David Sirota: Behind the GOP’s OWS Backlash
David Sirota is a best-selling author of the new book "Back to Our Future: How the 1980s Explain the World We Live In Now."
In reaction to the growing Occupy Wall Street protests, the Republican Party has dusted off some of the oldest cliches in our political discourse. There’s Rep. Paul Broun, R-Ga., making the contradictory claim that Americans exercising their First Amendment right to protest represent an “attack on freedom.” We have House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, R-Va., slandering peaceful demonstrators as a “mob … pitting Americans against Americans” only a few years after he praised Tea Party protests for “fighting on the fighting lines of what we know is a battle for our democracy.” And there’s GOP presidential front-runner Mitt Romney, who once bragged about his father protesting with Martin Luther King, now calling the protests “dangerous … class warfare.”
The uniting idea behind these screeds is this: a group of socialists, radicals, anarchists and other assorted Dirty Hippies is co-opting demagogic demonstrations against universally recognized Bad Guys as part of a stealth attack on Mom and Apple Pie.
If the narrative sounds familiar, that’s because it is part of the ongoing Republican war against the 1960s — one first openly declared by Richard Nixon with his fear-mongering diatribes about the alleged battle between the Good ”Silent Majority” and the Bad people participating in mass protest movements. In a revealing interview on Friday with fringe-right-wing radio host Laura Ingraham, Rep. Peter King, R-N.Y., cogently tied together all the disparate GOP jeremiads against the Occupy Wall Street protests by saying, “I’m old enough to remember what happened in the 1960s when the left-wing took to the streets and somehow the media glorified them and it ended up shaping policy.” He added that, “We can’t allow that to happen.”...
By explicitly attacking how the 1960s “shaped policy” rather than merely criticizing how the decade changed mores and aesthetics, King has gone much farther than such empty banalities. Indeed, his statements on Friday expose a taboo truth beneath the GOP agitprop: the modern Republican Party doesn’t just object to 1960s-style imagery, tactics and political performance art, it objects to the concrete legislative results of 1960s mass protest — results like the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, statutes protecting women’s rights, the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency and the end of the Vietnam War....