Jeremy Varon (27 page)

For Baudrillard, the episode was not an example of “ideology,” in which elites or a culture of distraction dulled the public’s critical faculties.

Rather, it reflected the “authentic” inertia of the masses, which Baudrillard regards as the true source of their power.

Baudrillard’s analysis suggests that the antiwar movement invested the masses with false promise. Militants confronted the inertia of the masses in several ways. Like other opponents of the war, they experienced disappointment that the population did not mobilize in even greater numbers. The masses, conceived of as a
social totality,
resisted the antiwar movement’s moral and political charge. The numbers the antiwar movement manage to field never rendered it the unequivocal victor in the battle for America’s hearts and minds. However, within Baudrillard’s analysis, the problem was not insufficient numbers, Nixon’s cunning, or Americans’ approval of the war. Rather, the movement overestimated the expressive power of the masses—the very possibility that their univocal voice could be heard or represented. The image of Nixon watching American football on TV on November 15 while half a million people marched outside his house evokes Baudrillard’s example of the French public’s enthusiasm for the soccer match. Nixon’s actions only superficially functioned as a calculated boycott of the event. In this conventional model, he remains the representative of the silent majority as a prowar constituency; by watching TV—and college football at that, whose fan base is largely working and middle class—he led Americans in their indifference to, or contempt for, the march. From a more probing perspective, Nixon was the cynical champion of the majority he invented. With a still sharper lens, Nixon seems to embody the very immobility of the mass, its
constitutive
indifference. He serves now as the banal champion of the true, vexing silence of the silent majority that made it
impossible for either pro- or antiwar forces
finally to win the allegiance of “the masses.”

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Antiwar militants were also frustrated with the seeming passivity of the mass of people the movement did manage to assemble. The Weathermen and the Yippies upbraided the November crowd for not rioting in greater numbers. Others pitied the naïveté of pilgrims armed only with candles. Yurick cursed the marchers for failing to storm the White House, tear Nixon from the TV, and expose the fiction of the “absent and quiescent public” whose support he claimed. Yurick’s scenario almost perfectly enacts Baudrillard’s description of the unfulfilled vision of the left: it exactly pictures the moment when the masses, on the verge of seizing power and fulfilling their destiny, hold back. In assessing the reasons for that restraint, militants typically criticized their fellow activists’ insufficient appreciation of the imperialist character of the war, naïve faith in American democracy, or failure of courage. Baudrillard’s model suggests that militants were ultimately foiled by the implosiveness of the mass,
evident even in their own mighty ranks.

Baudrillard’s analysis, however, is vulnerable on two grounds. The first is political. In a muted, postsocial populism, Baudrillard celebrates the radical loss of meaning, as the silent majority repels attempts to impose on the masses values and opinions they do not possess. Indifference becomes a new form of the Great Refusal. He thus transforms a presumed vice into a virtue. The masses, failing as bearers of liberatory meaning, are redeemed as the agents of meaninglessness. To be sure, it may be valuable to demystify notions of “the people” or “the masses” as preexist-ing unities, capable of issuing unambiguous mandates or of fulfilling an historical mission of liberation. With such terms, New Leftists and other radicals obscured the diversity of the actual groups they sought to empower and pinned their hopes of victory on abstractions. Their highly general language of emancipation collapsed, in a sense, under the weight of its own vagueness.

It is harder to see the desirability of the broader loss of meaning and the kind of silence Baudrillard champions. It remains imperative that communities of common interest enter public spaces and agitate on behalf of political values. Their success presupposes both the capacity for group initiative and a political system that considers itself accountable to some conception of popular sovereignty. Relatedly, Baudrillard so thoroughly exults in the masses’ power of stubborn silence that he seems to deprive principled public statements of all importance. It is still important to speak up, even if through one’s voice, the masses don’t also speak.

And though the slogans “Serve the People” or “Power to the People”

may be rooted in reductive abstractions, they still make basic sense as

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ways of indicting the disproportionate power of the few, stressing the need for inclusiveness and equality, and expressing an enabling faith in the goodness of humanity.

