Messaging matters.
When considering the social upheaval of the 1960s, for instance, the left has managed to package the parts favorable to the liberals in a neat little box: The March on Washington. Bobby Kennedy eulogizing Martin Luther King.
George Wallace in the schoolhouse door. Chicago Mayor Richard Daley’s police beating protesters at the 1968 Democratic National Convention as demonstrators chanted, “The whole world is watching.”
What the left has managed to excise from this package, meanwhile, is stuff like the Weather Underground, a left-wing terror organization that perpetrated dozens of bombings. The Black Panthers, now lionized as a symbol of black militant struggle, was a group that financed much of its activities through extortion and protection rackets.
There were the countless failed utopian visions, the minds left permanently adrift thanks to chemically aided “consciousness expansion,” the wreckage left by the free love movement and the idea that sex could (and should) be divorced from any concept of love, monogamy or marriage — all of these have been deftly left on the cutting room floor.
Instead, the decade is branded as one of peace, flower power and the triumph of love and justice. The reassuring tones of Robert Redford’s voice can narrate it, informing us all just how righteous it all was.
It’s safe to call the period we’re living through now the greatest social upheaval since the 1960s, but how how the left will manage to package it will be a bit messier. There are still the gatekeepers who are more than willing to elide over the parts that aren’t “mostly peaceful,” but social media keeps receipts. Like, for instance, what happened in West Allis, Wisconsin, on Friday night…
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