New Left, New Right, New New Left, New New Right

NOTE: This is a post that I drafted in April and never had time to go back and edit for publication. In the spirit of the message stated, I'm finally just going to publish, and not worry about "perfecting" it or correcting phraseology that may convey a meaning other than what I really intend. Fuckit. In the wake of this week's election sweep, especially the elimination of Congressman Alan Grayson from his office and the suspension of Keith Oberman from his cable talk show, the crux of the statement below is badly needed and can't wait any longer to be put out there.

"Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Sheep talking rhetoric. Sexism is bad. Racism is bad...." I'm not sure if I am recalling this exactly right, but this was the gist of Abbie Hoffman's critique of the way the Old Left articulated its concerns in the late 1960s and early '70s. He advocated a more artistic, expressive way of political messaging in his book, Revolution for the Hell Of It.


The methods he advocated and employed (John Lennon and Yoko Ono called Abbie and his co-Yippie Jerry Rubin "artists" in describing their tactics) were super-effective at attracting and holding the attention of the media and the masses in the late 1960s and early '70s, but did not catch on widely with other parts of the Left, old or new. It was the New Right that adopted their methods beginning with Jerry Falwell and his Moral Majority, Inc., and continuing into the present day with Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin and many others.


Hoffman and Rubin were geniuses at using creative shock tactics and formulating catchy, memorable memes that had a tendency to "go viral," to use a term that did not exist at the time but describes the communicative process perfectly. (We called it "myth-making" back then.) They overstated and exaggerated and put things into terms that could not be ignored. They were sensationalistic and over-the-top and in-your-face. And they were not afraid of appearing to be completely crazy. In fact, they thrived on the attention it produced.


Sound familiar?


I have often thought that the ONLY reason the Left was "winning" in the late Sixties was because of Hoffman, Rubin and the few others like them who infiltrated the dominant culture of the U.S. with their "media manipulation" and myth-making abilities. They certainly captured MY imagination as a 13-year-old hearing about them on Chicago radio station WBBM when I was home sick with the Asian Flu the winter of 1968, listening to stories about their efforts to win a permit from the city to hold their demonstrations during the Chicago Democratic National Convention. Just the name "Yippie" was so clever and funny, after hearing of "hippies" for several years, it was impossible not to listen to the stories. But it was also that they were truly funny in many other respects--Abbie's wild curly hair was completely outrageous at that time, for example.


In recent years, the only politically Left public personalities I have seen who have ANY sense of humor that I can think of off the top of my head are Michael Moore, Lynn Winstead, Al Franken and Stephanie Miller. And of those, only Michael Moore was actually primarily a political activist who then used media in a creative way, as opposed to someone whose main role in life was to be some kind of a professional humorist or entertainer who also happened to hold progressive political beliefs. And then, after he began to make money, Moore just seemed to suck it all up and spend it on fast food. By now he should have started another SunDance Film Festival or some kind of scholarship for radical filmmakers. Where does all that money go?


For Right wing activists, it makes natural sense to be a professional propagandist, because they are de facto representatives of the status quo and commercialism and moneyed interests. For the Left, the only way a progressive political activist can be truly authentic and credible is to be primarily an outsider who finds ways to use the existing system to get their message across and effect change, but remains basically too independent from it to ever risk becoming a sell-out to it. (Something that happened frequently with the Left, especially in their incorporation into universities as faculty members--for example Bernadette Dohrn and Angela Davis and Todd Gitlin. Universities may be seen as a bastion of raving radicalism by the Right, but in fact are a place where the Ruling Class is cultivated, refined and connected.)


Abbie Hoffman did this (authentic activism, I mean) better than any other radical figure in my lifetime. When he received offers to endorse products, he laughed them off. When he was paid a huge advance on one of his books, he immediately donated ALL of it to the Black Panthers. When my small independent political tabloid interviewed him in New York in 1981 after he emerged from the Underground, he had a phone call from the New York Times that he turned down because he was busy with us, a 20,000-circulation alternative paper in Minneapolis. "The Times?" he asked. "Which one?" It was only years later, after he settled into an "elder statesman" role in middle age, that he finally indulged a small portion of his speaking fee proceeds into a boat, and even then felt conflicted about enjoying it. He was clearly driven by his principles and his ideals, and cared little about aggrandizing or enriching himself personally. He derived infintely more thrills out of getting to be the hero, outlawed by the authorities, than accumulating material junk or "security."


