"My generation of the New Left — a generation that grew as the war went on — relinquished any title to patriotism without much sense of loss."

"All that was left to the Left was to unearth righteous traditions and cultivate them in universities. The much-mocked political correctness of the next academic generations was a consolation prize. We lost — we squandered the politics — but won the textbooks."

So wrote Todd Gitlin in an essay in a 2003 collection called "The Fight Is for Democracy: Winning the War of Ideas in America and the World."

I ran across that at the Wikipedia entry for Gitlin, which I was reading because he's got a piece the NYT: "The Bernie Sanders Moment":

It may have seemed, only a few years ago, that the ’60s radical moment was consigned to documentaries on Woodstock, pushed out of the spotlight for Occupy Wall Street and a new generation of activists to enter stage left. But here it is again....

Is [Bernie Sanders] a generational candidate, then, seizing the spotlight to vindicate fellow ’60s-era radicals who may have felt their moment was gone? Yes and no. His enthusiasts cut across age lines. Tim Ashe, a Vermont state senator who got his political start working for Mr. Sanders, is 38. He has met 20-somethings and 40-somethings who say they moved to Vermont because of Mr. Sanders’s appeal — not in order to vote for him, but to live in a place that would elect him. The Howard Dean of 2004, a far more moderate Vermont immigrant, was for some a first hurrah in national politics. Now Mr. Sanders is the purer vintage.

So once again, we are not done with the ’60s.... However unpromising his prospects for electoral victory, Mr. Sanders’s campaign is already a force....

Man, it must be annoying for these Sanders people to have their "moment" stepped on by the "force" that is Donald Trump, whose dim prospects of election are supposed to be a reason to completely ignore him. Why pay attention to one and not the other? It doesn't make sense.

Glenn Reynolds says something similar in "The Donald and Bernie show/When party outsiders feel ignored, a champion appears to take their interests to heart":

Both Sanders and Trump pose threats to their respective establishments. Sanders might be another Eugene McCarthy, who garnered tremendous enthusiasm in 1968 while sapping the energy of Democratic establishment candidate Hubert Humphrey, who went on to lose. Trump might turn out to be another Ross Perot, whose plain talk about deficits excited a lot of GOP voters who then saw George H.W. Bush as an unappetizing substitute.

In a democratic polity, you can't ignore the concerns of large numbers of voters forever. Both Democrats and Republicans are learning that lesson yet again.

And by the way, for those who think Trump is in a different category because he comes across as angry, take a closer look at Bernie Sanders. He was on "Meet the Press" yesterday, and we were repeatedly freezing the frame for the purposes of commenting on his angry facial expressions. If the press were as motivated to revile Sanders as they are Trump, they could easily put up photographs that make him look as weirdly enraged as the usual pictures of Trump.



Trump, it should be noted, is hamming it up for the camera. Sanders is trying to look presidential on a supportive morning news show. The freeze frame I caught was at 0:24 in the linked video, as he was saying "I voted against the Patriot Act."

"A double-vanilla ticket will be attacked as un-diverse by the media."

Double-vanilla! Michael Barone uses the term in discussing Mitt Romney's reasons for picking a white male VP. (His "vanilla" males are Paul Ryan, Rob Portman, Mitch Daniels, and Bob McDonnell.)

Did Barone invent that term? He says "what opponents might call a double-vanilla ticket." Do opponents already say that or is that a Barone invention?

Is "double vanilla" an acceptable term?
	No, we should be color blind.
	No, race is a serious topic and that trivializes it.
	Yes, lighten up... I mean... appreciate a little levity.
	Yes, because it brings the lingering historical problem of white supremacy to the surface.
pollcode.com free polls

"Brooklyn College said it was 'regrettable that Mr. Bruce Kesler misunderstands the intentions of the Common Reader experience and the broader context of this selection.'"

Reports The Daily News, picking up the story that we were talking about here yesterday.

Hey, now we get to check out the Daily News comments. Continuum says:

I guess if you can't physically burn the books yourself, you can burn the school financially where they're allowed to be read. 

"Allowed to be read"? (Yes, ’n’ how many books can exist in a school/Before they’re allowed to be read?) It's an assigned text, one book for all. It's the book we want in your head, the school says to the incoming freshman, who, presumably, were chosen for their diversity.

Continuum continues:

It's his money, so he can do with it as he chooses. This won't be the first, nor will it be the last time, that some rightwinger will try to prevent an opposing view using his money or lack thereof . . . . . 

Prevent an opposing view?

