Backlash is inevitable

Another criticism leveled at the movements we analyzed is that they produced a broad-based “backlash” in the American electorate. Harrington says that disruptive protest in the 1960s produced “the mean spirit exploited by people like Richard Nixon,” and Bernstein warns that disruptive protest is “dangerous.” There is a large measure of unreality about this criticism. It is as if a group or class struggle can, when carefully managed, proceed without engendering conflict. Obviously, the labor struggles of the mid-thirties helped to produce the corporate-led backlash that began in 1938 and culminated in the “witch-hunts” of the late forties and early fifties; and just as obviously, the black struggles of the fifties and sixties helped produce the backlash of the seventies (to which the student and anti-war movements also contributed.) But how could it be otherwise? Important interests were at stake, and had those interests not been a profound source of contention, there would have been no need for labor insurgency  in the one period or black insurgency in the other. Put another way, the relevant question to ask is whether, on balance, the movement made gains or lost ground; whether it advanced the interests of working people or set  back those interests….What was won must be judged by what was possible.

–Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward, Poor People’s Movements

Advertisement