Age of Spectacle, No. 19
Chapter 4: The Rise of Cyber-Orality: Underturtle III, part 4; and a Counter-Obit
Today’s The Raspberry Patch finally completes the rollout of The Age of Spectacle’s Chapter 4. Chapter 5, “The Cultural Contradictions of Liberal Democracy,” comes next and will complete Part I—“Puzzle Pieces”—of the manuscript. Whew: A lot has changed since the first dollop of the manuscript appeared here on April 5. A major reorganization of the manuscript and too many lesser changes to the text to count render what was posted in the spring and early summer of the year nearly obsolete. Not that the earlier posts were not worth reading; but you got tangled in the construction process along with me, as you were warned you might. No harm done, probably.
This process of working and posting and reworking and such recently occupied a dream, and when I awoke from it I realized something both interesting and humbling: I garden as I write books. This time of year my garden tends to get a bit overgrown. I let the plants thicken and wander a bit, even if they intrude on pathways or yard, as volunteer squash plants are well known to do. I eventually pare back and harvest. Just the other day I harvested three kinds of basil for winter: Genovese, bathed in olive oil; Thai, bathed in roasted sesame oil; and Tulsi, bathed in spicy mustard seed oil. Yum, yum, yum.
And that is exactly how I write books. I let them get overgrown. I let the ideas take on lifepaths of their own, so I can see what shapes they will become, and what seeds they will form to grow still more ideas. Eventually I prune and harvest. This may not be the most efficient way to write a book. I know that since I have written some in more conventionally disciplined ways, but that was because the subject matter was narrowly enough defined to furnish its own clear principles of exclusion. Whenever I have tried to write a more complex and probing book, however, I have ended up with a version of my gardening method. My daughter consoled me when I laid this self-revelation out for her: “It’s the only way to do certain kinds of writing, since you can’t have the right answers before you work out the right questions.” Bless her.
Will more reorganizations and other lesser changes ensue? Probably. Part of the reason will be, as before, that my thinking matures as I learn and redact, and of course the world keeps furnishing irresistible tides of new material. I also gain from useful feedback from some readers who are personal friends. I know that I have not turned on the Substack “comments” switch; at the same time, I have also not erected any paywall, and partly as a result, I suspect, the number of Raspberry Patch subscribers keeps rising. Some subscribers pay monthly fees even though they need not do so, and that is both flattering and evocative of my gratitude. When next month we get to Part II of the manuscript, “Emerging Picture,” I may switch on comments and erect a low paywall. It comes down to whether having to waste time dealing with the inevitable trolls in a comments section is worth it for the revenue the paywall might produce. I do see the two “switches” as paired, since the right to participate in a discourse justifiably aligns with a tariff exacted for the privilege. I’ve not yet made up my mind.
As it happened, the Substack system’s email-length limitations made it impossible to jam all the rest of Chapter 4 into last week’s post, so the widowed-remainder leads off this week’s post. I’ve also provided the full revised manuscript outline at the end, as I’ve usually been wont to do whenever I have had the room.
But that still leaves a lot of space unspoken for, so I’ve popped onto the end of this post a comment hooked to a minor news item having nothing much to do with The Age of Spectacle. It amounts to a counter-obit, something I’ve done only once before in more than half a century, seeing as how appearing to speak ill of the recently deceased is not considered to be in the best of taste. Sometimes, if rarely, it is nevertheless necessary for the sake of truth and clarity. This comment ties into an earlier short essay—“Waltzing Down the Road to Hell,” Quillette, May 27, 2024—since updated and expanded. The fuller essay will appear in The Raspberry Patch probably sometime next month. So this comment may return to this space in a fuller context.
Otherwise, speaking of things that have little or nothing to do with The Age of Spectacle, I have thus far done one zoom seminar for my RSIS/NTU colleagues and students in Singapore, on August 15, entitled “Handicapping the Likelihood of a Kamala Harris Presidency,” and one short essay in the RSIS Commentary series, published on August 13, entitled “Fraught and Unpredictable: An Overview of the American Elections.” These efforts were designed to engage with a Singaporean infosphere, twelve times zones and a cultural galaxy or two distant from Washington, and both appeared before the DNC in Chicago this week. They may be of some interest to U.S. natives anyway. Both the recorded zoom session and the Commentary essay should be accessible for free on the RSIS website, for those who may be interested.
