Pete Buttigieg Is Worried About the "Revolutionary Politics of the 1960s," but We Need Them Now More Than Ever

In this op-ed, Lucy Diavolo argues that Pete Buttigieg’s concerns about Democrats pursuing the “revolutionary politics of the 1960s” is ahistorical and counterintuitive to beating President Donald Trump in 2020.
Archival blackandwhite image of hundreds of people gathered in front of the Lincoln Memorial during the March on...
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Updated on February 27, 2020:

As noted in the original version of this post, Teen Vogue reached out to Pete Buttigieg's campaign to clarify his comments on "revolutionary politics of the 1960s" and why a tweet was deleted including that phrase. Following the publication of this piece, they responded.

"Viewing the full context of this moment at last night's debate, it's clear that Pete was not talking about American movements during the 1960's [sic] at all, but rather the autocratic regimes and military coups d’états that cropped up abroad across Latin America, Greece, and Indonesia during this decade, to name a few," wrote Rodericka Applewhaite, who is on Buttigieg's rapid response/research team. Buttigieg's comment did come after Joe Biden had pointedly asked Bernie Sanders about condemning authoritarianism in Cuba and Nicaragua (which Sanders did), but at no point during the South Carolina debate were Greece or Indonesia mentioned.

Applewhaite went on to clarify that the lack of context is why the tweet with the quote was deleted, writing to Teen Vogue, "Tweeting the line itself removed context from the statement, which is why you saw it blow up on Twitter as it got circulated by users that likely weren't watching the debate in real time."

Sean Savett, Buttigieg's rapid response director, added in a statement to Teen Vogue, "We deleted the tweet because it did not capture the full context of Pete's comments, which clearly referred to Bernie Sanders' nostalgia for the coups and revolutions that were taking place in Cuba and around the world. Pete was making the important point that if Bernie Sanders is the nominee, it will hurt Democrats up and down the ballot if we have to spend our time explaining why our nominee is encouraging people to look at the bright side of the Castro regime."

Buttigieg did mention "coups" happening in the '70s and '80s immediately after his line about the '60s during the debate, but his team's response ultimately raises some other questions. For example, the Cuban Revolution was in 1959 and overthrew a dictator following his own 1952 military coup. There was a coup in Greece in 1973, but that was itself a response to a military coup in 1967 that installed leaders so far right, they apparently continued to inspire the country's far-right ethnonationalists for decades to come. And in Indonesia, a failed 1965 military coup sparked a brutal crackdown on communists. It's believed hundreds of thousands were killed in a massacre the United States government backed.

It is unclear if these are the exact uprisings against repressive right-wing governments that Buttigieg is worried about as "coups."

Previously...

At the South Carolina Democratic debate, Pete Buttigieg made his latest play to paint Bernie Sanders as too big of a risk because of the democratic socialist’s revolutionary politics.

On the debate stage just days ahead of the “first in the south” presidential nomination contest, where Black voters made up 61% of the Democratic Party electorate in 2016’s primary, Buttigieg said, “I am not looking forward to a scenario where it comes down to Donald Trump, with his nostalgia for the social order of the 1950s, and Bernie Sanders with a nostalgia for the revolutionary politics of the 1960s.”

Buttigieg also tweeted the sentiment, though the tweet was later deleted, as Gizmodo reported. This abrupt pullback illustrates how off-base Buttigieg’s concern about the spirit of the '60s really is.

The first big question, especially for a southern Black crowd, might be how the civil rights movement squares with Buttigieg’s concerns about an era which saw Martin Luther King, Jr.’s rise to political prominence, and his tragic assassination; an era that gave prominence to the Black Panthers, Malcolm X, Medgar Evers, and many, many more Black leaders, whose work is still relevant today. These people, their work, and their movement are undoubtedly part of the “revolutionary politics of the 1960s.”

Or maybe Buttigieg is talking about the people fed up with the homo- and transphobic policies of the times, who rose up, in 1966, at Compton’s Cafeteria in San Francisco, and at the Stonewall Inn, in 1969, in New York? Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera, two of the most notably lionized figures to come out of Stonewall and the ensuing years of LGBTQ organizing in New York, even put the word “revolution” in the name of the organization they started to house and care for LGBTQ youth, the Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR).

Maybe Buttigieg is worried about other movements from the 1960s. It was the era that gave us the Brown Berets, the Chicano movement, and an outburst of activism from migrant farmworkers. The '60s saw the birth of the Native-led Red Power movement and the Indigenous reclamation of Alcatraz Island. The bra-burning antics of the decade’s feminists may be misremembered, but it’s indisputable that the 1960s gave us a powerful wave of new feminist thought. Through it all, protests against the Vietnam War grabbed national attention. And many of these movements had young people leading the way.

It’s hard to say what Buttigieg meant exactly, so we’ve reached out to his campaign to clarify which movements he may have been talking about and why his tweet was deleted. I can concede that much of the significant work of that era has been erased in favor of a version of the '60s that centers on white hippies talking peace and love, and maybe that’s what Buttigieg meant.

But that isn’t the real history. The revolutionary politics of the '60s are more than peace signs and tie-dye shirts. You can’t “OK, boomer” an entire decade’s worth of groundbreaking political activism to score political points, even if you’re a millennial presidential candidate.

Sanders, the target of Buttigieg’s barb, appears to know this. In an interview with Teen Vogue last summer, I asked Sanders whether or not coming of age in the 1960s, the era Buttigieg seems so worried about, resonated with our current moment and the youth activism we see today.

“I don’t know that I can give you a brilliant answer here,” Sanders replied. “When I was a young man in college, I got involved in the civil rights movement, got arrested for fighting to desegregate schools in Chicago, and helped lead one of the first northern sit-ins in Chicago to demand an end to segregated housing in Chicago. That was a very volatile time. You had the war in Vietnam. You had the civil rights movement. And those were the motivating factors for millions of young people.”

Sanders then praised the young generations that are currently leading the way on similar conversations, highlighting how political unrest continues to motivate youth activism.

“What I will say — and I say this sincerely — is that I think the younger generation today is probably the most progressive young generation in the history of this country,” he said. “This is a generation which is profoundly anti-racist, anti-sexist, anti-homophobic, anti-xenophobic, and anti–religious bigotry. It is a generation of tolerance and decency. And that is no small thing. And that generation should be very proud of who they are.”

Regardless of which candidate you’re backing, I hope we can all recognize that denigrating this litany of political movements is a losing strategy for any Democrat. Nostalgia has the potential to distort our perspectives of the past through rose-colored lenses. But it’s less dangerous than willfully ignoring our history, or worse, downplaying the people who have fought to change it.

We must remember that the revolutionary politics of the '60s were, in many ways, a response to the social order of the '50s. And just as Trump has pitched himself to America great again in a specifically '50s way, we need to make space for the revolutionary politics of the '60s to challenge the ways this nation has oppressed, and continues to oppress, the people it’s pledged to liberate.

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Want more from Teen Vogue? Check this out: How the 1968 Democratic National Convention Protests Helped Define a Decade