Altho, on the topic I would add a proposition that he probably won't agree with: Another way the 60s context was different, and more hospitable to the anti-war and other radical upsurges, is that at that time, the consensus politics of the country's political class were quite different than today's. The Democrats were capital's go-to team, and both parties agreed on a set of fundamentals, which essentially amounted to a very compromised distortion of new deal social democracy--- the workers get a piece of the pie, unions are okay, so are lots of other interest-based social networks like urban machines and mafia and grassroots patronage networks, social spending for the poor is okay, the safety net is guaranteed (PLUS lots of stuff like cold war imperialism, avowed legal white supremacy in much of the US, enforced traditional patriarchy, mainstream cultural conservatism--- i.e. stuff that made american social democracy so shitty and american). Much of the 60s upheaval was chunks of society left out of that consensus, or who were against horrors being committed for it, uniting against it. Since what they were rebelling against was essentially a reformist, liberal system, there was little room to rebel with reformism. A big chunk of the country moved far to the left both because there was space to do so, and because liberal reformism had so completely failed to create a just system.
Today's bipartisan political mainstream, on the other hand, represents the different set of fundamentals that Goldwater's rightist insurgency was all about. With the institutions of the old consensus politics by now largely dismantled, the left (by any definition) has been unable to win national political contests in what has become an even more profoundly conservative country. Political forces other than the republican right have been in disarray, from dems to liberals to organized labor to the radical left to the contemporary inheritors of identity politics.
But now that the republican right's long dominance of politics has devolved into an imperial war lost and increasingly comical incompetence and neocon ideology, much of this very conservative country hates them, and many of their former supporters from merle haggard and toby keith to capital and the federal beauracracy are looking for alternatives. But the bad guys only want an alternative that is competent and not crazy, whereas the bulk of society that is disgusted with Bush casts about in many different directions: Giuliani, Hillary, Dean, Obama, retreat from politics altogether, a more small-gov conservatism, a more aggressively fundamentalist christianity.
On the left there is just as little consensus: communism and m-l politics are discredited to many because of the states they produced, third world anti-imperialism ditto, anarchism has a comprehensive utopian vision but unable to pull of any results, nader sucks and nobody voted for him anyway, and even realist projects like Brazil's PT and the italian left have wound up in power, supporting neoliberalism AND us imperialism. Given the options I'm not suprised Yoshie champions Chavez and Iran, but principles aside neither is a replicable model given the fact that they float on oil (and Bolivia, while inspiring, also pulled off their victory in the country with the most radical working class in the world).
I'll still go to any anti-war protest I can, tho.
> There is no useful comparison to be made between the anti-war movement
> of the '60s and of the present: There is no hugely varied black
> liberation movement at the center of the stage now from which all other
> movements can draw strengh. {In addition the movements of the '60s were
> fueled by two decades of steady economic expansion, laying the basis for
> what was then known as a "Revolution of Rising Expectations." There is
> no such explosive growth of hope in the last few decades.}
>
>
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