On we go to complete Chapter 4:
. . . . Take just one recent, April 2023, disintermediative example as illustration: The moronic but nevertheless dramatic perfidy of Jack Teixeira.
Is it possible even to imagine a massively damaging security information breech of the kind perpetrated by Jack Teixeira absent key features of the cyberlution? How could a 21-year old baby-faced Massachusetts Air National Guardsman dweeb get hands on SCI-level information in the first place were it not for technological change so outpacing the slow routines of Pentagon bureaucracy that no one even saw the potential for a problem until after the problem emerged? And this despite the earlier heads-up warnings provided by Manning, Assange, and Snowden?
Much more important to our line if inquiry, without social media, “dark” social media like 4Chan in particular, how could Teixeira have turned himself into a bigoted “virtual” grand guru of adoring game-playing zombie-ninnies from around the globe? How could such a group, which never actually assembled in a flesh-and-blood present, even have existed in the pre-cyber age? And who would have followed Teixeira absent the anonymity that hid his tender age, his encyclopedic insecurities and total absence of “guru” credentials—the anonymity that is, of course, the seductive hallmark of all QAnon-type pseudo-cabals?[1]
Teixeira acted out in the real world ultimately and did real damage, but he was living in a techno-warped fantasy bubble when he did it. He was a little god to his followers, a little guy behind a flimsy Wizard-of-Oz curtain that eventually got torn back by the contemporary equivalent of a little dog named Toto. He was not a whistleblower, a spy, a secrets-for-sale merchant, or anything that has ever existed before. He was a clueless fantasist in a dream world who is now, in a way, immortal, for the history books must include at the least a footnote about him as a pioneer in a novel if accidental vocation: pointless espionage. Everything about the so-called Discord leaks is ridiculous, and ridiculously imitative of bad fiction, except the consequences. That, frankly, was unpredictable.
Optimists No More
Americans are technological optimists on balance, or used to be. We mostly bought into the Whig idea of history from the start, believing that material progress and moral progress were adoring twins striding hand-in-hand into the gleaming future.[2] Aside from nuclear energy, there has never been a new technology that Americans did not take to market before thinking about its possible downsides: the Bonsack automatic cigarette rolling machine; monocultural farming; the internal combustion engine and the national highway system; the birth-control pill; and plenty more. So not predicting a Jack Teixiera is not a fluke.
The same has been true, obviously, for cybertech and its ever-expanding array of gadgets. We all remember the encomia predicted not all that long ago for those gadgets and the technology they embodied: It would be pro-democratic because it would give more people voice and agency; it would relieve isolation and loneliness; it would enable start-ups and small businesses to thrive and so reduce inequality. It all looks so embarrassing now. (It should, but it doesn’t always: Very similar forms of self-interested optimism now spout from the corporate world about Artificial Intelligence.)
We’ve had our fun, lots and lots of it, and one can point to some positive developments arising out of the new digital technology. When you think about it optimism itself is a species of fun, at least when it mimics a modality of escapism. So let us close this chapter with a simple review of ten interactive calamities that the cyberlution, left almost completely unbridled, has brought us in just the past few decades.
It has created an entirely new class of addictive behaviors that have in turn harmed the mental health especially of young Americans via the plague of social media.
Social media in particular has technically augmented the old technique of rumor-mongering, and as such has sired both disinformation (a.k.a. fake news) and information overload that, in tandem with the precipitous decline of print culture, has disorganized our stock of social knowledge about practically everything, many years in the making.
It has shot attention spans and quality attention capacities to hell, harming the readiness of most students to read books and write essays—in other words, to learn how to think, manage time, and constructively plan.
It has worsened our society’s alienation from nature and made us more, not less, isolated from each other.
It has helped to mainstream regressive zero-sum attitudes that have contributed to political polarization and incivility. It has in turn stimulated extreme and ahistorical debates about censorship and free speech as well as about guns, public health preparedness, and many other non-trivial public policy issues.
