The Daniel Greenfield piece is excellent. Read the whole thing, as they say.

I read the Wiki entry for Mario Savio, but I'm still unclear about the context. What exactly prompted him to give that impassioned speech?

To most in those crowds it never occurred to them how natural they themselves were to become that machine, now exponentially increased in authority, because they were already raised in it. The organizers always knew.

Most people remain puzzled that there is a great difference between freedom and liberty. But I do think you are right. The Tea Parties are an honest man's search for rediscovering enduring greatness. I have never been witness to a time, or read of one, where some part of the public was so far ahead in leading it's own leaders.

Who among the candidates last night understood that it is the machine that exists between us and the freedom we seek? Any? All? Is there one person that many think of us think was capable of leading us against the machine? How many of the candidates belong to, are part of, the machine?

ABO~OMG,
Sandy

I'm a huge Daniel Greenfield fan. Thank you both for the education on Savio. If free speech was his main cause, then I know a few bleeding hearts in the bad habit of comparing conservatives to "Hitler" who could use a reminder. In light of the recent ESPN knee-jerking, the Hitler/Nazi thing is kind of getting on my last nerve. Thanks again!

Wonderful to see how that all worked out, eh? The free speech movement started CA on its way to perdition. But I expect the law of unintended consequences would no doubt escape a mathematician, indeed, most academics.

I used to think the Canadian system was somewhat dysfunctional because the federal power here seemed so weak in comparison to the powers of the provinces. But now I see this distribution of power as a great strength for democracy because the "machine" is much smaller when it is just the size of a province, as opposed to citizens being encompassed by a machine the size of the federal government.

I think the U.S. has made a big mistake by allowing the federal government to now hold such sway over the states. There needs to be a greater focus in the U.S. on states' rights in order to cut the machine back down to size. A good example is education. It used to be a state function, but now the federal government's Department of Education has usurped much of that function because of regulations and funding.

Gloria-

Yes, education could be a force of change in the right direction in many ways. I recall maybe one class on U.S. government and nothing stuck because they had succeeded in pre-filtering out details and principles of interest, as if everything in the books was of equal significance. In other words, a flat and brain-numbing curriculum.

7-12 grades should be loaded with classes that help kids contrast local, state and federal powers and know of the historical shifts in those powers. Isn't this really more important than the contrast between Republicans and Democrats? The early framers of our public education system-- Peabody et al.-- knew well that the system they were designing would serve the essential function of instilling an American outlook and camaraderie in all of its subjects. Training young people toward the middle as it were. Fine and well as far as it goes. But it doesn't go far enough unless we are content to relinquish our powers to the machine. Any machine.

RedCarolina

There's nothing quite like being called Nazis by a bunch of National Socialists who don't like successful Jews and businesses whose output is not directed, or outright controlled, by the state.

The best thing about Savio's speech is it gave us Gerard.

Yes, well, when we stop the machine, and eventually build a new one, the money men will be waiting there to buy it, won't they?

Money men didn't build the machine, SW, money men built the Federal Reserve, and the revolutionaries built the machine twenty years later. It was not done with money, it was done with rhetoric. Now they have both. Whatever great interests existed before that time never constituted a machine.

What also strikes me is his voice. You don't hear voices like that anymore. He sounds more like something from the 40's or 50's that what I think of as the 60's (I was born in 1968). Definitely not the "voice of the neuter". He speaks authority that seems almost foreign. You don't hear that much either these days. Then again, the immediate circumstance that prompted him to speak with such eloquence is so distant and small his passion seems unwarranted. Thanks for exposing me to this, and your current interpretation Gerard.

Buckley spoke to people too.

Read it.