Do you think the generation of '60s-era progressives have done a good job passing their wisdom and practice down to the next generation?

Probably not. But "generation" is an unwieldy entity. It's not generations that learn. But it is networks and groupings and circles, and those that came out of the '60s haven't for a long time functioned as such. There's no return address.

Is there a modern equivalent of Students for a Democratic Society? I'm wondering how you'd compare SDS to ANSWER, MoveOn...

It's apples and prickly pears. I mean, ANSWER is a cult. It's a tightly organized sect that operates in the shadows and tries to bull its way into power. SDS was a much more open and democratic organization -- at least until the bitter end. Couldn't be more different.

Yet ANSWER is the group most strongly associated with the Iraqi antiwar protests...

ANSWER was originally the movement against the war, but I think they were superseded. ANSWER couldn't bring themselves to criticize Saddam Hussein. They seemed to believe that any use of American power, anywhere, under any circumstances, was illegitimate and imperial ... The sort of fanaticism they displayed did allow them to jump forward getting permits for protests and so forth, but it also very quickly limited the support they received, which is why other people started organizing other networks, which then did mobilize the largest demonstrations: for example, the one in New York, which was not done by ANSWER -- though they were standing there with signs trying to look like they had. In reality it was United for Peace and Justice.

There's no question that sectarian groups can accomplish very specific objectives in a big hurry. What they're not good at doing is moving public opinion, or moving the real political forces.

So it sounds like ANSWER would be more comparable to the Weathermen, if anything...

The history is inverted, but yes, the spirit is similar in that they, like the Weathermen, talk a sort of abstract language which doesn't make sense to anyone not standing in their immediate circle. It's a jargon that only sounds plausible if you take it as an emotional rant. They're not only speaking impractically about the world, but they're also impenetrable to people who don't already have the code book.

It's this abstractedness which I think marks them both. They're talking about a world that's unrecognizable to most people.

What about MoveOn?

Also tightly organized, but also hospitable to ideas from its membership. I think MoveOn is an extraordinary achievement, but it's not really a membership organization -- though maybe it's quietly in the process of becoming one. I don't know. If I get an e-mail from MoveOn, am I a member?

SDS was a much more ambitious phenomenon, maybe indecently so, but it had the hope of becoming a sort of "ideological home," as opposed to being simply action oriented. But MoveOn is absolutely brilliant for its setting.

So there's no modern equivalent at all.

No, absolutely not. There hasn't been anything like it.

In today's circumstances, the minute anybody tried to do something like that they would automatically be pulled apart by identity groups and by big fights about priorities, and I think it might be fairly nightmarish. But I do think there needs to be some kind of coordination of people who want to do practical politics on the left -- emphasis on the word practical. The Green Party is a misguided attempt at that machinery. I mean if the Green Party wasn't obsessed with autonomy, and if it had set out to become a force in the Democratic Party, it would I think have been useful.

Speaking of the Green Party, you've made some really strong statements about them in the past. What's your take on 2004?

I don't know. Last I saw, they're debating it, Nader's meeting with people asking if he should run, and I don't pretend to understand their organization. But almost everywhere I went on my book tour I met both unreconstructed Greens as well as people who had rethought the strategy as a result of the calamity that came crashing down on our heads in the 2000 election.

It's obviously a lot harder now to make the case that there's no difference between the parties. I think it was a foolish case in the first place, but today all you have to do is say the words "John Ashcroft," "war in Iraq," to make it very, very difficult to make the claim that this is exactly what Al Gore would have done or even close to it. But there is a phenomenon in politics -- and the left isn't any more exempt from it than the right -- of cognitive dissonance, in which you bend the world, you hypnotize yourself into seeing the world in such a way as to make it unnecessary for you to rethink your first premises.

So just as George Bush may well think that he found weapons of mass destruction, and most Americans think that there were Iraqis involved in 9/11, you'll find Greens who desperately cling to a falsehood about political reality which makes it unnecessary to rethink their premises.

OK, but when I talk to Greens they say, "Well, if the Democrats ever included our issues, we'd be Democrat, but if not we need our own candidate." And when they're not making that argument they say the problem is the Electoral College, that if we just had runoff voting everything would be jake.

Well, yeah, the problem is that the U.S. is located between the Atlantic and the Pacific, and if they'd only move it to the center of Europe things would be different. And if my grandmother had wheels she'd be a bicycle. [Laughs.]

It's always stupefying to encounter fundamentalists of any stripe, people who have built a protective shield around their minds. People who are impervious to practicality, who don't learn from experience, are always dangerous. And now we know them by their fruits.

Some people say we have to be nicer to them -- I'm not especially nice, as you can hear, on the subject.

I've also run into people who've thought it out themselves, because they weren't impractical. They performed an experiment in 2000, and the experiment turned out to be catastrophic. And they picked themselves up and moved on. It seems to me that if the evidence around you isn't sufficient to tell you made a gigantic mistake, then I'm really at a loss.

But speaking practically, you can make the case that the Republicans do a much better job than the Democrats at including their extremists.

You bet! They've turned a lot over to them. But theirs are tremendously disciplined, and they turn out to vote. They don't bolt from the Republican Party. I give an example in the book about the earlier history of the right wing in Southern California. Thinking that they were about to break through and win control of the party in the early '60s, they then lost the gubernatorial nomination contest, and some of them were ready to bolt to a third party. And they were talked out of it by their financial backers, on the grounds that they should be practical. And they stuck around long enough to nominate Goldwater, and although he was clobbered, that campaign launched the career of Ronald Reagan. Because they care deeply about power, they were persuaded to be practical.

And that's the crucial difference. If you shudder at the thought of power, you don't belong in politics. You can't emote your way to power, you can't moralize your way, you have to strategize your way to power. The right has produced leadership between the saints and the politicos, people like Ralph Reed and Pat Robertson, people who can harness the spirit without ever turning their backs on the prospect of real political power. And it got them a long way. They're still there, and they're central.

And the result is that the Republican Party now has 30-40 years of experience of holding their crazies with the promise of rewards -- either at the judiciary level, or making inroads on abortion, or walking the line on gay issues and so on. They've been able to distribute enough goodies to keep them loyal. They've also produced generations of politicians, like Bush himself -- not to mention Bush's brain, Karl Rove -- who know how to dance between these worlds and keep everybody reasonably content.

While the left is always ready for carnivorous action against one of its leaders. They're always ready to shred a standard-bearer if he or she fails to deliver the maximum. They're very quick to send somebody out the safe house of sainthood, because they've let them down.

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