For a decade Americans have been steeped in the rhetoric of "zero tolerance" and the faith that virtually all problems from drug addiction to lousy t… - Ellen Willis

Today, anxiety is a first principle of social life, and the right knows how to exploit it. Capital foments the insecurity that impels people to submit to its demands. And yet there are more Americans than ever before who have tasted certain kinds of social freedoms and, whether they admit it or not, don’t want to give them up or deny them to others. From Bill Clinton’s impeachment to the Terri Schiavo case, the public has resisted the right wing’s efforts to close the deal on the culture. Not coincidentally, the cultural debates, however attenuated, still conjure the ghosts of utopia by raising issues of personal autonomy, power, and the right to enjoy rather than slog through life. In telling contrast, the contemporary left has not posed class questions in these terms; on the contrary, it has ceded the language of freedom and pleasure, "opportunity" and "ownership," to the libertarian right.

"Someone was waving a large pink-and-white sign that read, "Don't Worry, Be Happy." I was trying, and so were at least thirty thousand other bodies, with varying degrees of post-Aquarian patience, to see the Who for the first time in a year."

one exasperating example of how easy it is to obliterate history is that Betty Friedan can now get away with the outrageous claim that radical feminist "extremism" turned women off and derailed the movement she built. Radical feminism turned women on, by the thousands. ("Radical Feminism and Feminist Radicalism" 1984)