Was the anti-Vietnam War movement counterproductive?

One of the more bizarre "lessons" of the Vietnam War that keeps popping up is the notion that the antiwar movement was actually counterproductive, or, at a minimum, that the antiwar movement itself was unpopular.

For instance, Todd Gitlin, who was head of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) in 1963-4, wrote just recently on this topic: Anti-War America TomPaine.com 08/30/05.  He said there:

Here’s the rub about 1969:  As the war became less popular, so did the anti-war movement.  It was hated, in fact—by the end of the decade, the most hated entity in America.  In the 1969 Gallup poll I just cited, as Harold Meyerson reminded his Washington Post readers in June, “77 percent disapproved of the antiwar demonstrations, which were then at their height.”  To what degree this was because the movement was reputed to be against the troops, to what degree because of confrontational revelries and symbolic anti-Americanism on the left, to what degree because of psychic projection, who can tell?  But all this was a gift to Nixon, and it has been the gift to the right that keeps on giving. 

Gitlin seems to be still nursing old factional resentments from those days.  By 1969, the radical group SDS had essentially dissolved, with the Weathermen faction (later the Weather Underground) being the most famous/notorious of the successor factions.  Gitlin's bitterness over the extremist turn of his former organization is on display in the excellent 2003 documentary The Weather Underground by Sam Green and Bill Siegel.

Usually sensible in his analyses and careful with his facts, he accused that particular group of advocating "random violence" and embracing a philosophy of mass murder, both of which are, so far as I know, factually inaccurate.  Though similar in ideology to the Rote Armee Faktion (RAF) in Germany, aka the "Beider-Meinhof gang," they did not engage in the kidnappings and killings that the RAF did.  (Unless you count springing LSD guru Timothy Leary from prison and spiriting him out of the country as kidnapping.)

My point is not to analyze the strategy and tactics of the Weather Underground, whose political influence in  the United States was virtually nil, at least any usual sense.  My point is that people like Todd Gitlin still carry resentments from old political battles that seem to distort their views of today's events.

To be fair to Gitlin, his piece linked above is mainly aimed at defending Cindy Sheehan against her prowar detractors.  Still, "all this was a gift to Nixon, and it has been the gift to the right that keeps on giving" is a snapshot of the antiwar movement that is fairly unhinged from the reality, it seems to me.

Then there are people like the odious David Horowitz, who has made a career out of being a hardline rightwing radical who converted from having been a hardline leftwing radical.  They are perfectly happy to have the antiwar movement of the 1960s and early 70s be portrayed as counterproductive.

And this plays right into one of the favorite conservative mantras, which is that everything liberals stand for is bad because it would have "unintended consequences" that would have exactly the opposite effect of what the well-meaning but totally deluded liberals intended.  To see how Bush's favorite historian and Republican überhack Victor Davis Hanson carries this approach to goofy lengths in talking about Cindy Sheehan, see my VDH Watch 8 of 08/28/05 at The Blue Voice.

And that's a risk in superficial portrayals of the antiwar movement of that time by people who ostensibly sympathize with its aim of getting the US out of the Vietnam War.  It plays into the desire of Establishment types like Horowitz and Hanson to make ordinary people fell disempowered, that there's nothing citizens can do to affect foreign policy.  That's one reason Cindy Sheehan is a powerful symbol.  And a threatening one to war fans.

The observation that the antiwar movement was unpopular is true enough that the statement has some superficial plausibility.  But to imagine that it was pure coincidence that public opinion turned against the war as the organized antiwar movement got bigger and more prominent, I would think you would have to be an academic getting lost in one's own abstractions or have a brain pickled in OxyContin.

Polls have shown for years that a majority in the US support a woman's right to choose on abortion.  The antiabortion movement has a negative image for most people, even apart from the violent fringe.  But in just a few weeks, there is an excellent chance we will have a Supreme Court majority committed to shredding Roe v. Wade as fast as they can.  There are some things in politics that just can't be understood by a do-you-like-this-or-not opinion poll.

I plan to look at this issue some more the next few days.