The Vanguard of Failure

... is probably too cruel of a title for the post, but I like the phrase, so I'll leave it.

R. D. Walker blogging at The Real Revolution has this excellent definition of the "vanguard of the proletariat."

Lenin agued that to bring about the communist revolution, the urban workers and peasants would require the active leadership of a political vanguard party of dedicated, professional revolutionaries to bring about revolution.

The flower children of 1968 were supposed to be the vanguard of a new society, one built around love and acceptance and helping others. We commenced a war on poverty that flooded our government social programs with ever-increasing fountains of money. A generation of intellectuals embraced the terminology of Marxism and class warfare. Traditional morality, so restrictuve and judgmental, was torn apart until acceptance of every kind of lifestyle was the norm.

If you go back and read the goals of these people, they were sincere and beautiful. The music was wonderful and the intentions were, for the most part, pure.

Too bad it failed. It all seemed so simple and so obvious. I think that if you'd sat these people down, particularly their intellectual leaders, and told them that decades hence, with all of their ideas enacted and many more they hadn't yet considered, that our prisons would be overflowing, child and drug abuse rampant, education stagnant at best and that the portion of society holding things together would be those that did not embrace the flower child culture, they'd have been shocked.

These flower children, rebelling in a large part against the meat grinder that was the war in Vietnam created a Vietnam war of their own - a prolonged, hopeless struggle to obtain an unreachable utopia with endlessly mounting casualties.

American society hasn't yet figured this out, but I would bet that we will. As the bills come due for all of the borrowing to finance our failed social experimentation, a new generation may paraphrase one of the flower children, Senator Kerry. "Who wants to be the last to (die, be abandoned, be abused, be sent to jail, do drugs, ...) for a mistake?"