America right now is ‘anti-war’, in the sense that about two thirds of the people think the occupation of Iraq is a bad business and the troops should come home. Anti-war sentiment was a major factor in the success of the Democrats in last November’s elections, when they recaptured Congress. The irony is that this sharp disillusion of the voters owes almost nothing to any anti-war movement. To say the anti-war movement is dead would be an overstatement, but not by a large margin. Compared to kindred movements in the 1960s and early 1970s, or to the struggles against Reagan’s wars in Central America in the late 1980s, it is certainly inert.

When in March of this year Democrats in the us Congress felt obliged to send President Bush the message that he should bring the troops home before he leaves office, they were not voting in the shadow of a mighty throng of protesters cramming into the open spaces in front of the Lincoln Memorial, their slogans rattling the windows of Congress. They were voting in the shadow of the elections of 2008, and eager to display in gesture if not in substance some acknowledgement of a general anti-war feeling abroad in the land.

To this day the anti-war movements from the era of Vietnam survive—often vividly—in the texture of everyday life in America. Lives were changed forever by the decisions of thousands upon thousands to refuse to serve in south-east Asia. The great peace marches on Washington, the rallies in major cities, the riots outside recruiting offices, the upheavals in the universities smoulder still—sometimes dangerously—in popular memory. Just last year, a Vietnam vet in Colorado spat on Jane Fonda and said publicly he would be happy to shoot her because of her supposed treachery to the American flag forty years ago.

Of course, back in the Vietnam era, America had the draft. The imminent possibility that they might be compulsorily conscripted into the Army or the Marines and find themselves in the Mekong Delta in six months concentrated the minds of middle-class 18-year-olds on the monstrosity and injustice of war with marvellous speed, just as it concentrated the minds of their parents. Today there is no draft. It is true that many of the soldiers deployed in Iraq have been compelled to serve double tours of duty; that others were facing criminal conviction and were offered the option of prison or enlistment in the army; that others again are illegal immigrants offered a green card or us citizenship in exchange for service in Iraq. But every member of the us military there or in Afghanistan is, technically speaking, a volunteer.

In the near future, at least, no us administration will take the political risk of trying to bring back the draft, even though lack of manpower is now a very serious problem for the Pentagon. By the same token, the absence of the draft is certainly a major factor in the weakness of the anti-war movement. But though there was no draft in the Reagan years, there was certainly a very vital movement opposing Reagan’s efforts to destroy the Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua and to crush the insurgency of the fmln in El Salvador.

I remember well criss-crossing America in those years, giving anti-intervention speeches on campuses, in churches and labour halls in scores of towns in nearly every state in the union. Almost every American town in every decade has its dissident community. At any rally you can see the historical strata in human contour.

Up until a decade ago there would be the old Communists, maybe veterans of the Lincoln Brigade that volunteered to fight for the Republic in the Spanish Civil War. Into the late 1980s, these red vets were often the best organizers. Then there would be anti-war activists like the late Dave Dellinger, who went to federal prison as a pacifist in World War Two. There were people who came of age politically with Henry Wallace and the Progressive Party that challenged Truman from the left in 1948. A slightly younger cohort learned its organizing in the years of the Korean war and the rise of the Civil Rights Movement. Old labour activists rubbed shoulders with Quakers and Unitarians. Then there is the Vietnam generation, many of them in their mid-sixties now. More than once, in the South, I have found that the still-active sparks are former Maoists who deployed to places like Birmingham, Alabama as their revolutionary duty, and who took root as civil rights attorneys or public defenders or labour organizers.