"Probably for the first time in his life, ex-President Blowjob actually said something which was both true and profound," wrote Kim du Toit last week re this clip from Bubba's My Life speech delivered in Chicago last June:
"If you look back on the sixties, and on balance, you think there was more good than harm, then you're probably a Democrat," Clinton said. "If you think there was more harm than good, then you're probably a Republican."
We missed it at the time but happened to catch a replay of that clip on C-Span the other day, and it got our blogging juices flowing. Assuming erroneously that the clip was from the former president's convention speech -- which, of course, we had not listened to at the time -- we Googled a transcript and actually READ the whole thing (we NEVER read Clinton transcripts at home). Even on paper it was mesmerizing, sweet music to the Clinton choir. It even had us humming along at one point:
Democrats and Republicans have very different and deeply felt ideas about what choices we should make. They're rooted in fundamentally different views of how we should meet our common challenges at home, and how we should play our role in the world.
That was the true part, echoing his earlier point about a person's position on the political spectrum's being a function of one's attitude towards the sixties. After that isolated insight, Slick Willy pulled an Orwellian inversion and slipped seamlessly back into fantasyland, gathering in all that is good unto the Democrats and projecting all that is bad onto the Republicans.
But back to the left's fixation with the sixties. Bruce Thornton made much the same point in his analysis of the "long march through the institutions" undertaken by sixties leftists, blogged here the other day. City Journal Editor Myron Magnet reinforces the point in "The War on Poverty at 40," a look back at themes developed in his 1993 classic, The Dream and the Nightmare: The sixties' legacy to the underclass:
Exactly 40 years ago, the nation embarked on two huge federal initiatives aimed at improving the lot of African Americans: the War on Poverty and the 1964 Civil Rights Act. The two programs, so different in their assumptions, turned out to be a giant natural experiment in social policy. Four decades later, with the results clearly in, we can confidently distinguish what works to uplift people from what doesn’t.
Even as the opportunity opened by the Civil Rights Act resulted in such dramatic gains for the vast majority of black Americans, the condition of a minority of blacks, perhaps one in ten, markedly worsened in the years after 1964, so much so that a recognizable underclass -- defined by the self-defeating behavior that kept it mired in intergenerational poverty -- became entrenched in the nation’s cities.
Blame instead the enormous changes unfolding in American culture in exactly those years: the sexual revolution, the counterculture’s contempt for the "system," the celebration of drugs, dropping out, and rebellion. When this change in our nation’s most fundamental values and beliefs filtered down from the elites who started it to those at the very bottom of the social ladder, the consequences were catastrophic. The new culture devalued virtues that the poor need to succeed and celebrated behavior almost guaranteed to keep them out of the mainstream.
At the heart of the War on Poverty was the utterly debilitating message that the worst-off were victims: that the larger society, "the system," rather than their own behavior, was to blame for their poverty, their crime, their failure.
The lesson on this 40th anniversary couldn’t be clearer. Freedom works; dependency doesn't.
Peggy Noonan's advice, in her blurb on Myron's bookjacket eleven years ago, was perhaps prescient:
This is a book for the nineties. It is original and honest and shrewd. I hope the members of the Clinton administration read this. Absorb it. And act on its insights.
Call it a cynical trianguation strategy designed by pedal-digit afficionado Dick Morris to win political points (we always do), but Bill Clinton did, in effect, "read this." Vowing to "fix it later," he caved to welfare reformers, and our now proud former welfare-mom fellow citizens and their kids are the greatest beneficiaries. Plus, celeb folk of color and of the left like Bill Cosby are recognizing the unforeseen consequences of the liberal, left-of-center worldview that is the sixties' greatest legacy and urging their sisters and brothers to just say no to welfare dependency.
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