A New Left's marriage of arrogance and ignorance

Rich Lowry:

WHY don't we just vote to strike tonight - and we'll decide to morrow what we're striking for?"

Those were the words of a student protester thoughtfully deliberating at Yale University, as recounted by Roger Kimball in his book on the left, "The Long March." It was a question that captured much of the heedless spirit of the student demonstrations of the 1960s, for which "May 1968" is shorthand.

That spring 40 years ago saw a radical takeover of Columbia University - eventually duplicated at other elite campuses - and student protests around the world. In France, the government was rocked to its foundations; in the Eastern Bloc, a crevice was opened up in the Berlin Wall. Here at home, campus life became synonymous with a straitened leftism, and the post-World War II political consensus shattered.

Before we had our long national nightmare (Watergate), we had our long national temper tantrum. In America, student protests were an indulgence of the privileged, a wail by baby boomer kids raised in unprecedented affluence against their parents' authority.

To accuse of "fascism" a generation that bled in the mud of Normandy fighting the Axis took a massive historical ignorance and overweening self-regard. The New Left had both.

...

Like John McCain, I was busy at the time in Vietnam. Fortunately I was only being shot at and going on long walks along the beach or in the mountains of northern I Corps. I was not being abused by sadistic communist like McCain. But people like Ayers were on the side of the sadist and the people trying to kill us. I have often noted the phony nature of the anti war activities. They were not pacifist who opposed war. They just opposed our side of the war. They made no effort to get the other side to stop fighting. They did all they could to make our side feel the war was hopeless. They were moral cowards. It took no courage to do what they did.

I see the same arrogance in Obama's handling of criticism. Victor Davis Hanson addresses the messianic tone of the Obama campaign. "... He talks of hope/change, new politics, unity, and bipartisanship and you are cynical and hateful for not buying it and instead worrying that he has a serial propensity for distortion (“100 years”) and invective (“lost his bearings”). The immediate advantage is that the nonbeliever is always ridiculed for his devilish skepticism; the eventual downside for Obama is that the loftier the prophet, the more transparent his all-too-human transgressions." Obama is too comfortable with people who hate us.