It has abetted the sexualization of children and the growth of conspiracy theories and cults, simultaneously pushing kids toward adulthood and adults toward childishness.
It has magnified the cognitive gluttony that is everywhere in the culture, further enshrining entertainment as the ultimate goal of an otherwise aimless civilization.
It has furthered the decay of moral reasoning and self-discipline, and accelerated the nadir of the Abrahamic faith communities that imbued American society with both, for there is little those communities can do to compete successfully with the graphic fantasy spectacle in a technologized attention economy.
It has created via the digital era’s “net effect” an oligopoly of just a few giant tech corporations that has proven so far beyond any form of responsible regulation at the state or Federal level, which in turn is further eroding trust in government.
Over a mere few years it laid the foundation for a fantasy-inflected reality-television presidency, duly and fairly elected. As a result it has put the future of the United States as a constitutional, classical-liberal democracy at risk and, with it, arguably jeopardized the security of the entire global commons.
Has any of this been intentional? Of course not; the blatherings of so-called cultural Marxism are nonsense, just another conspiracy theory among many. Nearly all of the cybertech movers and shakers convinced themselves that they could do well and do good simultaneously. Alas, it remains true that the smallest good deed is more to be esteemed than the greatest good intention.
A final caveat: It may seem that a focus on the new digitized orality and cyberaddiction suggests a kind of materialist, even quasi-Marxist, approach to political sociology. Given the unprecedented developments of information science and technology in recent decades, a technology that for the first time substitutes for human thought as opposed to human muscle, it is hard to resist the conclusion that the science-technology factor has been and remains the principal driver of recent socio-political change. And that is why those who see only benefits in the onrushing world of AI need remedial courses in both recent history and common sense.
That said, the science-technology factor is only one aspect of culture and, however important it may have become, it remains enmeshed in a dialectical relationship with ideas and symbolic conceptions of many sorts. If science and technology drive socio-political reality human beings still drive science and technology, after all. This is why any form of supposed technological determinism—either the plebeian “you can’t fight progress” surrender type or the apocalyptical Unabomber type—is an error.
This is, it should by now be clear, why the argument made here is not unifactoral or even causally unidirectional among its key elements. I wish the whole truth of the matter could be simpler to understand and express. Unfortunately, reality is not cooperating. If it had a hand, I think I know which finger would be raised and pointed toward us.
And now the promised Counter-Obit, beginning a mere eight paragraphs ahead:
. . . The basic thesis of my 1995 book Telltale Hearts: The Origins and Impact of the Vietnam Antiwar Movement, is that, contrary to widespread self-preening urban legend nurtured during the quarter century preceding 1995, the antiwar movement did not shorten the Vietnam War or lead to U.S. de-escalation and eventual withdrawal from Southeast Asia. It probably had only a minor impact on the skein of politico-military developments during the time the movement was most radically active, but to the extent it did influence developments it probably did so counterproductively. The protests most likely lengthened the war via a phenomenon known as the negative follower effect, a key theme and locution in a 1973 book by John Mueller titled War, Presidents and Public Opinion.[3] The movement probably got more people killed, Southeast Asians and Americans both, than would otherwise have been the case.
While Telltale Hearts’s core thesis was not entirely original to me—though the notion did occur before I became aware of Mueller’s book—my book revived it from the dust of intellectual memory. Mueller was too far ahead of his time to affect the recrimination-heavy debate that followed the April 30, 1975 fall of Saigon. Thanks in part to a quarter century’s worth of since-minted hindsight, I also interpreted the thesis through a broad cultural analysis absent from the then-extant literature. That interpretation added an original secondary thesis: However modest its impact on the ebb and flow of the war, the antiwar movement mightily advanced the mainstreaming of countercultural themes at home, a development with anything but trivial impact. It wasn’t what the movement demanded that made a difference, but how and for what imagined reasons it demanded it.
