Jeremy Varon (26 page)

“Hearts and Minds”

instead virtuous majority opinion”; thus, “the conjectural incoherence of the invisible masses [became] a conspicuous political asset.”68 Researchers testing Nixon’s claim shortly after it was made concluded that the idea of the silent majority was a “cleverly designed symbol” that might

“become more important for the reality it creates than the reality it describes.”69 That is, the impression that the public supported the war might, in circular fashion, lead individual Americans and their political representatives to support the war. Most disturbingly, Nixon appeared to believe in his own myth of the silent majority and used this purported mandate to justify continuing the war.

As argued in chapter 2, the New Left experienced a crisis over where political reality lay. Militancy of an extreme sort provided one response by assuming that force was the essence of politics, that violence was the essence of force, and that to engage in violence was therefore to experience the “real” of politics. But these assumptions were neither universally shared on the left nor always held with great consistency or confidence; “reality” remained something of an impossible object of political and existential desire. Debate over the war pointed to a broader-reaching crisis of the real within specifically democratic politics, whose essence is popular sovereignty. Questions abounded: Which was the
real
majority? Who was a
real
American, and what did he or she
really
think about the war? As the antiwar movement struggled with these questions, it developed very different conceptions of its task.

Two possibilities haunted the antiwar movement, with crucial implications for those pursuing violence. The first was that the government might ignore its demands, even if it organized a clear antiwar majority.

The movement would then have to find strategies other than mass mobilization to bring the war to an end. Weatherman, in arguing for violence, presupposed that most Americans opposed the war. Ayers explained that by 1968,

[We felt] that we’d reached the end of a certain road, that we’d convinced the majority of the American people—or so we thought—to oppose the war, that we’d won the battle of hearts and minds. . . . And yet the war pounded on with an escalating madness [and with] no end in sight. And no matter how many people we could convince, no matter that we drove a president from office [Johnson] and defeated the guy who carried his water [Humphrey], we still couldn’t stop it.70

In assuming the existence of an antiwar majority, radicals, however tenuously, claimed a popular mandate for their militancy and violence, de-

“Hearts and Minds”

137

spite the widespread condemnation of such tactics inside and outside the movement. For the most part, the Weatherman imagined itself to be fighting a “People’s War” in America against U.S. imperialism. Like the insurgencies in Vietnam and Latin American countries, their war was to have the support and active involvement of the masses. Weathermen who met with North Vietnamese officials in Cuba in 1969 were particularly moved by accounts of their resistance, in which the whole of North Vietnam seemed to rally as “one heart, one mind” in opposition to the United States.71 The Vietnamese in fact communicated to American activists that it was their duty to organize as many people as possible into the antiwar movement and keep using institutional channels (such as lobbying Congress), even while engaging in more radical protest. Militancy, within this model, would accent a larger, domestic struggle against the war that included many levels of participation.72

The second, more disturbing possibility was that the antiwar movement might not secure a real or even perceived majority. Throughout the movement’s life, the dominant faith held that opposition to the war would necessarily shift from the stance of an insurgent minority to that of a majority. Paul Goodman explained in 1967: “We assume that Americans do not ‘really’ will the Vietnam war but are morally asleep and brainwashed . . . that there has been a usurpation by a hidden government which makes policy, and that an awakened populace can throw it off.”73

Whatever their diligent efforts to awaken the populace, activists had to contend with the war’s sustained popularity and the widespread dislike of demonstrators among large segments of the public. (A fall 1969 poll showed that 69 percent of Americans thought that antiwar protesters were “harmful to public life.”)74 In the absence of a popular mandate, the rationale for “the war at home” changed; no longer could it be teth-ered to an antiwar majority.

Apparently taking for granted the existence of a prowar majority, the Yippies and other New Leftists stressed the need to build a youth rebellion that, given the structural importance of young people for the war, would be able to end it without widespread “establishment” support.

