http://www.leftbusinessobserver.com/Obama.html
I was listening to an old Behind the News show, in which Doug quotes himself in the Left Business Observer:
<quote>
As this newsletter has argued for years, there's great political
potential in popular disillusionment with Democrats. The phenomenon was
first diagnosed by Garry Wills in Nixon Agonistes. As Wills explained
it, throughout the 1950s, left-liberals intellectuals thought that the
national malaise was the fault of Eisenhower, and a Democrat would cure
it. Well, they got JFK and everything still pretty much sucked, which
is what gave rise to the rebellions of the 1960s (and all that excess
that Obama wants to junk any remnant of). You could argue that the
movements of the 1990s that culminated in Seattle were a minor rerun of
this.
<unquote>
And I liked that a lot at first hearing -- it seemed right, and third times the charm, and if anything, we're getting disillusioned in record time on a comparative scale.
But on reflection, one thing bugs me about this argument. There were lots of things Kennedy and Johnson didn't do -- like stop being imperialists. But were also radical, epochal changes. Like the passage of the civil rights act. Or the passage of medicare and medicaid.
So you can't argue it was failure alone that radicalized the masses in the 1960s. You'd have to argue that somehow it was failure plus large successes that made people hungry for more.
And when you put it that way, it seems like other explanations seem simpler. Like that civil rights stirred a true mass movement which was sitting there waiting for a new task when the laws they had agitated for passed -- plus being disappointed that so much remained to do. And that the anti-war movement obviously had a lot to do with the very involving personal fact of the draft -- when someone is asking you to die for a stupid reason, you take it much more seriously.
So on closer look, it seems that at least in the 1960s (which is the archetypal case) it wasn't the disappointments in themselves that caused the movements. It seems rather the other way around: it was movements that made the disappointments so huge.
And FWIW, the civil rights/civil disobedience movement started under Eisenhower. And it was the incubator for all the others.
Michael