Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin: Yippies vs Yuppies Debate (1986)

https://archive.org/details/abbie-hoffman-and-jerry-rubin-yippies-vs-yuppies

Excerpts

Rubin: Now this is a debate between being stuck in the past. And I know how tempting it is to be stuck in the past, because when you’re legends like Abbie Hoffman and I were in the ‘60s, you don’t want to give that legend up. It’s exciting to be a hero, and it’s very difficult to change, and especially difficult because there’s a lot of people who are still stuck in the ‘60s. Some of them may even be here tonight. […] Earlier someone mentioned fitness and self-awareness, and a few people hissed and booed. I guess if you’re booing fitness and self-awareness, then you gotta cut me out of that revolution, a revolution that excludes being fit and excludes being self-aware. But anyway this is a debate, as far as I see it, between the past and adapting to the present and creating the future. If you still think of the old slogan “tune in, turn on, and drop out,” then you’re gonna be on his side. If you believe “time is money,” then you’re gonna be more tempted toward my side. Anyway, basically I want to say I’m very proud of what I participated in in the ‘60s, and nothing that I’m doing today, in any sense, takes away from that appreciation. I think there's a contradiction here, and that is that when somebody seems to change on a surface-level or the forms change, the media makes a big sensationlistic thing about it and people therefore assume that it's not an evolution but it's a break with a past. And I think that everything I'm doing today is a natural evolution from the past, and I'm just extremely proud of what we accomplished in the ‘60s, but I don't want to dwell on that.

[...]

Rubin: But something else happened in the ‘70s, and that is that we found that our reality was not going to come home, because we saw the world divided into two: all evil emanated from the White House and around the world were peasant communities that we're going to have revolutions and create new societies. And then of course Vietnam, the North did take power over the South. Cambodia, tremendous genocide took place. Soviet Union invasion of Afghanistan. Cuba sending troops everywhere. And we began to say now what's going on here. Maybe our vision of the world isn't exactly right. And then in 1973-’74 the United States did something that we didn't think was going to happen. The United States got its troops out of Vietnam, and we were shocked about that, because we thought that Vietnam was the essential expression of racist, imperialist American society. And then in ‘74 of course came the climax of the ‘60s, because if we ever thought in the ‘60s that Richard Nixon was gonna be forced out of the White House, we would have said the revolution has happened, but it happened in ‘74, but it happened because American democracy worked.

Rubin: And then in the mid-’70s, we came to a realization,

Someone in the audience: You’re a joke! [applause]

Rubin: and that realization was that we're not a minority. We're a majority of the United States, that the baby-boom generation, 75 million Americans, who participated in the ‘60s and are going through these changes that I described in the 1970s, we can control the future of the United States. We can control the future of the United States because we're the majority, but if they come to us in the ‘60s and said okay you're right, you run the country, we wouldn't have known how to run anything, because we weren't preparing ourselves for that kind of leadership. And so in the ‘70s, I think millions of individuals made individual decisions to go into the system in one form or another, and the entrepreneurial explosion took place in the middle of the late ‘70s as the baby-boom generation began becoming entrepreneurs [and] starting their own businesses. Sixty thousand businesses started in America in the mid-’60s. 800,000 businesses started every year today [sic], and the transformation of Western society from an industrial society to an information society, a historical transformation, and that transformation is taking place because of the baby-boom generation. So I see the baby-boom generation as an innovative, history-making generation that in the ‘70s created the women’s movement and the self-awareness movement and the entrepreneurial explosion and is about to take political power in the United States. In the last election, neither the Democratic Party nor the Republican Party in any sense appealed to this generation. […] The Republicans nominated a candidate of the 19th century—Ronald Reagan, and even though Ronald Reagan says he's for the entrepreneur, none of his policy support entrepreneurship. We're talking now about post-Reagan America, because post-Reagan America will be the baby-boom-generation America. I predict that in 1988, you will see a baby-boom-oriented candidate elected president of the United States, and all the values that we fought for in the ‘60s, all the things that we talked about and carried picket signs for, we will be implementing, implementing with specific programs, implementing with vision, facing the contradictions that we faced in the ‘70s and in the 1980s and 1990s, turning them into policies to transform the world. Thank you very much.

[…]

Hoffman: And one of Jerry’s big complaints is that I haven’t changed, that I’m not new, that I’m not with it, that I haven’t gotten into the “decade-ism” of the 1980s, that I don’t fit in, that I was underground, that I was lost, that I didn’t go through any changes of consciousness, that I’m fixated and stuck. There’s nothing new about the yuppies! We had the yuppies in the 1950s. They were called status-seekers. They were caught on the constantly-upward escalator—the rat race. We made fun of it. It was a shopping-mall mentality: give me the career, give me the diploma, that’s all I need, I’m gonna keep my nose clean, I’m gonna dress right, I’m gonna dress for success, and the whole empire will be ours. The same hyper-nationalism in the US, that we’re number one, and screw the rest of the world—it’s only there to serve us. People like Jerry and myself took a look at that vision and said it was spiritually unrewarding for ourselves and it was unjust to those less fortunate who couldn’t participate in that dream. And because of that the greatest decade of activism in our country happened, because us and others like us made that decision. And now Jerry wants to bring that back—essentially he’s stuck in the 1950s if I’m stuck in the 1960s.

Hoffman: He said he’s proud of what he did in the ‘60s, but if you redo it you will say that he’s eaten every single page alive. He’s a born-again capitalist, entrepreneurs are his new heroes, and just like Ronald Reagan he goes around to campuses and tells the Horatio Alger rags-to-riches stories. Last year it was Apple Computer—two hippies tinkering with a toy in their garage made millions of dollars, all new consciousness. The Apple went a little rotten and now it’s Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream or Rachel’s Cookies or the new Pet Rock—everyone strikes it good. He said 800,000 businesses were started last year; statistics show three quarters of those are gonna go bankrupt, but that doesn't matter. This is an Amway convention you are listening to. [loud applause] This is a lottery ad. Everyone comes up roses. This is the New York Magazine you are reading. This is USA Today—it's all rosy, it's cheery, it's upbeat, in color, la-di-da, quite modern. This is all a very interesting rosy picture, but this is not reality. He does an interesting game by making all the baby-boom generation not only activists, which is not true; the majority of us were not in the streets. They did not go to jail for what they believed in. They did not make the choice of coming to Canada. 20,000 came to Canada; three and a half million went to Vietnam, so it's not the majority. It's a moral minority that makes a conscious decision to go against the grain and to go against the government. And he equates all those activists with the baby-boom generation and all the baby-boom generation with entrepreneurs that are cashing in. There's 75 million people in our country in the baby-boom generation. 3.6 million of those earn $35,000 (US) or more, while at the same time 32 million earn $10,000 or less each year. In other words for every entrepreneur riding around in a Porsche, there are eight single mothers with kids sucking the glue off food stamps—they just happen not to make the pages of People Magazine.