Weatherman went so far as to argue at times that it was fighting not only an entrenched power structure but, potentially, the tens of millions who supported it. Protest violence, in this understanding, did not gain its legitimacy from the America people. This does not mean that the Weathermen dispensed with appeals to the majority altogether. Instead, they redefined
which majority
commanded their loyalty. The largest share of northern and southern Vietnamese, their thinking went, wanted a unified, 138

“Hearts and Minds”

communist Vietnam, or at the very least freedom from U.S. aggression; violence served this international mandate. More broadly, Weatherman justified its conduct by pointing to the anti-imperialism of the peoples of the Third World, who could be seen as a
global
majority.75

Reflecting on the fate of the slogan “Serve the People,” Robin Palmer more viscerally expressed the ambiguities in “the war at home.” “Serve the People” was a rallying cry for leftists throughout the globe, from Chinese communists to the Black Panthers, SDS, and Germany’s Red Army Faction. It placed faith in the common man and woman and announced activists’ ultimate accountability to their needs and desires. In the United States, the slogan was particularly relevant for radical minority groups, such as the Panthers and the Puerto Rican Young Lords, whose community programs sought to provide services for those whose basic needs the economic and political system did not meet. The slogan also implied that conservative forces in the government and among the public were the greatest obstacles to the success of popular progressive movements.

Palmer described how in 1968, with the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy, it appeared that “the right, the reactionaries, had more guns than we did, had more power than we did” and

“knew how to get what they wanted better than we did, in spite of the fact that it didn’t seem that they were as numerous as we were. . . . When Nixon talked about the silent majority, we scoffed.” In 1968, Palmer took part with other Yippies in running a pig for president behind the slogan

“Take heart, good people, Rome wasn’t destroyed in a day” and derisively exposed with his guerrilla theater what he felt was the illegitimacy of an electoral process that, failing to yield a serious antiwar candidate, did not represent the apparent antiwar majority.

Yet as the continued popularity of both Nixon and the war sank in, Palmer concluded,

Nixon was right. We’d all go home to our parents and they’d say “Of course Nixon is right. We like Nixon, we don’t like you, even if you’re our son and daughter. . . . Get a haircut, get a job!” . . . The silent majority supported the war. They did. . . . There’s no way we could say that the people of the United States had a good heart, and that if only the people, the true voice of the people . . . had been able to express itself, there would have never been a war in Vietnam—that’s bullshit.

Weatherman’s J. J. echoed Palmer’s cynicism in an irreverent adaptation in 1969 of the left’s vaunted slogan. At a 1968 SDS convention, J. J. had proposed half-seriously that the group adopt the slogan “Serve the People

“Hearts and Minds”

139

Shit.” Bill Ayers later suggested that Weatherman adopt “Fight the People,” insofar as its enemies included all those Americans supporting the status quo. (Ayers, Jim Mellen recalls, would quip to his critics:

“You’re supposed to serve the people. . . . What ya gonna do? Open a restaurant?”)76 Years later, Palmer explained the meaning of J. J.’s slogan and why he identified with it: “That’s all [the people] deserved. The people didn’t deserve shit because of segregation. The people didn’t deserve shit because of McCarthyism. The people didn’t deserve shit even because of capitalism and the great disparity between the wealthy and the poor. The people deserved shit because of the Vietnam war, because we were behaving as a country the same way as Nazi Germany behaved.”

