[lbo-talk] Adolph Reed on BHO

[andie nachgeborenen]

You are right. I have read several studies refuting the myth, popular a decade or so ago, that the children of the supposedly lefty hippie boomers would rebel by becoming Republican corporate lawyers. Not so on both counts. First, the boomers were not exceptionally left wing, even if you take into account the difference between cultural leftism (so-called identity group politics and feminism) and New Deal economic leftism. The myth that we were all at Woodstock, participated in the Siege of Chicago, saw our friends gunned down and Kent state, burned our bras, and joined the Weather Underground, all while high on top-grade Colombian grass and Oswald acid, is a myth. Only a very small proportion of the later boomers (1965-75) generation did such a thing. American society as a whole became more culturally liberal, especially with the civil rights movement and later, the women's movement (now, finally, the gay rights movement), stayed fairly economically

 liberal from the New Deal until the mid-Reagan years (and even then there was no hard right turn in public opinion, though there was some drift from New Deal liberalism). 

Second, with respect to Doug's point, the strongest predictor of a child's political views is his/her parents' views. The Jesuits were right, give someone a child until s/he is seven and you shape him/her for life. Example: my own political views differ from the New Deal liberalsim of my folks' mainly in my beliefs, or hopes, about what's empirically possible, each of us colored. of course, by their experience of growing up during or fighting in WWII or growing up during the era of Vietnam, Watergate, and various popu;lar movements. My own kids's views are cerytainly ballpark with ours, again with coloration of having grown under Bush/Clinton/Bush in a time when popular activity is at a comparative lull. The studies show that this is pretty typical.

OK, gotta stop procrastinating now.

--- On Thu, 7/17/08, Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:


> From: Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com>
> Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] Adolph Reed on BHO
> To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org
> Date: Thursday, July 17, 2008, 11:33 AM
> On Jul 17, 2008, at 11:41 AM, Julio Huato quoted Howard
> Zinn:
> 
> > It seems to me that we need not engage in some fancy
> psychological
> > experiment to learn the answer, but rather to look at
> ourselves and to
> > talk to our friends. We then see, though it is
> unsettling, that we
> > were not born critical of existing society. There was
> a moment in our
> > lives (or a month, or a year) when certain facts
> appeared before us,
> > startled us, and then caused us to question beliefs
> that were strongly
> > fixed in our consciousness--embedded there by years of
> family
> > prejudices, orthodox schooling, imbibing of
> newspapers, radio, and
> > television.
> 
> Is that really true? I suspect there's a lot of
> continuity between  
> parents' politics and their kids' politics. I
> recall that someone -  
> Richard Freeman maybe? - did a survey of campus
> anti-sweatshop  
> activists in the late 1990s and found a very large share of
> them had  
> parents who were activists of some sort in the 1960s. And
> just last  
> night we were talking with a friend who's in Solidarity
> who said that  
> many of her comrades with grown kids reported their
> offspring to be  
> involved in radical politics in some way. I'm guessing
> these "aha!"  
> conversion experiences are unusual. Not unheard of but not
> the norm.
> 
> Doug
> ___________________________________
> http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk