REMEMBERING THE HARD HAT RIOT:
Fifty-five years ago, in May 1970, a riot erupted at the corner of Wall and Broad Streets in Lower Manhattan. A few days after the killing of four students by National Guard troops at Kent State University, a large group of antiwar protesters gathered at the historic intersection. They stood on the steps of Federal Hall, next to the statue of George Washington, which commemorates the spot where the nation’s first president took his oath of office.
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Hard Hat Riot is notable for what it does not say. It does not use the word “fascism” to describe the rioters. It does not end with footage of the January 6, 2021 riot at the U.S. Capitol, and it makes no mention of Donald Trump.
Yet the hard hat riot is relevant to today as a lesson in the failures of elite liberalism. Liberal political action, even when taken with the best intentions, often falters when its supporters engage in cultural warfare that alienates ordinary Americans.
A liberalism that looks down on people it perceives as inferiors economically, socially, and culturally, will end up losing electorally. Richard Nixon’s landslide reelection win of 1972 made this clear, as did Trump’s victory more than a half century later in 2024. Such a politics will worsen political tensions and polarization.
Today, some Democrats are desperate to find ways to relate to male, working-class voters without college degrees. It’s not a new challenge. As Hard Hat Riot shows, the Democrats’ problem has been decades in the making.
Their collective opinion about those who don’t share their worldview has been ossified for just as long. In January of 1970, Time magazine declared that “The Men and Women of the Year were the Middle Americans,” and condescendingly wrote about its subscribers in what would eventually be known as the “Gorillas in the Mist” style of journalism:
The Supreme Court had forbidden it, but they prayed defiantly in a school on Netcong, N.J., reading the morning invocation from the Congressional Record. In the state legislatures, they introduced more than 100 Draconian bills to put down campus dissent. In West Virginia, they passed a law absolving police in advance of guilt in any riot deaths. In Minneapolis they elected a police detective to be mayor.
Everywhere, they flew the colors of assertive patriots. Their car windows were plastered with American-flag decals, their ideological totems. In the bumper-sticker dialogue of the freeways, they answered Make Love Not War with Honor America or Spiro is My Hero. They sent Richard Nixon to the White House and two teams of astronauts to the moon. They were both exalted and afraid. The mysteries of space were nothing, after all, compared with the menacing confusions of their own society.
The American dream that they were living was no longer the dream as advertised. They feared that they were beginning to lose their grip on the country. Others seemed to be taking over–the liberals, the radicals, the defiant young, a communications industry that they often believed was lying to them. The Saturday Evening Post folded, but the older world of Norman Rockwell icons was long gone anyway. No one celebrated them: intellectuals dismissed their lore as banality. Pornography, dissent and drugs seemed to wash over them in waves, bearing some of their children away.
But in 1969 they began to assert themselves. They were “discovered” first by politicians and the press, and then they started to discover themselves. In the Administration’s voices–especially in the Vice President’s and the Attorney General’s–in the achievements and the character of the astronauts, in a murmurous and pervasive discontent, they sought to reclaim their culture. It was their interpretation of patriotism that brought Richard Nixon the time to pursue a gradual withdrawal from the war. By their silent but newly felt presence, they influenced the mood of government and the course of legislation, and this began to shape the course of the nation and the nation’s course in the world. The Men and Women of the Year were the Middle Americans.
Of course, at least back then, future Democrat state attorney general candidates at least didn’t openly fantasize about shooting those strange looming Republicans. But that’s progress, or at least progressivism, I guess.