Joezoo says:

The gentleman misunderstands the purpose of a college education - to be exposed to a wide variety of ideas, and learn how to be critical of them. 

Yet, ironically, Kesler is being critical of a book — and teaching a lesson in criticism.

I wonder what books he read while at Brookly College were high on the list of books-to-be-burned by donors at that time.

Where did this "burned" concept come from? Kesler never said the book shouldn't be available in the library and assigned in some courses where it has some relevance. He objected to its being chosen as the one book to give to freshmen to create a sense of "common experience." That's a much stronger statement by the school of how it sees itself. And the book is assigned in the required freshman English course. Imagine a set of transcribed interviews with young people as the text to be studied in an English class. Think of the rich pool of English literature... and weep.

StoutKraut says:

Its about time someone has the 'pair' to stand up and be counted. With freedom comes responsibility and NOT radicalism. Besides its his money and he can do whatever he wants with him.

Alumni provide an important check. Look at what happened at Harvard Law School:

In 1987, our last year as students at Harvard Law School, we formed a group called NOPE. No matter how rich we became, even if we could credit Harvard for our careers, we vowed to never contribute anything of financial value to its endowment: Not One Penny Ever. NOPE...

That's a long side track that I won't travel down today, but Elena Kagan is in that story. In the 80s, I worked at a Wall Street law firm (Sullivan & Cromwell), hearing Harvard alumni partners fretting over what was happening to their law school. Suffice it to say that radical politics were a big problem... and the alumni were not powerless.

It's a marketplace of ideas, and there are powerful buyers and sellers in that marketplace. The professors have market power, but they aren't the only ones.

You’ve been with the professors
And they’ve all liked your looks
With great lawyers you have
Discussed lepers and crooks
You’ve been through all of
F. Scott Fitzgerald’s books
You’re very well read
It’s well known

Ah! There was a time when the professors at least saw fit, when imposing a book, to impose an exemplar of great writing.

***

"Our lives are defined by opportunities, even the ones we miss."

The "long and painful falling out" between Barack Obama and Jeremiah Wright — and what made Obama snap.

At the NYT, Michael Powell and Jodi Kantor have background on the Obama's decision to speak out more forcefully against Jeremiah Wright:

Late Monday night, in the Carolina Inn in Chapel Hill, N.C., Barack Obama’s long, slow fuse burned to an end. Earlier that day he had thumbed through his BlackBerry, reading accounts of the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr.’s latest explosive comments on race and America. But his remarks to the press this day had amounted to a shrug of frustration.

Only in this hotel room, confronted with the televised replay of the combustible pastor, did the candidate realize the full import of the remarks, his aides say.

Yes, there really was something infuriating about Wright's smirks and mannerisms. You could bend over backwards and excuse the text — if you were so inclined — but on the video, it's unmistakable that Wright has contempt for Obama and fully intended to harm him.

[The] long and painful falling out [was] marked by a degree of mutual incomprehension, friends and aides say. It began at the moment Mr. Obama declared his candidacy, when he abruptly uninvited his pastor from delivering an invocation, injuring the older man’s pride and fueling his anger....

Only a few years ago, the tightness of the bond between Mr. Obama and Mr. Wright was difficult to overstate....

In this learned and radical pastor, Mr. Obama found a guide who could explain Jesus and faith in terms intellectual no less than emotional, and who helped a man of mixed racial parentage come to understand himself as an African-American. “Our trials and triumphs became at once unique and universal, black and more than black,” Mr. Obama wrote in his autobiography “Dreams From My Father.”

At the same time, as Mr. Obama’s friends and aides now acknowledge, he was aware that, shorn of their South Side Chicago context, the words and cadences of a politically left-wing black minister could have a very problematic echo. So Mr. Obama haltingly distanced himself from his pastor.

Read the whole article. There's too much to excerpt. One key point is that Wright blames David Axelrod:

[Wright] repeatedly mentioned Mr. Axelrod, Mr. Obama’s chief strategist, saying that while he was expert at promoting black candidates with white voters, he did not know much about relating to the black community.

“They’re spiriting him away from people in the African-American community,” Mr. Wright said, “David doesn’t know the African-American church scene.”

And Powell and Kantor credit (or blame) blogs for keeping the controversy alive:

Blogs, and a few print reporters, kept asking questions about Mr. Wright’s politics, his black liberation theology. Snippets of his fiery, soaring sermons began to appear on cable televisions and in blog posts.