Plenty of wiser heads understood at the time that the campus-centric protests of the mid-to-late 1960s and early 1970s—especially at their most explicitly anti-patriotic, obscenity-laced, violent, and disruptive—aided the Johnson Administration and later the Nixon Administration in managing ruffled public opinion over the war. Far more Americans loathed the antiwar movement than had misgivings about the war and its managers. Having bought time using the negative follower effect as currency, these two administrations proceeded to lay down the policy traces they did, for better or for worse, including pulses of sharp escalation during the Nixon Administration as it tried, but ultimately failed, to craft a redemptive coercive diplomacy. Policy failure so profound that it could not be ignored even despite the blinding blandishments of groupthink is what caused the government’s change of heart, not attempts to levitate the Pentagon or other forms of stoned-out New Left shenanigans.[4]
If one appreciates irony as the art form of a coldblooded historical process, the pairing of a U.S. military strategy in Vietnam that was counterproductive with the counterproductivity of the antiwar movement arrayed in opposition to it is really hard to beat. If Edgar Allan Poe had written “The Gift of the Magi” instead of O’Henry it might have turned out something like that, a lot more cloying than the ever-wonderful original.
As a generation passed, however, the granularity of wartime political consciousness gave way to cascades of selectively amnesic wishful thinking. At the time, handicapping how antiwar movement antics might shift the domestic political calculus looking to the 1968 election, and then the 1972 election after it, was understood to be a complex business given the molten ambivalence of public opinion about the war. All that complexity washed away in the minds of most movement veterans who became certain in retrospect that “democracy in the streets,” to cite the title of one self-congratulatory mid-1980s memoir, changed the collective mind of the nation, thus forcing an end to the war.[5]
That revisionism, however, failed the most elemental logical test: Had the antiwar movement really been as broadly efficacious as its aftermyth claimed in transforming the mentality of the nation, that surely would explain why Democratic presidential nominee George S. McGovern trounced Richard M. Nixon in the 1972 presidential election.[6] Ahem: There was no changed mind of the nation. Insofar as the war became gradually more problematic to the American public as time passed and U.S efforts failed to achieve victory, the fact that Vietnam was the first televised war had far more to do with opinion shaping than anything the antiwar movement did.[7]
No matter how in-your-face they may be, facts are powerless to leverage egos so heavily laden with ideological flapdoodle that they become rationally immovable—especially when those egos, and the heroic stories they told themselves and younger others as the years rolled on, represented the vanguard of a new and enticing countercultural edge promising blameless hedonism and affluent ease to the upwardly mobile scions of the burgeoning middle class.
The years continue to roll on but the Vietnam antiwar movement aftermyth has, if anything, grown even stickier. A textbook-quality example is Harrison Smith’s August 9, 2024 Washington Post obituary of Randy Kehler.[8] Kehler was the antiwar pacifist, a leader of the War Resisters League (he ran its San Francisco office) who inspired Daniel Ellsberg to leak to the New York Times what became The Pentagon Papers.[9] Harrison describes that 1971 leak as having “galvanized the antiwar movement,” among other things. That statement may be true at the far margin of reality, but it is false as intended and as likely understood by the typical WaPo reader.
By June 1971, when Ellsberg’s leak became public, the radical phase of the antiwar movement was exhausted. The last big gasp of that phase was the October-November 1969 Moratorium demonstrations, which had included both centrist and radical elements in its organizing group. The Moratorium coalition split after those demonstrations and by 1970 two groups competed for leadership of the antiwar movement: the re-centered Moratorium and the still more radical new Mobe, now called The People’s Coalition for Peace and Justice.[10]
With the sharp if temporary escalation of the war in April-May 1970 with the bombing of Cambodia and Haiphong Harbor—an act of hopeful coercive diplomacy by a Nixon Administration seeking a route out of the war for the United States via what was called Vietnamization—campuses exploded in rage. Classes were suspended, exams cancelled, and, not incidentally, the Weather Underground consolidated itself out of the womb of the Mobe and started making bombs. But the movement as a whole nevertheless shifted back toward the center from whence it had departed after mid-1965. It did so partly because some inside-the-system mainstreamers against the war realized that antiwar radicalism had been counterproductive to mobilizing opinion against the war. By mid-1971, with the Weather Underground having gone radically feral along with the Afro-American shard of the radical antiwar core in the form of the Black Panthers, nothing much remained of the more radical organizational directorate.
