Op-Ed Columnist: The Right Gets Its ’60s

"Something's happening here.

What it is ain't exactly clear."

— Stephen Stills, 1966

The right-wing campaign to sabotage the Affordable Care Act has driven a lot of normally temperate people past the edge of exasperation. Pundits have described the crusade as crazy, stupid, arrogant, dishonest, cynical, ridiculous and politically suicidal. And that's not just liberals talking. Jennifer Rubin, who blogs from the right for The Washington Post, says of the defunding obsessives, they "have absolutely no idea what they are doing." Fox News seems perplexed, and eyes are rolling at The Weekly Standard. Big Business is appalled. Elders of the Republican right, like Karl Rove, are harrumphing their disapproval.

And yet the zealots press on, threatening to hold the rest of the government hostage to kill a health care reform that (a) is the law and (b) shows every sign of being a good thing for the country.

What's happening here ain't exactly clear. But I have a notion: The Republicans are finally having their '60s. Half a century after the American left experienced its days of rage, its repudiation of the political establishment, conservatives are having their own political catharsis. Ted Cruz is their spotlight-seeking Abbie Hoffman. (The Texas senator's faux filibuster last week reminded me of Hoffman's vow to "levitate" the Pentagon using psychic energy.) The Tea Party is their manifesto-brandishing Students for a Democratic Society. Threatening to blow up America's credit rating is their version of civil disobedience. And Obamacare is their Vietnam.

To those of us who lived through the actual '60s, the conservative sequel may seem more like an adolescent tantrum than a revolution. For obvious starters, their mobilizing cause is not putting an end to an indecent war that cost three million lives, but defunding a law that promises to save lives by expanding access to insurance. Printing up unofficial "Obamacare Cards" and urging people to burn them is a silly parody of the protest that raged 50 years ago. But bear with me.

At the heart of the '60s radical zeitgeist was a sense that the government had forfeited its legitimacy, and that the liberal establishment had sold out or lost its nerve. At the heart of the right-wing uprising is a similar sense of betrayal: the president is not just an adversary but an alien; the Republican leadership has lost its principles; the old rules don't apply.

Like the original '60s, when revolutionary fervor coexisted with the celebration of free love and pharmaceutical bliss, the new '60s has a growing libertarian flank. And just as the 1960s "movement" had its share of camp followers who showed up for the sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll, the Tea Party attracts political freeloaders drawn by the addictive drugs of power and television attention.

Both political upheavals occurred against a backdrop of cultural disorientation, in particular a new-media invasion and a shrinking zone of privacy. In the '60s, the rise of national televised news disrupted the comfort of homogeneous communities. Issues that had been generally confined to a private sphere — especially issues of sexuality and women's rights — burst into public debate. In the '60s, as David Farber of Temple University has written, Americans saw "all of life's chances as infiltrated and even determined by the binds of the political." Today's upheavals likewise take place in an unsettled time of dissolving boundaries, of ubiquitous media and diminishing privacy. Conditions are ripe for the rise of new leaders, some of whom will be demagogues and charlatans.

I tried out my theory on Todd Gitlin, a Columbia professor whose books include "The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage." He pointed to one important similarity between then and now, and one significant divergence.

"The very strong parallel is the go-for-broke mood," Gitlin said. The rules of order and civility of language go out the window because "you feel this is a matter of apocalyptic urgency." Obamacare is not Vietnam, "but for them it is." The health care law, the main components of which are just being implemented, embodies for the right an abuse of government power verging on tyranny, which justifies the most extravagant response.

The main difference, Gitlin said, "is that Abbie Hoffman never would have run for the Senate. The Tea Party, for all of its complaints, and the Republicans in general have a long history of taking their dissent within the party."

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