Arguably the most surprising political magazine in the country today is The American Conservative, because it is firmly — passionately — anti-imperialist, pro-local, and pro-poetry. It’s the one magazine I read today that makes me rethink who I am on a routine basis.
Here’s a fascinating column by Bill Kaufman, about a mostly forgotten SDS leader from the 60’s who preached reconciliation between the New Left and the Old (populist) Right.
Maybe we should be thinking less about honoring veterans of foreign wars, and more about avoiding wars in foreign nations. For the planet, and for ourselves. Kaufman writes:
If Obama bears the standard, the revolutionary
posturing of Bill (“kill your parents”) Ayers and Bernardine (“bring
the war home”) Dohrn will serve as the synecdoche of ’68 in Republican
minds. Prepare for another aphasiac episode in what Gore Vidal calls
the United States of Amnesia. But I say to hell with Ayers and Dohrn.
Let us remember the other New Left—a humane, decentralist, thoroughly
American New Left that regarded socialism as “a way to bury social
problems under a federal bureaucracy,” in the words of Carl Oglesby,
president of Students for a Democratic Society in 1965-66 and a key
figure in its Middle American wing, which extended from independent
anti-imperialist liberals to trans-Mississippi “Prairie Power” radicals.
The column goes on to explain why Oglesby deserves our attention, now more than ever, Keep in mind that some of the writers for this magazine are strong supporters of Obama. Who would’ve thunk it?
Kit Stolz 
You know, I really don’t disagree with anything in the Kauffman article. I’m a Christian who leans towards the Dorothy Day, Ivan Illich, Jacques Ellul wing of Catholicism. Lately I find myself sympathizing with the (non fascist) far right wing of the Catholic Church. They’re just not interested in compromising with “The World” and I can certainly understand that impulse.
I went to a rally against the war recently. It was put on by the ILWU (longshoremen) who were calling an eight hour job action to end the war.
Strong stuff, and I expected to be very excited. Instead, I found myself surrounded by old lefties, many of whom I knew when I was a teenager. I’m 54 and they hadn’t changed a bit. It was really very depressing. I found myself wondering, “Whose side am I on anyhow?”
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