When the Moratorium then tried to gin up large demonstrations during the spring 1971 semester, with no radical organizations helping to bring out the crowds, they mostly fizzled. By 1973, after the Nixon Administration ended the draft on January 27 of that year, the antiwar movement’s increasingly deflated balloon came to resemble a flattened used condom: The movement had had its fun but, alas, it was unproductive.
Why did this happen? Two reasons mainly.
First, it had become clear that the Nixon Administration was trying to wind down the U.S. combat role in the war without losing it, and in 1972 its main strategic tack to that end became public: the opening to China that, in theory at least, was supposed to restrain Soviet support for North Vietnam and thus provide lubrication for diplomacy.
But second, by 1970 at the latest, the surge of recreational drugs had arrived at scale in American youth culture, and many late Sixties radicals, now with a few more years behind them, moved on to other delights and causes. No one saw the transition gaining traction more clearly than Tom Wolfe in his classic The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test:
A very carnival! And it wasn’t politics, what he said, just a prank, because the political thing, the whole New Left, is all of a sudden like over on the hip circuit around San Francisco, even at Berkeley, the very citadel of the Student Revolution and all. Some kid who could always be counted on to demonstrate for the grape workers or even do dangerous things like work for CORE in Mississippi turns up one day—and immediately everyone knows he has become a head. . . . [H]e now has a very tolerant and therefore withering attitude toward all those who are still struggling in the old activist political ways for civil rights, against Vietnam, against poverty, for the free peoples. He sees them trapped in the old “political games,” unwittingly supporting the oppressors by playing their kind of game and using their kind of tactics, while he, with the help of psychedelic chemicals, is exploring the infinite regions of human consciousness. . . . .[11]
Just a last word on Smith’s contribution to the Vietnam aftermyth: He refers matter-of-factly to The Pentagon Papers having “revealed years of government lies and deceptions.” The Pentagon Papers began literary life as a classified secret history of the war ordered written in 1967 by Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara. Note carefully: McNamara was an antiwar movement bad guy par excellance; had he not ordered it written there would have been nothing to leak.
Why the order? The document, running some 7,000 pages, was assembled from the trove of memoranda and other documents in possession of the U.S. Government because McNamara wanted to know what had preceded his tenure so he could make better sense of the mess he had inherited. Not surprisingly, the research effort revealed no shortage of poor intelligence, misperceptions, sheer stupidities, incoherence-producing bureaucratic power plays, and “shaped” messages mainly from the Defense Department and the CIA to the White House—some of which then poured forth into public statements, some of which, in turn, were meant to palliate an increasingly restless Congress and electorate.
To depict this normal if desultory process as wholly a matter of “government lies and deceptions” is to engorge the corollary myth of the “deep state,” formerly called “the military-industrial complex,” that has now migrated with alacrity from Left to Right. Who thinks that if current U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin or his successor were to order a secret review of U.S. policy with regard to Russia from the eve of its 2014 seizure of Crimea, or maybe from the earlier Russian humiliation of Georgia in 2008, to the outbreak of war in Ukraine in February 2022 and beyond, the result would have a much different tone?
A former Marine, Daniel Ellsberg deeply distrusted and flatly disliked antiwar radicals, but Kehler, a self-anointed pacifist Quaker saint, was different: He was not angry, obscene, violent, or volubly anti-patriotic. He was not a Communist, never waved a North Vietnamese flag, and refrained from taking blotter acid as a routine recreational aid. That said, Ellsberg became the modal historical whistleblower, his iconic deed having become the default justification for showering praise on the oath-breaking Mannings and Snowdens out there, whatever their motives may have been and however much damage they did.[12]
It is therefore fair to say that Randy Kehler’s role in the publishing of The Pentagon Papers provided a boost to the by-then re-centered antiwar movement—though Harrison makes no distinctions nor suggests any. But to what palpable end exactly?