Baudrillard’s analysis is also vulnerable in a descriptive sense. The 1960s were an era of extraordinary mobilization. Rather than grapple with the challenge of 1960s protest to his narrative of the rise of the silent majority, he simply issues the transhistorical axiom that one thousand will stand up while millions remain passive. In the United States alone, millions stood up against the war. It is not just that Baudrillard has his numbers wrong. There is an obvious sense in which it
did
matter, with the stakes of life and death, how many people were in the streets and what, so to speak, they were doing there. For Baudrillard, the 1960s are a blind spot that prevents him from seeing in “the masses” the capacity for both silence and expressiveness, implosiveness and explosiveness, absence and presence.

Applying Baudrillard’s analysis to the antiwar movement leads to consideration of the impact of protest, and violent protest in particular, on the war itself. Was violence, as is almost always claimed, essentially a product of impatience with the slowness of the democratic process? Did it unequivocally hurt the movement?81 Or did it in any sense advance the antiwar cause? The historical reputation of the Weathermen and others using violence hinges greatly on the answers to these questions.

If the antiwar movement was at a crossroads at the end of 1969, it was the government and military officials who planned and prosecuted the war who were largely responsible for the movement’s dilemma. While some activists were convinced of the futility of nonviolent protest, most still believed in the ability of peaceful, legal mechanisms to end the war.

But the government, by conducting its war strategy in secret and often willfully misleading the public, left activists to argue somewhat blindly with one another about their actual impact on policy and about which antiwar strategy was best.82

Tom Wells’s mammoth
The War Within,
widely considered the definitive work on the antiwar movement, helps to glean the reality behind the activists’ perceptions. By meticulously studying how key government officials responded to individual protests, Wells offers what amounts to an independent assessment—one benefiting from hindsight, detachment, and breathtaking research—of debates within the movement. He concludes that antiwar activity “played a major role in constraining, deescalating and ending the war.”83 The movement’s achievements included influencing Johnson to scale back the air and ground wars and Nixon to 144

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withdraw troops and limit attacks on Cambodia and Laos. Most dramatically, the October Moratorium and the pending November 15 demonstration played a role in Nixon’s withdrawal on November 1, 1969, of an ultimatum he had secretly issued to North Vietnam in the summer. It warned of “savage” attacks, possibly including tactical nuclear strikes, should the North refuse to surrender. Finally, Wells holds that the antiwar movement contributed to Nixon’s decision to phase out America’s military involvement in Vietnam.84

This impressive record ultimately yields a mixed set of lessons, if one reads Wells against the grain. Wells presents the situation of the movement as one of profound irony, whose consequences proved costly.

Though activists had more power than they commonly recognized, their

“failure to appreciate their actual political power hurt their cause.”85 That injury took several forms: limits on the display of antiwar feeling, caused by some activists’ antipathy to traditional legal demonstrations; bitter internal dissension in the movement, which limited its size and strength; and the inactivity of countless individuals who became convinced that their protest would make no difference. Wells uses knowledge of the movement’s influence to indict, if often implicitly, antiwar militants who lost faith in the democratic process. He targets their excessive cynicism about the responsiveness of the American political system to dissent and their dismissive attitude to peaceful protest.86 For Wells, the Weathermen were a misguided fringe and erred chiefly in believing that violence helped the antiwar cause and in drastically overestimating its appeal among the war’s opponents. (Former Weathermen do not necessarily reject these criticisms wholesale. In the 1980s, Jeff Jones described the November 1969 march as “one of the most important demonstrations of the whole antiwar period.” Recounting how it influenced the withdrawal of Nixon’s ultimatum, he explained, “People went home from the demonstration [saying,] ‘Half a million mobilized in Washington, and it has no effect.’ But years later we realized that, in fact, it was significant.”87

Larry Weiss went so far as to say that Weatherman “made a significant contribution to destroying the antiwar movement” by insisting, in essence, “that either you fight with a metal pole and a helmet or you are

‘objectively’ on the side of Nixon.”)88 The great moral of Wells’s story is that activists would have done better to stick with peaceful protest, no matter how ineffective it may have appeared.

