Alan has said most of what needs to be said on Platypus & Hitchens, but I remain disturbed by this subject line, and I have spent quite a bit of time trying to define the source of my disturbance. I think the problem is that (for me at least) implicit in the questions is a radical and destructive (intellectually and politically destructive) voluntarism.
Let us suppose the date wa Dec. 1, 1957. I think that something very like the Platypus lament could have been written, showing conclusiviely that "The Left" was degenerare and hopeless, and someone like andie could have written a long, carefully reasoned essay entitled, "Where Are We Going? What Are We Doing?" And almost certainly that essay would have failed to mention (or perhaps even mentioned, parenthetically and dismissively) the event which two years before when Rosa Parks, culminating years of careful planning by the Montgomery NAACP, refused to give up her seat on a bus - thus setting of a (slow-moving) political earthquake which was not to entirely lose its momentum for almost 20 years. ( I date 'the sixties' from Rosa Parks to the defeat of ERA.) One needs to go back to the 1850s through the ending of Reconstruction to find anything of equal magnitude in U.S. history. It's been almost 50 years since I read Thomas Hart Benton's _Thirty Years View of the United States Senate_ (1850), but I do not think there was the slightest fear expressed by him of the events that in the following 20 years were to inaugurate the Second Republic of the United States as the Sixties inaugurate The Third Republic. An Andie writing in 1850 might well have viewed the future as dimly as, apparently, Andie views our future, and like Platypus believe that it was necessary to excogitate a wholly new Plan to launch a future.
The Sixties were _issue_-driven, and owed nothing to anyone's asking or answering such querstions as "Where Are We Going? What Are We Doing?" In fact, such questions, if taken seriously, would have been in 1957 or 1960 as bostructive as, I bewlieve, Andie's asking of them now is.
Carrol