Things have changed dramatically since 1968, of course, and the sort of violence (and revolutionary, messianic hopes for society) that accompanied political events then, are highly unlikely to occur in the context of the 2008 campaign.  Nevertheless, the approaches of the two candidates do show parallels with those of 1968, and much to the benefit of one over the other.

            Hillary Clinton is the candidate who is still stuck in the political past and is still fighting the wars of the Sixties, still trapped in the adversarial thought patterns of that era.  This is, perhaps, to be expected, as the sixty-year old grew up and became politically active in precisely these years.  She came from a well-to-do background, and was initially a Republican before her experience at Wellesley made her an activist and a feminist. (The fact that she now portrays Obama as the elitist and herself as the straight-talkin' triboon of the people is quite ironic given her actual background.) Clinton has always had many of the combative instincts of the ‘68ers.  One can argue that the antagonism she has evoked from the "vast right-wing conspiracy" and other right-wing Republicans was and is based very much on the Right's - correct - sense that Hillary is still fighting the wars of the Sixties.

Ironically, she combines this combative, quasi-populist attitude with relying on the top-down approach of the Democratic political machine, which, when one thinks about it, was another problem with the progressive Left of the Sixties, whether in the Johnson administration or opposed to it - everything was for the people, very little was expected to come from the people.  There is something truly elitist about the big-state solutions of the Great Society programs, and this is precisely what Clinton's policies would seek to emulate today: top-down, "we know what is good for you" programs where the citizen has little input.  It is a machine-client, interest-based model that is traditional and it is perhaps this that appeals to the less educated, and more traditionally "Democratic" blue-collar white voters that are her main base (especially in Appalachia).   Clinton's comment about Johnson being as or more important than King in getting Civil Rights legislation passed may or may not have been dabbling with the race card, but it most certainly revealed this top-down faith in the political establishment as opposed to the politics of the grass roots.

Clinton seems also to have retained the tendency to divisiveness and sectarianism of the 68ers.  One might argue that it was Mark Penn's proclivity to see the American electorate as only a series of discrete voting blocks that gives this impression of a segmented view of American society.  Yet comments by Clinton since Penn's departure suggest the reason she was so reliant on Penn in the first place is that she shares his dissectory view of demography.  The comment about "hardworking white people" very much fit this view of American society being just a collection of constituent groups, without any commonality to speak of.  Her recent accusations about misogyny in the media, suggesting that the failure of her campaign has been due to the sexism of American society (when the Democratic electorate who has not voted for her has been in a very large majority a female one) also point to the fact that she has not gotten beyond the identity politics and competing categorizations of the Sixties and its aftermath. 

What I think such comments reveal is that her picture of the world is still one in which society is composed of a series of competing groups engaged in a zero-sum game in which the aim must always be to obtain 51% support in order to get your side, your constituents and your interests represented, and dominant, at the table of public goods.  The world, and American society, remain a dangerous, Hobbesian place, where the hopes of the more idealistic 68ers are revealed to be pipedreams, ignorant of the divisions, racial, sexual, cultural, economic, which have governed human action, now govern human action, and will ever do so.

To be continued....