Alas, the Kennedy-Johnson Administration that had presided over the vast majority of the so-called lies and deceptions was already gone, and the newly “galvanized”—to use Harrison’s own adjective—movement failed to stop anything. Instead, it played an important role in nominating George S. McGovern for President in 1972, and it was McGovern’s massive defeat that in turn enabled the second Nixon Administration to further draw out the war, getting more people killed, for what ultimately became a failed exercise in coercive diplomacy. Had the U.S. Government far more rapidly exited its combat role in the war after President Lyndon B. Johnson’s throw-in-the-towel national television address on March 31, 1968, as some wiser heads in the Democratic Party then favored, the net reputational damage would not have been nearly as severe as that caused by the calamitous and highly telegenic fall of Saigon in late April 1975.
The truth is that the U.S. government exited combat in Vietnam the same way it entered: The Government led, and the people followed. The former was a mistake, and the latter amounted to admission of and tacit contrition for that mistake. In between the Marines coming ashore at Da Nang in February 1965 and the fall of Saigon a bit more than a decade later, the human wreckage qualified as countless and sickening folly, nothing very new in the annals of human history. The political fallout woven into the tapestry of subsequent U.S. history, meanwhile—well that has yet to really end.
The Age of Spectacle: How a Confluence of Fragilized Affluence, the End of Modernity, Deep-Literacy Erosion, and Shock Entertainment Technovelty Has Wrecked American Politics
Foreword [TKL]
Introduction: A Hypothesis Unfurled
Cyberlution
The Republic of Spectacle: A Pocket Chronology
A Spectocracy, If We Can Keep It
Why This Argument Is Different from All Other Arguments
Opening Acts and the Main Attraction
The Path Forward
Obdurate Notes on Style and Tone
PART I: Puzzle Pieces
1. Fragilized Affluence and Postmodern Decadence: Underturtle I
Government as Entertainment
The Accidental Aristocracy
The Agora’s Deafness to Classical Liberalism
The Culture of Dematerialization
Affluence and the Changing Image of Leadership
Neurosis, Loneliness, and Despair
Wealth and Individualism
Hard Times Ain’t What They Used to Be
Affluence Fragilized
Real and Unreal Inequality
The Net Effect
Dysfunctional Wealth
Searching for the Next Capitalism
2. Our Lost Origin Stories at the End of Modernity: Underturtle II
What Is a Mythopoetical Core?
Aristotle’s Picture Album
Faith, Fiction, Metaphor, and Politics
The American Story
How Secularism Was Birthed in a Religious Age
Regression to the Zero-Sum
Industrial Folklore
Bye, Bye Modernity, Hello the New Mythos
Mythic Consciousness and Revenant Magic
Progress as Dirty Word, History as Nightmare
Attitudes and Institutions Misaligned
3. Deep Literacy Erosion: Underturtle III
Trending Toward Oblivion
The Reading-Writing Dialectic
The Birth of Interiority
A Rabbinic Interlude
You Must Remember This
Dissent
The Catechized Literacy of the Woke Left
Reading Out Tyranny
Fakery Cubed: Chat Crap
4. The Rise of Cyber-Orality: Underturtle III Continued
The Second Twin
Structural Mimicry and Fantasized Time
Losing the Lebenswelt
Podcast Mania
The Political Fallout of Digital Decadence
Zombified Vocabulary
Where Did the News Go?
Democracy as Drama
Optimists No More
5. The Cultural Contradictions of Liberal Democracy
A Big, Fat, Ancient Greek Idea
The American Story Again, This Time with Feeling
Footnotes to Plato
Some For Instances
Opinion Gluttony
Revering the Irreverent
The New Children’s Crusade
The Wages of Fantasy
Pull It Up By the Roots
The Great Morphing
PART II: Emerging Picture
6. “Doing a Ripley”: Spectacle Defined and Illustrated
Astounding Complexes and Technical Events
Tricks
Illusions
Cons
Fakers and Frauds With Halos
Magnificos
Projectionist Fraud as a Way of Life
Old Ripleys, New Ripleys
Trump: Master of Contrafiction
Conspiracy Soup
Facticity Termites
Conditioning for Spectacle
7. The Neuroscience of Spectacle
Glancing
Seeing the Light
Eye-to-Eye
Surfing Your Brainwaves
McLuhan Was Wrong, and Right
Structural Shadows
Surfing a New Wave
Suffer the Children
Some Informed Speculations
8. The Mad Dialectic of Nostalgia and Utopia in the Infotainment Era
Ripleys on the Left
From Left to Right and Back Again
The Root Commonalities of Illiberalism
Spectacle Gluttony
Gratuitous Harm in Black and White
The Touching of the Extremes
The Wrongness of the Right
And Now More Sex
Beyond Feminism
The Irony of Leveling
The Imperfect Perfect
Vive la Difference?
