you might be offended, take it up with the rest of them, not me, they are your people), no difference.
-Jon
So true. And to complete the
Submitted by tcm14 on Thu, 07/05/2012 - 3:44pm.
So true. And to complete the analogy, after being saved by all the squares' donations, a modern leftist would then turn around and blame the squares for creating the whole Woodstock mess in the first place. That's sort of what they do with society.
Can Newsbusters do a April 15th v. July 4th comparison?
Submitted by optimist on Thu, 07/05/2012 - 2:27pm.
I'd like the see how many positive articles v. negative articles are published for April 15th and July 4th respectively. I think we all know what the sad results will be, but I would love to see actual numbers.
Talk about spending on a birthday...Halloween is #2
Submitted by upcountrywater on Thu, 07/05/2012 - 2:58pm.
April 15, gets to party with Thursday June 28, 2012....
Jobs created.... handing off 16,000 IRS pages of "seize it before you earn it TAX", TO YOUR ACCOUNTANTS, to pour over....
Clinton hosing down Americans with an additional 800 pages of irs law in the 90's left a scar.
Well what do you know....Taxed Enough Already... is till valid.
You Didn't Build That.
When tragedy strikes
Submitted by MrSnuggles on Thu, 07/05/2012 - 2:53pm.
When tragedy strikes somewhere in the world what country steps up, almost by itself, and gives selflessly to help the victims? Why, America of course. If communists like this pos have there way we will not have wealth to give.
I'll tell you what was
Submitted by LAM SON 719 on Thu, 07/05/2012 - 2:53pm.
I'll tell you what was selfish about the 60's. Leftist cowards whose only concern was their next high. They spouted bullshit to satisfy their egos and hide their cowardice. Some of us saw the sixties for what they were. I watched poor simple people in Vietnam live day to in terror, they knew that once we left there ville the VC would return exact preverted justice. The sickening part was we could have stopped the terror and brought those people a measure of freedom but the same idiots who now crow for social justice shit on the people of Vietman, Cambodia and Laos.
"woodstock writers festival", a gathering of cowards trying to hide their sins.
There's no doubt that whether the history books reflect...
Submitted by paratisi on Thu, 07/05/2012 - 6:56pm.
it or not, The "Hanoi Jane's" and the Democrat Defunders of the Vietnam War, the hippies, etc., will forever have the blood of 3-5 million dead on their hands and heads, throughout eternity.
Andersen is just peddling the
Submitted by celator on Thu, 07/05/2012 - 3:26pm.
Andersen is just peddling the "the United States of America is an awful country"-- a constant theme of the NYT for 80 years.
This is the newspaper that cheered Stalin, Mussolini and Mao Tse-tung at the height of their power.
This is the newspaper that cannot wait to publish security leaks so that the enemy will learn about our deepest intelligence operations.
This is the newspaper that cheers and paves the way for a fascist, totalitarian, socialist government.
This is the newspaper our enemies read to learn how to defeat us.
This is the newspaper who covered for...
Submitted by paratisi on Thu, 07/05/2012 - 7:00pm.
Ted Kennedy, when he volunteered for the KGB, while acting as a U.S. Senator, because of his total hatred of President Ronald Reagan.
Anderson Is:
Submitted by rammingspeed on Thu, 07/05/2012 - 3:39pm.
Unreconstructed Marxist.
Case closed.
Utopianism
Submitted by Kuso Jiji on Thu, 07/05/2012 - 5:21pm.
These Marxist have no clue about individual liberty and self determination.
They were "won?" Really? Not according to the New York Times.
Submitted by CobraMan on Fri, 07/06/2012 - 11:44am.
"Why had the revolution dreamed up in the late 1960s mostly been won on the social and cultural fronts -- women’s rights, gay rights, black president, ecology, sex, drugs, rock ’n’ roll -- but lost in the economic realm, with old-school free-market ideas gaining traction all the time?"
They way the liberal press, especially the New York Times, puts it, those things have not been won, ESPECIALLY in the social and cultural fronts. According to the New York Times, gays are still being repressed (Gay Marriage bans, anyone?), women are still facing the Class Ceiling, The First Black President (is that trade-marked yet?) is being opposed solely because of the color of his skin, the "ecology" is being devastated by Man Made Global Warming (which no one want's to stop), sexual repression abounds (especially when it involves the use of condoms), drugs are merely symptomatic of extreme poverty, and rock and roll has no effect on anything, especially the, shall we say, more risque songs of pop music today. So, just what has those self-absorbed, narcissist ex hippies, such as yourself, actually accomplished? According to the ex-hippies yourselves, things are worse now than at any time in living memory. So, please, explain to me just what it is that you think you have accomplished, other than stroking your own egos to the point of becoming delusional?
I'll tell you what your decade of "sex,drugs, and rock and roll" has wrought: two generations of sexually confused, socially inept, fiscally unsound, self-absorbed adult children who think they know everything but can't even figure out how to fix a broken lamp unless step-by-step instructions are posted on Youtube. Such is the legacy of the Woodstock generation.
The Citizens of each State shall be entitled to all Privileges and Immunities of Citizens in the several States. The US Constitution
Unless you're a fetus. The US Supreme Court
Or Anwar al-Awlaki.
By the way, hippie...
Submitted by CobraMan on Fri, 07/06/2012 - 11:53am.
"But capitalists in return would be unshackled as well, free to indulge their own animal spirits with fewer and fewer fetters in the forms of regulation, taxes or social opprobrium."
By the way, hippie, that shouldn't surprise you, for just as you rebelled against the generations that preceded you, the generations that follow your Cultural Revolution are rebelling against YOU, and are doing so in larger and larger numbers each year! And, so, the circle of life continues. It's not because of anything you did, or failed to do. As a matter of fact, it has nothing, AT ALL, to do with you, however painful that must be to your ego. It's just another aspect of human behavior.
The Citizens of each State shall be entitled to all Privileges and Immunities of Citizens in the several States. The US Constitution
Unless you're a fetus. The US Supreme Court
Or Anwar al-Awlaki.