Abbie's portrayal in "Forrest Gump" is all the proof that is needed of his impact. The film is based entirely on finding the absolute most definitive symbols of the period of history spanning the second half of the 20th century, through the Civil Rights era into the Space Age. Abbie is there, in his American flag shirt (something he went to jail for, remember--this was totally sacrosanct at the time, an utter taboo that only became normalized later), speaking at the Washington Monument. "There was this man giving a little speech...and he liked to use the 'F' word a lot. 'F' this, 'F' that. And every time he used the word, the people--well, they cheered!"


For progressives to get anywhere in counteracting the move to the Right that began with the election of Reagan in 1980, they would need to get back to the kind of courage and heroism that Abbie embodied, very much in the mold of previous American heroes like Tom Paine and Henry David Thoreau, who rejected personal gain in favor of their ideals. One of the most self-defeating errors of the Left has been the notion that a "hero" is antithetical to progressivism, that it is a symptom of Westernism that must be expunged from the lexicon in order for social justice and peace to prevail. The Left has to get over this stupid notion. The Left also needs to speak plain English and pull the giant stick out of their collective ass. Stephanie Miller, on her nationally syndicated radio show, makes reference to "stick-up-the-ass liberals." This has been a chronic condition. The Yippies were despised by most leftists during their own time because of their flamboyancy and outrageous theatrics and rhetoric. Only years later did a tiny handful of intellectuals re-claim them as contributors to whatever degree of revolution had occurred.


The basis for using outrageousness as a legitimate tool for change was, according to Abbie and Jerry, Marshal McLuhan's "The medium is the message." Rubin wrote in his book "Do It!" that his wild long hair, beard, beads and hippie garb were inseparable from his ideology. He remarked that if he was watching a "radical" on television who was wearing a suit and tie and had a normal haircut, he never trusted them. Think back... It was Reagan who won the cultural image war for the Right when dissidents began to feel that to be credible they had to be fashionable in terms defined by the Right. There was a point in the 1980s where the Democrats began to try to outdo the Republicans in terms of flying American flags at their conventions.

The Left was the side calling openly for violent revolution in the 1960s and early 1970s. The Black Panthers were the ones appearing in public with sidearms and semi-automatic weapons. Although Abbie distinguished himself from Jerry in that he liked "the clenched fist with a flower in the hand" as opposed to just the clenched fist, there was a kind of macho forcefulness as lefties embraced Castro and Che as idols and joked about the bombing of the Bank of America and other symbols of U.S. "pig" culture. The conservatives were the ones gasping and shaming such terroristic talk. Today Rachel Maddow and Keith Oberman make a living gasping and shaming kooky, wild-eyed Right wingers and Tea Baggers from the Left.

The image from National Lampoon's "Animal House" of the stuffy sorority girl removing her rubber gloves after trying to jack off her preppie boyfriend, impotent with anxiety from dealing with the anti-authoritarians at the Delta house, is perfect to represent the dynamics of political domination. Whichever side is REALLY winning is the one partying and having fun. Remember at the end of "Animal House" when the characters are freeze-framed and there is text showing what happened to each of them? John Belushi's character became a U.S. Senator.

When he was a young political activist, John Kerry tossed his medals over the wall. When he ran for president, he was "swift-boated" for it. Had he embraced his own past instead of letting it be used against him, had he said, "Hey, things were a lot different in the 1960s and early 1970s," and explained how his current beliefs were derived from and connected to what he had done as a youth, he might have won the presidency.

Tea Party Movement: Before and After, Part I--WAY Before...

The Boston Tea Party was a revolt against "huge corporate tax cuts for the British East India Company, the largest trans-national corporation then in existence." Radio talk show host and author Thom Hartmann has done a great job of summing up the historic event and making an analogy between East India and Wal-Mart on his website.

While the present day Tea Partyers on the Right have claimed the founders as if the only thing the colonists cared about was taxes (and as if there was no distinction between being taxed by the British crown and being taxed through a government based on self-representation), it is far more accurate to draw an analogy between the ideals of the contemporary political Left, rather than the Right, and the ideals of the founders. The Left would be much more successful if it embraced at least the ideals of the founders if not the founders themselves, rather than writing them off backhandedly and mindlessly as mere "slaveholders," as it so often does.

