Positive Liberty

NPR ran a story today commemorating the 40th anniversary of the riots police brutality at the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago. The story, while generally interesting and almost informative, contained this stunning attempt to whitewash history:

Michael Heaney, a political scientist at the University of Florida, says that because of 1968, “we’ve now become a ‘movement society.’ ”

“What 1968 demonstrated was that protest could be an effective tactic for bringing about social change,” he says. “So important new protest tactics were invented: the sit-in, the large demonstration. And people learned that this was a way they could effectively influence the government.”

That’s right, the mostly white protestors at the Democratic Convention in 1968 led to the invention of the sit-in and large demonstrations. Those uppity nigras in the 1950s couldn’t possibly have had anything to do with it. It couldn’t be that the 1968 demonstrators actually learned some of their methods from those ig’nant southern blacks, could it?

And make no mistake: Heaney is (like me) very, very white, as you can see.

Is it really any wonder that Michelle Obama hasn’t always been proud of the U.S.? Even left-leaning academics and the liberal National Public Radio seem eager to give our collective memory a bad case of vitiligo.

I apologize on behalf of my profession (that Heaney is a fellow political scientist is galling–that anyone with a Ph.D. who studies social movements could make such a statement is appalling); really, we’re not all like that.

[Addendum: Why does it matter? Because the civil rights movement of the 1950s/60s was a voluntaristic collaboration of people who undertook great individual risk to protest against the worst thing government can do--discriminate among people on an arbitrary basis. The 1968 protestors opposed a war that sought (however unwisely in its implementation) to forestall a collectivist, coercive, ideology of government. They had every right to protest, I probably would agree with some of their issues, the cops were wrong to crack skulls, and yet their importance, in every respect, pales in comparison with the civil rights movement. It's a case of real freedom fighters vs. frustrated idealists, and Heaney has chosen to ignore the real heroes of liberty.]