We learn that that the cruise, which had Wright out-of-touch at the time of Obama's Philadelphia speech, was long planned, not a convenient exile. Wright "returned to find his name a term of opprobrium all across the nation." (Don't cruise ships have TV and newspapers and internet connection? If you were Wright, wouldn't you be monitoring what people were saying about you?)

Mr. Wright... wanted only to explain himself.

Not to punish Obama?

His first steps seemed to go well enough, particularly a relatively temperate interview with Bill Moyers on PBS. But at the National Press Club on Monday, Mr. Wright took a few questions, and his scholarly mien fell away.

“His initial statement was fine,” said the Rev. Michael Pfleger of St. Sabina Roman Catholic Church in Chicago and a friend of Mr. Wright. “But the questions caused a response from Reverend Wright that I wasn’t expecting.”

Mr. Wright seemed to sense nothing wrong. A friend said he appeared buoyant and relieved afterward.

He got high off the crowd somehow. Manic. He thought he was doing fine.

But a couple hundred miles south, Mr. Obama was soon seething.

"Soon" is funny. It took him a long time to get mad. But it looks like a very personal kind of mad. It's not so much that Wright's ideas were anti-American and his politics were extremist and left-wing. Obama had to have known that from a 20-year association with the man (unless he only had the association for appearances and political advancement and never really cared what Wright thought). Obama got mad, it seems, because he could see that Wright meant to hurt him and was getting fired up moving for the kill.

"We also have people who are supporting Bush and undermining our efforts too."

I was just walking along Library Mall at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, minding my own business, when I encountered a little street theater and got out my tiny Sony Cybershot to record what was clearly a public performance, intended to be seen. A man with a clipboard came up to me and -- despite the fact that I was wearing earphones -- asked me a question, which I am now able to hear was "Would you like to sign our petition to impeach Bush and Cheney?" My answer -- which was an answer to whatever he had on that clipboard -- was "No thanks." Then, demonstrating his commitment to individual rights, he commenced to interrogate me about why I was taking a picture, what my opinions were, whether I am the sort of person who might "undermine" their efforts, and whether I was working for some "organization." Oh, yeah, with this camera the size of a deck of cards, I'm backed by an elaborate organization. Perhaps you've heard of it. It's called Althouse.

Roberts Rules of Order and 60s radicals.

From an essay by Rachel Donadio (which has much more about Roberts Rules of Order):

Todd Gitlin, a former president of Students for a Democratic Society who teaches journalism at Columbia, recalled using Robert’s Rules for early S.D.S. meetings, “sometimes with amusement,” as if these young radicals had “borrowed Mom and Dad’s decks of cards to play our game.” But by the mid-’60s its guidelines seemed restrictive. In his history “SDS,” Kirkpatrick Sale recounts a 1964 meeting at which the organization’s co-founder Tom Hayden began to question the value of procedural niceties. “Suppose parliamentary democracy were a contrivance of 19th-century imperialism and merely a tool of enslavement?” Sale quotes Hayden as saying. “Suppose we rush through the debate and ‘decide’ to do something by a vote of 36 to 33. Will we really have decided anything?” Hayden, Sale writes, “saw that S.D.S. was caught in the bind of trying to create a new world with the tools of the old.”

Today, Hayden, a professor and activist, is still skeptical of parliamentary procedure. “Robert’s Rules might suit a representative institution, but it doesn’t suit a fledgling social movement,” he said in a telephone conversation. “It institutionalizes a win-lose mentality, when often there are close decisions in which both sides need representation.” Hayden cites the example of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, which in the mid-’60s voted to expel white members. “It was a one-vote margin that changed ’60s history fundamentally,” Hayden said. “I view it as an unfortunate way to try to settle a serious problem.”

I can't stand SDS... Did I ever tell you that SDS folk used to meet in the dorm room next to mine at the University of Michigan, circa 1969? They were really annoying when overheard through a wall. I don't know if it's the best way to form political opinions, but overheard through a wall, I couldn't stand them. It's the middle of the night, you're trying to get some sleep and they can't seem to agree about The Revolution. Must you yell about it 5 inches away from my bed?

Anyway, much as I can't stand SDS, I've got to give Tom Hayden credit for saying a lot of smart things there. (Though I don't agree with that new world/old tools part.) You know, I've chaired committee meetings, and I've never proceeded by taking votes and letting a narrow majority win. We've always talked to the point of consensus or until those in the minority position accepted the outcome. I accept that elections and elected legislatures ought to proceed by majority vote, but there are a lot of situations where the majority vote and Rules of Order games are best avoided.