An effort to do just this was made in the mid-1970s. An organization called the People's Bicentennial Commission, led by Jeremy Rifkin, formed as a response to the ultra-conservative official government commission that was created to lead the celebration of the 200th birthday of the United States of America. The PBC took the position that spirit of the American Revolution should be rekindled, that it was time to demand radical change again, a second American Revolution to bring us back to the original principles of the founders. Unlike today's Tea Party types, who are politically far Right and completely misrepresent the founders (to put it mildly), the PBC pointed out that those original principles, in fact, leaned distinctly to the idealistic Left of the late 1960s and early 1970s.


The PBC denounced the Bicentennial planning that was underway by forces supporting the status quo, pointing out that corporations were using the event to promote their own selfish interests, and that their interests were contrary to those of the country as a whole. The PBC characterized examples of images of the founders being used to sell cheesy products "blasphemy." The PBC published quotes from the founders that reaffirmed their ideological radicalism and deistic religious (or non-religious) leanings.

"I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations, which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength and bid defiance to the laws of our country." -Thomas Jefferson, 1814

A small booklet entitled "First Principles" became a favorite of mine. I carried one around and handed out copies. It contained statements that were surprisingly radical--at least, surprising to those who had never read the writings of these leaders. By this point in our nation's history, the too-comfortable Middle Class had no clue what the founding principles had really been. There was the famous story about someone who went around to people on the street and read excerpts from the U.S. Constitution without identifying the source of the clips, and then asked them for their impressions of what had just been read to them. It might have been done on the Candid Camera television show.

"Communist!"

"Pinko!!"

"Hippie propaganda!!!"

The notion that figures like George Washington, Samuel Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Ben Franklin or others were leftist revolutionaries was a stunning one in the 1970s. By this time the Daughters of the American Revolution had re-cast these early American leaders in a hopelessly staid, stereotypically conservative light. They were as out-of-sync with the turbulent times as anyone could be. They were these dainty, shrivelled up, matronly old, anachronistic biddies who were laughed at by the Youth Movement. They were our "royalty," a despicable thing to be in any revolutionary time period, 1960s or 1770s.

Of course, yesterday's revolutionaries, once in power, are already no longer revolutionaries. Two hundred years later, they are almost de facto conservatives, if their ideas have taken root and endured. By definition, conservatism is resistance to change, and any system that has lasted for 200 years and continued to be based on the same principles, IS conservative.

"God forbid we should ever be twenty years without such a rebellion... what country can preserve its liberties, if its rulers are not warned from time to time, that this people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time, with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure." -Thomas Jefferson

Scene: Office of the Minnesota Daily student newspaper, 1976. An editor is slouched behind his typewriter and picks an argument with me about Jefferson's quote advocating a revolution every so many years.

Editor: "He didn't mean it LITERALLY! Of course it was just a way of making a point."

Me: "Of COURSE he meant it literally. He was one of the leaders of a bloody revolution himself!"

Editor: (whine) "Don't be ridiculous. He was just being poetic, he wouldn't be in favor of that."

This went on and on for a half hour. He wouldn't budge. He was totally locked into viewing the quote strictly from within the terminology and norms of his own lifetime in the third quarter of the 20th Century. There was no way of lifting him out of that framework. Just as my editor was unable to remove himself from the immediate experience of a time period when violence was an unthinkable recourse for effecting political change, unable to comprehend the genuinely violent nature of the American Revolution because he saw Jefferson as a conservative figure from the past rather than a revolutionary actor in his own time, the Tea Partyers today can't seem to unlock the meaning of the writings of the founders in terms of the idealistic ideological principles they were espousing.

"All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit." -Thomas Paine

My editors groaned when I insisted on drawing a weekly Bicentennial cartoon taking quotes from "First Principles" and juxtaposing them against contemporary images that updated the messages. I was inspired to do these partly out of the promulgation of banal factoids spouted off in nationally televised "Bicentennial Minute" spots. One featured cartoonist Garry Trudeau, confirming my criticisms of the complicity of cartoonists who were employed by the corporatized establishment press. When I drew a salute to Thomas Paine to be run on his birthday which simply showed a crosshatched etching of him and the dates of his birth and death, my editors "joked" that they would rather see it run on the anniversary of the day he had died.

