Bernie Sanders' World Is An Overnight Sensation 50 Years Later
“There’s something happening here, what it is ain’t exactly clear.” Buffalo Springfield, For What It’s Worth
Netflix is currently showing a documentary Echo In The Canyon— hosted by a po-faced Jakob Dylan— into the musical and cultural history of L.A.’s Laurel Canyon area in the mid to late 1960s. If you can get past Dylan’s cadaverous performance you will find the aging musicians who created the folk/ rock musical genre— and their friends in the California cultural movement of the time.
Stephen Stills, David Crosby, Roger McGuinn, Michelle Phillips, Jackson Browne, Lou Adler and the late Tom Petty reminisce about the era for Dylam’s film. The product is a nostalgia-laden postcard from the heady days of mixing music and social activism. (Dylan also mummifies covers of songs from the era, including an Association chestnut Cherish.)
For those who lived through the tempestuous 60s this is also a flashback to the radicals who influenced Bernie Sanders in his boyhood. The mixture of SJW politics and pop music— embodied in politicians such as Robert Kennedy— came close to overthrowing the status quo at the time. The experience was such that many— Sanders included— never got over the heady sniff of a revolution that almost was. (Bernie famously honeymooned in Moscow in 1968 as there tanks tolled into Czechoslovakia.)
They’ve patiently bided their turn since then, nursing Eugene McCarthy campaign signs and Ché Guevera posters. Judging by the 2020 platforms of septuagenarians Sanders and Elizabeth Warren they believe the wheel has finally come around to them again. The Democratic Party is being yanked leftward in stunning fashion by these products of the tie-dye, Woodstock, George McGovern, Viet Nam war, Monkees, LSD, free love, hippy and yes, Laurel Canyon culture.
Shockingly this transformation is winning voters among young radicals for whom this is their imagined Viet Nam moment. Warren is head-to-head in many polls with the establishment’s figurehead Joe Biden. Sanders is polling a strong third. Tellingly both Warren and Sanders are schooling Biden in donations from party loyalists.
Which begs the question, why did a movement predicated on notions of Peace & Love fail in the 60s and 70s? The answer is that Flower Power first scared, then bored the people they were hoping would join them in a Peoples Revolution. For all its talk about sunshine and flowers the movement was defined by a pervasive pessimism and defeatism captured by movies like Deer Hunter or Coming Home. It hated traditional America. Remember “paranoia strikes deep/ into your lives it must creep” from the above-mentioned Buffalo Springfield?
The fear, exploited masterfully by Nixon, culminated with Charles Manson, whose murderous cult intersected with musical stars such as Dennis Wilson of the Beach Boys (who recorded Manson's song "Cease to Exist”) and producer Terry Melcher (son of Doris Day). The notion that Manson used a Beatles song Helter Skelter as inspiration for slaughtering people showed that not everyone in the movement was wearing flowers in their hair.
The riots in Chicago during the 1968 Democratic Party national convention did nothing to help either. The unkempt leaders of the protest movement that erupted that summer— Jerry Rubin, Tom Hayden, Abbie Hoffman— were unsettling to a number of Americans. Who then elected Nixon to end the war and stifle the hippies.
Jimmy Carter’s election as president in 1976 was the last gasp of the culture Jakob Dylan beatifies. The Eagles song “New Kid In Town” captures the forlorn hopes for a new way of governing America. After Carter’s one term, blighted by the Iranian crisis, OPEC and soaring interest rates, Ronald Reagan’s New Morning In America swept away the radical left from U.S. politics for a generation.
Dylan’s father Bob— always sensitive to the zeitgeist— quickly abandoned his old pals in the Pete Seeger Left to warble country ballads, flirt with Christianity and make movies. By the time the glorious struggle petered out the middle class disillusioned with free love was happy to head for the vapidity of disco or the nihilism of punk.
The single enduring accomplishment of the movement was its fascination to the media, academia and Hollywood. While voters were happy to disavow their own flirtation with the Weathermen and the Symbionese Liberation Army, film makers and singers couldn’t get enough of the intellectual cotton candy of loathing for just about everything in middle America.
While the nation was lifted by Reagan and a revival of American exceptionalism, the culture klatch was listening to Bruce Springsteen’s bitter 1984 ode Born In The USA— thst captures the regret and dead-end vision of the bien pensants of the coasts. They continued to believe that the positivity of Reagan and the fall of their fellow travellers behind the Iron Curtain was just an aberration.
Through the school system and pop culture they stoked grievance culture for a genetration. Using sins of the past to deconstruct American history, they awaited the saviour, who at last arrived in 2008 in the form of Barack Obama, the first black president. With someone in the White House to weaponize guilt, the Flower Power survivors linked arms.
Released from their exile, the Laurel Canyon leftovers swept into power, overwhelming even Obama’s moderate positions. The climate “crisis” was heaven-sent for progressive pessimists . With its mixture of apocalyptic prophecy and messianic adherence to group think it hit their sweet/ sour spot. Now the 2020 political equation is a bouillabaisse of gender politics, racial grievance, third-generational feminism and strident anti-capitalism. Warren and Sanders are casually calling for the overthrow of the U.S. economy even as it reaches new heights.
Most stunning is how few Americans see this as radical or scary. Of course, Warren’s $50 trillion healthcare plan can work. Just tax the rich. But we shouldn’t be surprised. The facts never mattered before to the ‘60s radicals. Why should they matter now?
Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy is the publisher of his website (http://www.notthepublicbroadcaster.com). He’s also a regular contributor to Sirius XM Canada Talks Ch. 167. A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada's top television sports broadcaster, he is also a best-selling author whose new book Cap In Hand: How Salary Caps Are Killing Pro Sports And Why The Free Market Could Save Them is now available on brucedowbigginbooks.ca.