Posted by
Malchickiwick on Tuesday, February 13, 2007 8:01:00 PM
It’s a long way from Port Huron to Park City.
Tom Hayden, the guru of the New Left appeared among America’s patrician class for the massive self love festival known as Sundance. Predictably, America’s bo-tox elite fawned all over Hayden, a man who performed heroic deeds during the Freedom Rides of the 1960s, and later in Chicago in 1968.
But Hayden’s knack for rubbing elbows with the country’s culture snobs exposes an inherent flaw in the version of American liberalism he helped articulate while a student in Michigan. And it helps explain the left’s utter failure since then – a disaster evinced by the fact that the country’s political center has moved so far to the right in the 45 years since Hayden and his fellow Students for a Democratic Society crafted the Port Huron Statement.
Back then, it was cute. A bunch of white college kids, awash in privilege, linking arms with America’s most truly oppressed and excluded. Their efforts helped kill Jim Crow in the South. They coherently argued against America’s “ruling myths,” and the hypocrisy of her liberty. They decried “power rooted in possession, privilege and circumstance.”
Then, sometime around Woodstock, they sold out.
They made heroes of rock stars. Turned mediocrities to millionaires. And their “counterculture” became just one more commodity at the grocery store.
Now, the America those pie-eyed students helped create is so far right that Dick Nixon looks something like Eugene Debs.
And still the left just doesn’t get it: You can’t rail against excess while sipping Moët et Chandon; you can’t argue environmentalism while guzzling megawatt after megawatt for your “film festival,” and you can’t deride American Imperialism if it’s the only reason you have a job.
Maybe someday the elitists of Sundance and Malibu will realize that they perpetuate the system they abhor, that they benefit the most from cultural imperialism and the global consumerism that has institutionalized world poverty. Maybe someday there will be a chance for real change.
But don’t expect a Park City Statement anytime soon.