Arriving at this view was a disillusioning journey. In the early 1960s, Palmer had been confident, in his words, in the “perfectibility of man”

and in the virtues of the democratic process. His optimism was affirmed by Lyndon Johnson’s position on civil rights. Palmer reports being so overjoyed hearing on the radio Johnson’s speech before Congress urging passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act that he got out of his car in busy New York City traffic to cheer his hero. Yet Palmer’s “sentimentalities”

about democracy and respect for Johnson were soon destroyed by the Vietnam War. By the late 1960s, he directed his outrage at the entire system, whose people
chose
to fight the Vietnam War. When asked years later on whose behalf he had protested, Palmer leapt up to say: “The Vietnamese! The Viet Cong!”77

Antiwar radicals, in short, advanced two dramatically opposing visions of the “war at home.” In one version, it was to dislodge a policy that flouted the public’s will. In another, fought by a minority within a minority, it was to use any means necessary to end the aggression in Vietnam, irrespective of the public’s wishes. The tension between these versions can be recast with respect to democracy: Was the Vietnam War a failure of democracy because the government steadfastly refused to heed the people’s call for peace? Or did democracy fail because an “immoral majority” decided, in democratic fashion, to support a war that was nonetheless unjust? Proponents of the “war at home” never came to a consensus on which was the case; indeed, it was possible for activists to sustain both views at once or to move between them as their faith in the good will of that elusive entity “the people” ebbed and flowed. Mellen complained of this confusion, “[T]o take the slogan Serve the People made little sense [but] to just take the slogan, turn around, and say, ‘Fight the People’ made even less sense. What we really needed was a clear-cut, strategic conception of who we were fighting for and who we were fight-140

“Hearts and Minds”

ing against, or to what extent we were fighting against somebody . . .

[or] against what they conceived to be their interests.”78

In his essay “In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities,” the French philosopher Jean Baudrillard sheds light on these ambiguities by refo-cusing attention on the vocabulary animating debates over the war. Baudrillard, like Mosse, asserts the constructed status of “the masses.” Absent any precise “attribute, predicate, quality and reference,” the masses have no “sociological ‘reality’” in any “
real
population, body, or specific social aggregate.”79 They are, for Baudrillard, the ultimate signifier without a referent—the empty center of a whole “code of analysis” used to interpret wide-ranging social phenomena. For Baudrillard, however, the absence of empirical masses is more than a case of their social construction. In a loose periodization, he accepts the validity of an earlier, eighteenth-century political vocabulary that invoked “the people”—

though technically inaccessible—as still a more or less meaningful and representable referent. Under the dominance of what Baudrillard calls

“the social,” codified with the rise of Marxism, “the masses” have replaced or transcended “the people” and are seen as the bearers of the final transparency of politics, economics, and history. Their fictional status is qualitatively worse. They can neither express themselves nor even figuratively be made to speak. Yet Baudrillard grants the masses a special kind of agency. They repel attempts to inspire them with a moral, political, or historical calling, to unlock their explosive potential, to charge them with “the sublime imperative of
meaning.
” Defeating every effort at their excitation and representation, they are a fundamentally implosive construct that absorbs meaning—an
essentially
“silent majority” whose very immobility, indifference, and silence are its revenge on those who claim to speak in its name.

Baudrillard directs a portion of his argument against the left, for whom the masses have functioned as both the object and subject of emancipation. The masses “drift somewhere between passive and wild spontane-ity, but always as a potential energy . . . today a mute referent, tomorrow, when they speak up . . . a protagonist of history.” Despite efforts to awaken them, they have remained “inaccessible to the schemas of liberation, revolution and historicity” and resist even more modest efforts to incite their moral and political interest. The French public’s overwhelming preference in 1977 to watch a qualifying match for football’s World Cup rather than the news—quite dramatic at the time—of the extradition of an attorney for the Red Army Faction to Germany typified

“Hearts and Minds”

141

this refusal of meaning for Baudrillard. As if to break the left’s conspiracy of silence about the masses’ historical failure, Baudrillard queried: Can anyone ask questions about the strange fact that, after several revolutions and a century or two of political apprenticeship, in spite of the newspapers, the trade unions, the parties, the intellectuals, and all the energy put into educating and mobilizing the people, there are still (and it will be exactly the same in ten or twenty years) a thousand people who stand up and twenty million who remain “passive”—and not only passive, but who, in all good faith . . . frankly prefer a football match to a human and political drama?80