Yet Wells also presents material that helps us to understand the frustration and anger underlying so much radical protest. He consistently shows, for example, that conventional forms of public pressure on the

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government limited only the
magnitude
of the destruction in Vietnam.

He thus undermines his central claim that antiwar activists should have been more satisfied with their comparatively subdued efforts and less inclined to pursue highly confrontational forms of resistance. Moreover, government officials kept from the public information about the scope and destructiveness of the war, such as the bombing of Cambodia (conducted in secret for over a year) or the massacre in Mai Lai (knowledge of which the government long suppressed). In short, U.S. conduct in the war
was often far worse than the war’s opponents had been led to believe.
Having known the “hidden truth” might not so much have convinced protesters that they were making a difference as sharpened their sense that they were not making nearly enough of a difference. The escalation of protest, not moderation, might have been the result of more complete information.89

More significantly, Wells provides evidence to suggest that militancy and even violence played a role in the movement’s success as well. In his telling, government officials feared more than the loss of a popular mandate for the war; they also feared the threat to the legitimacy of their power and to domestic stability that militants posed. The fierce rhetoric of protesters, the violence at demonstrations, the sabotage, the numerous trials, the need for troops to guard government buildings, the campus turmoil, and, eventually, the numerous bombings all bespoke a national climate, not merely of dissatisfaction with a policy, but of hostility to the government and authority generally. The high-level administration officials Wells interviewed were typically unable to say in hindsight what kinds of antiwar actions were most influential. Instead, they stressed the impact of antiwar protest as a whole. For some, however, the militancy made a strong, even terrifying, impression. From their experience with protests, Secretary of Defense Robert MacNamara (under Johnson) and CIA Director Richard Helms developed an acute sense of the danger of the “mob.” In 1969, one official warned of “internal physical turmoil,” including the widespread rioting of whites and blacks, should Nixon deliver on the November ultimatum given the North Vietnamese.90 Another described existing levels of violence as “the most severe internal threat” the country had faced since the Great Depression.91 Henry Kissinger, the German-born secretary of state under Nixon, conveyed his sense of the danger antiwar radicals posed by making repeated comparisons between the America of the 1960s and Germany’s Weimar Republic of the 1920s and 1930s, which collapsed under the pressure of internal dissension and violence.92 This somewhat 146

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different model of the movement’s effectiveness suggests a second, competing level of irony that Wells never fully acknowledges: activists’ perceptions of their powerlessness also led to a ratcheting up of protest; insofar as the resulting strife and fears of broader instability adversely affected the war effort, the antiwar movement’s “ignorance” and attending

“excesses” had benefits after all.

The two versions of the movement’s influence drawn above recall the two conceptions of the masses’ power that Baudrillard rejects as illusions: their capacity to speak and to explode. Baudrillard’s skepticism proves instructive when discouraging unqualified praise for the politics of mass mobilization and misleading when denying “the masses” agency altogether. In his introduction to Wells’s volume, Todd Gitlin describes the antiwar movement as one of the outstanding “triumphs in the history of democracy,” in which “what had started as a rivulet, the protest of a few, grew into the torrent of a vast and representative majority.”93 Gitlin appropriately lauds the movement for its civic initiative, as millions of people with no special political endowment influenced deeply entrenched military and political powers in the prosecution of a war. The magnitude and even heroism of that feat is indisputable. Gitlin errs, however, in assuming the ultimate transparency of the democratic process. In his formulation—one standard in tributes to antiwar activism—the movement succeeded by finally winning American’s hearts and minds and then forcing the war to an end. One may ask, at what point did that “vast and representative majority” finally materialize? When did the public unequivocally reject the war?