Human Nature
9. Spectacle and the American Future
Bad Philosophy, Bad Consequences
Up from the Television Age
The Crux
Cognitive Illusions
Another Shadow Effect
Myth as Model
The AI Specter
A Sobering Coda
10: Epilogue: What Our Politics Can Do, What We Must Do
Policy Forlorn
Who Will Create the Garden?
[1] Teixeira’s case is not singular, merely uniquely damaging. Reeves writes of a man who spent 14-20 hours each day online honing his fantasy of being “a seasoned jihadi leader.” He was in fact “a powerless 20-something living with his parents in Florida.” Rothfeld, “The dark internet mind-set…”, p. B3.
[2] Not surprisingly, the idea of progress has been the subject of much scholarly interest over the years. The classic work of intellectual history on the subject dates from 1920: J.B. Bury’s The Idea of Progress. Among several others with more modern sociological perspectives brought to bear is Robert Nisbet’s History of the Idea of Progress, published in 1980 (republished by Transaction Press in 1994). Nisbet was already fretting back then that the idea of progress, which he associated positively with Christianity, was waning in the West. One can only imagine what he would think today, were he still with us.
[3] John Wiley published my 1995 book as well as Mueller’s 1973 volume and, as it happened, he served as a reader for my submission. That’s how we first got to know each other and, despite our different styles and views on some issues, we got along well enough to work successfully as author (him) and editor (me) on essay projects in subsequent years.
[4] My view of the war can be gleaned from three essays as well as from Telltale Hearts: “Aftermyths of the Vietnam Antiwar Movement," Orbis, Fall 1995 (reprinted in Current, March 1996); and “That Lousy War: Explaining Vietnam,” First Things, December 2000; and “Mythed Opportunities: The Truth About Vietnam Antiwar Protests,” Center for the Study of America and the West, Foreign Policy Research Institute, June 1, 2020.
[5] The reference is to James Miller, Democracy Is in the Streets: From Port Huron to the Siege of Chicago (Harvard University Press, 1987).
[6] For those who need a reminder (or had yet to be born), Nixon won the electoral voted of 49 states and garnered around 60 percent of the popular vote. McGovern won only Massachusetts and, for what little it was worth, the District of Columbia. That is a true, genuine, throbbing trouncing.
[7] A great deal was written at the time about the impact of television on popular opinion. For one postwar summation, see Michael Mandelbaum, “Vietnam: The Television War,” Daedelus 111:4 (Fall 1982), pp. 157-69.
[8] Smith, “Peace activist who inspired leaker of Pentagon Papers,” Washington Post, August 9, 2024, p. B4.
[9] David Halberstam’s The Best and the Brightest appeared 20 months after the leak, in November 1972, and it gathered far more readers than The Pentagon Papers did. The reason was obvious; The Pentagon Papers read like the unedited bureaucratic copy it was, while Halberstam was a very talented writer. But The Best and the Brightest could not have been written—at least not the way it came out—had it not been for Ellsberg’s leak.
[10] An accurate contemporary description of the state of play inside the antiwar movement is Francine du Plessix Gray, “The Moratorium and the New Mobe,” The New Yorker, January 3, 1970.
[11] That’s page 356 in the dog-eared paperback you’re likely to find somewhere. You could look it up.
[12] Harrison mentions in passing an add-on to the aftermyth of the antiwar movement: a 1997 docu-hagiography of the Kehler-Ellsberg connection, entitled “An Act of Conscience,” narrated by the Hollywood leftist Charlie Sheen.