Somebody just brought up, in a Q&A with Bruce Sterling, the fact that '18 was the 50th anniversary of the Whole Earth Catalog; they wanted to know what he, as someone who worked on the WEC and its sequel magazines Coevolution Quarterly and Whole Earth Review, thought its legacy was. And I'm going to brutally (and possibly unfairly) summarize his answer as: it didn't have one, because it was an interesting, but fundamentally bad idea. Sterling pointed out that the Whole Earth organization, and its products, were about where can you find the tools to do interesting things *by yourself* -- and nothing that lasts ever gets done by lone individuals.
Thinking about that, it's important to remember that the Whole Earth Catalog was huge on tools and textbooks for urban and suburban readers who were moving to rural areas, abandoning "civilization" to found subsistence farms, or at least for people who were fantasizing about doing so. I read about it at the time, and read more about it in first-person histories in the '80s: the disastrous '64 "Summer of Love" and the election of Richard Nixon in '68 felt, to a lot of leftists, like the end of the world: nothing more could be done to save, let alone advance, the social democratic project of broadly shared prosperity and universal human rights. And we certainly did see the high-water mark of post-World-War-II liberalism during Nixon's years in office; it's been nothing but retreat since then.
And after hearing Sterling's comments about the misguided (but fascinating) Whole Earth project, I wonder if the fact that so many leftists gave up on organizing altogether after '68 wasn't WHY things have only gone downhill since.
Personal story: to save me from increasingly murderous bullying, my parents dumped me in a downright cultish private high school funded by the John Birch Society, and I came out of it a Reagan Republican, a dedicated follower of Ayn Rand. But once I got out from under that cult, into the real world, and once I did some reading of actual academic historians and not the political hacks the movement promoted, it took me only a couple of years to flip back to the Rooseveltian social democracy I had been raised in. But it's left me complaining about something ever since ...
WHY IN THE HELL WERE THE BIRCHERS THE ONLY PEOPLE IN AMERICA MAKING THE CASE FOR THEIR BELIEFS?
That's what I spent decades waiting for: for the Democratic Party, or ANY other mass organization, to stand up and actually make the case for, to recruit followers of, the basic ideas behind social democracy. It's what drew me and so many others to Sanders' doomed '16 run, what drew me to even more doomed (and flawed) politicians like Edwards before him -- I wanted somebody who would recruit an actual movement for an alternative to the Reaganomics consensus.
So here's the thing I want to say at the end of 2018, two years into the reign of Donald Trump. DO NOT REPEAT THE MISTAKE THE BABY BOOMERS MADE back in the late '60s and early '70s. Do not react to Donald Trump the way that they reacted to Richard Nixon, by disengaging altogether from society and concentrating on what can you do, as a lone individual, to live a safer or more virtuous life or whatever. Band together. If you can do it in a political party, awesome, but even if you can't, stay engaged.
Because there's historical precedent: social democracy itself didn't emerge full-grown from Franklin Roosevelt's brow like Athena bursting from the forehead of Zeus. It originated when the muck-raking journalists, and their subscribers, banded together behind Upton Sinclair's political movement in the first years of the Great Depression. Upton Sinclair ran headlong into the same buzzsaw that took down Bernie Sanders, and for all of the same reasons: old people in both parties weren't looking for a new set of solutions, they were only interesting in arguing about who should manage the same old (Wall Street endorsed) solutions.
But it was the vast numbers of young people that Upton Sinclair brought into the Democratic Party, who stuck with the Party even after their leader's political destruction, who stood up for Roosevelt in '32 even though he wasn't really one of them, but then held his feet to the fire throughout the '30s in exchange for defending him from the center-right Democrats in the '34 mid-terms and the '36 primaries. You've never heard of most of them. But they saved the world, and built almost everything worth protecting in America.
Don't be a hippy in '19 and '20. Be a reform democrat. Don't retreat into your home and fantasize about going back to the land. Speak up. Organize if you can. But stay involved.
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