"There could be no such thing as landed property originally. Men did not make the earth... It is the value of the improvements only, and not the earth itself, that is individual property... Every proprietor owes to the community a ground rent for the land which he holds." -Thomas Paine

The PBC's Rifkin wrote and released another booklet for the Bicentennial. Common Sense II argued that the greatest threat to democratic or republican self-government in the U.S. by the 1970s was the result of a few families grabbing off a huge share of the wealth and using it to control the government. He wasn't talking about the descendants of the founders, but the super-rich--the Mellons, the Rockefellers (one of whom was Vice President at the time, depicted in the cartoon above which I drew in 1976 next to one of the quotes from "First Principles"), and others like them.

Rifkin was no doubt zooming in on families rather than corporations because he wanted to draw a contemporary analogy to Thomas Paine's assault on the notion that royalty granted by inheritance. But this focus on families was a more accurate and a smarter tactic for the Left than the current demonization of either corporations or "white males" in general, which alienates a huge percentage of those who would otherwise support and participate in creating a vital and effective progressive movement.

"If particular care and attention are not paid to the ladies we are determined to foment a rebellion and will not hold ourselves bound to obey any laws in which we have no voice or representation." -Abigail Adams, 1776

"Does it follow that it is right to enslave a man because he is black? Will short curled hair, like wool...help the argument?" -James Otis

Americans have a love/hate relationship with corporations, on some level no matter how much we despise their greed and irresponsibility we all realize that we benefit greatly from them in many ways. We also know that the fact that many if not most if not almost all of the worst crimes against humanity that have occurred in modern history have been perpetrated by white males does not mean that all or even most white males are guilty. As long as the Left simply demonizes corporations and "white males," it is doomed to defeat by the Right.

1985 Brain Trust radio show commercial, taking off on a popular breath mint commercial:

Voice #1: "The Brain Trust is a capitalist group!"

Voice #2: "The Brain Trust is a communist group!"

Both Voices in unison: "The Brain Trust is two (click) -- two (click) -- two groups in one!"


What really made the little "First Principles" booklet so provocative wasn't imagining how it had played 200 years earlier, but applying the principles to the present day.

The writings of the founders, if revisited, continue to be undeniably liberal or even radical, despite their long shelf-life. I first began reading their works as a teenager at about the age of 14, when I ran across a small paperback copy of Thomas Jefferson's letters at a used bookstore. Soon after devouring every paragraph, re-reading many parts over and over just to achieve an understanding what for me as a young person were very difficult to understand because of their archaic language and deep meanings, I moved on to reading Thomas Paine's collected writings--Common Sense, Rights of Man, Age of Reason. I then got into reading about the Constitutional Convention and the Federalist Papers. I read what I could by John Locke and Rousseau, two of the philosophers often referred to as influences on Jefferson and Paine.

"The contrast of affluence and wretchedness continually meeting and offending the eye, is like dead and living bodies chained together." -Thomas Paine, 1796

Thankfully, there were no right wing talk show crackpots around to pervert my interpretations of what Jefferson and Paine meant or drive me away from reading them and discovering the meaning for myself. No Palin, no Beck, no Limbaugh. No Orwellian deniers reversing the true intent of the authors of those great documents. The meanings were clearly not supporting the neo-feudalism that is being sought by these radical reactionaries who like to use American revolutionaries as psued0-subdeities onto whom they can hang a totally faked-up set of postmodern libertarian connotations. Tea Partyers should sit down and read the writings of Jefferson and Paine for themselves. As my high school English teacher, Mrs. Mett, used to say, "Don't read some regurgitated synopsis, read the original work!"

1975: I am a guest on the "Paul Helm Show," on KSTP-TV in Minneapolis-St. Paul. My controversial cartoons have landed me a shot on the Sunday night show. Helm, a rabid right-winger for his time, asks me "What shaped your mind?"

"Mind? What mind?" I reply.

(audience laughter)

"You said it, not me!" he barks. But then he prompts me further.

"Well, I read Paine, Jefferson, Madison..."

"Am I to take it that you've been hanging out at the John Birch Society Bookstore?" he comes back, "because that's the sort of thing they peddle there."

"They peddle it but they don't READ it very much, do they?"

(audience applause)

As bad as the Right is in maligning the founders in their misappropriated idolatry of them, the Left is worse for their stupified demonization of them. The oversimplistic writing off of the founders as "slaveholders" whose motivations for revolution were purely based on self-interest, the mythology that has prevailed among the Left for the past 20-25 years, has been both wrong in fact and a huge tactical error. It was a cute and clever attention-getter early in the postmodern progressive movement. It did not apply to all of the founders, for example Thomas Paine, who never owned slaves and passionately argued for its abolition. Even in those to whom it did apply, the struggles of conscience of Jefferson and others who wanted slavery to end merited a more sophisticated examination. A more productive strategy would be to focus on those like Paine as the truest revolutionaries, and to recognize that even in revolution some of the worst travesties are so deeply entrenched and intertwined with the current cultural, economic and political systems, it will take some time to wrench them out of existence.

