FRED SIEGEL: Occupy Wall Street And The Return Of The McGovernites. “The radicals of the 1960s deployed their justified opposition to the Vietnam War to blind themselves to the consequences and meaning of statism and Stalinism. Their aggressively willed ignorance produced the 1972 McGovern platform which re-wrote the traditional program of the European socialist parties in the American language of rights. Employment, educational quality, and housing were to become matters of right subject to the power of judicially supervised bureaucracies. Since then the distinction between liberalism and anti-capitalist radicalism has been continuously effaced by the rise of a vast regulatory state staffed, in part, by public sector unionists. . . . The supposedly anti-authoritarian 68ers helped create a more cumbersome and bureaucratic government in the name of protecting newly minted rights. That affinity is being recreated in Zuccotti Park. It’s not just that the Occupy Wall Streeters are filled with hopes of recreating the spirit of the 60s. It’s that they are literally recreating the follies of the 60s in miniature.”