Michael Lumish
One of the primary ways of thinking among twentieth-century American conservatives was a close-mindedness. Even a religious close-mindedness.
In the 1950s and 1960s, when conservatives held some power in American politics, they were widely mocked by the growing counterculture and the Beats and Kerouac and Ginsberg and Kesey -- and all that jazz -- led to the rise of The Movement.
The Movement.
It was the 1960s. It was anti-war. It was second wave feminism. It was the rise of the New Left and people like Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin and Bobby Seale of the Black Panther Party. It was also the rise of environmentalism and the movement to protect the planet, not to mention space exploration and people like recently passed Apollo 11 astronaut, Michael Collins.
These were people, whatever their political affiliation, who refused to be close-minded.
The Republican Party of the 1950s, with perhaps the exception of people like William F. Buckley, was rigid and close-minded and represented just the kind of people that liberals are pushing back against today.
The contemporary-left in the US today is just as close-minded and rigid and boring and authoritarian as were many Republican in the 1950s.
We will stand up against them today, just as we did yesterday.