"Government is instituted for the protection, safety, and happiness of the people, and not for the profit, honour, or private interest of any man, family, or class of men." -Mercy Warren, 1788

More important was the IDEALS, many of which departed radically from the past, and some of which were instituted and formed the basis for further progress. When Abbie Hoffman was on trial as part of the Chicago Seven (Eight) for his role in inciting the police riots of 1968 at the Chicago Democratic National Convention, he pointed to the pictures on the walls of the courtroom and suggested that he and the others who were on trial for leading the demonstrations had more in common with the "longhairs" up there than did the prosecutors who were trying to throw them in jail.

Abbie, who grew up near some of the most well-known American Revolution battle sites, was in touch with what would resonate with the largest mass audience, which is why he was so successful as a guerrilla communicator. He knew how to put revolution into terms of baseball, sex, rock'n'roll. He had an uncannily savvy knack for being able to articulate difficult ideas in pointed metaphors and crystal clear memes. For this reason, he posed an actual threat to the status quo, unlike most of his over-intellectualizing peers, and certainly nothing like the cynical opportunists who by the late 1970s had co-opted the New Left's idealism for their own selfish purposes--hijacked it just the way the New Right hijacked the Republican Party in the 1980s-90s.

The Left of 2010 has become the conservative movement of our time. Just as the DAR had rendered the founders' radicalism quaint in the image they reformed them into, the liberals of today are primarily privileged special interest group members who cynically use the struggles of the New Left radicals of the 1960s for pure self-interest, not for the ideals that were originally set forth in favor of civil rights, equal opportunity, social justice, peace. An Abbie Hoffman today would never be able to pull off what he did in his time.

I highly recommend spending some time at Thom Hartmann's website to read this article and others. His radio show is probably the best on the air right now. Before we discuss the irony of the name taken by the Tea Party of the year 2010 and lay out some guidelines for a strategy for the progressive movement for the next decade, it is important to understand the original Tea Party which it blasphemes by copying its title.

Text Copyright 2010 by Minne HA! HA! Magazine, Inc. / cartoons here were drawn by Pete Wagner in 1976, All Rights Reserved by the author-artist / http://www.kartoons.com/

Welcome to the 2020 Brain Trust Blog

The history of Brain Trusts:
Franklin D. Roosevelt had one in the 1930s.
John F. Kennedy had one in the 1960s.
Pete Wagner had (or more accurately, was had by) two, one in the 1970s and another in the 1980s, and is working on three.
The East Side Brain Trust was a group of friends in Milwaukee, where I spent the first 19 years of my childhood (going on over 50 now). They called themselves a "marijuana cooperative" but I was a teetotaler and was always trying to recruit them to get involved in guerrilla theater and pranks, with limited success.





The 1985 Brain Trust was formed in 1981. If that is a bit confusing, here's the story, in brief: I had been working as a political activist largely on my own since 1970 when I organized an environmental group (ECO) in high school. My main method was what was then called myth-making or "media manipulation." (Later called "guerrilla communication" by my friend, Abbie Hoffman.) In 1981, I worked with the Minnesota Public Interest Research Group to put together a series of political consciousness-raising lecture/shows at Coffman Memorial Union at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. At the same time, I was hawking my first book, BUY THIS BOOK, at the Union bookstore and at Dinkytown News, a newsstand just off campus. Between the shows and the book-selling appearances, I met several students who liked the message of the book about combining fun with activism, and we organized the 1981 Brain Trust.



The main co-organizers were Dian Wall, Tom Pettersen, Jim Hobson, Scott Adams and Aaron Helfman. We confronted "The Destroyers," right wing rabid evangelists Jed Smock, Max Lynch and Cindy Lassiter, Rev. Jerry Falwell, the Peters Brothers and others with good-humored guerrilla theater to express our disagreement with their views.

The name "1985 Brain Trust" came out of the view that "Most people think the world will end by 1984--either Orwellian totalitarianism or a global thermonuclear war. We're optimists. We think the world will last much longer. At least until 1985."