Forty Years Later, Undoing ‘68
The rush to celebrate the fortieth anniversary of 1968 (good round-ups here and here) indicates the strange reverence modern Leftists feel for that halcyon year when men were men and boys were violent Marxist radicals. As unsettling as it is to imagine that there are people who think The Dreamers looks like a fun way to spend a summer, this swell of nostalgia only underlines why even the Left should try to undo the legacy of ‘68.
While it’s true that the SDS-Yippie-Weather Underground axis in America accomplished few of their concrete goals — the French, at least, did get Henri Langlois hired back — there’s nothing necessarily wrong with a purely rhetorical revolution except, possibly, that young conservatives are usually bad at it. (From Cadres for Conservatism: Young Americans for Freedom and the Rise of the Contemporary Right: “...twenty-two YAF members occupied the headquarters of the Resistance, an antiwar group in Boston. Inside, eight members of the Resistance ‘reacted violently to the liberation. One member called the Black Panthers...constantly harassed the press...[and] in a final rage, stomped on the California grapes brought by the YAF as a snack.’” Ouch.) The real problem with a rosy collective memory of ‘68 is its effect on America’s understanding of “the youth” and their role in politics.
Thinking of the twenty-something demographic as a perpetual political vanguard is dangerous, and not just because it puts our future in the hands of the least wise and most radical. It frames cultural history as a sequence of battles between two sides: one bright, idealistic, and free-thinking, the other fearful, reactionary, and destined to lose. In this picture of history, it is understandable that older generations should resist cultural changes because, as remnants of an passing era, they could not be expected to understand the youth agenda. Because their resistance is based on prejudice, they cannot be persuaded to see the merits of something like second-wave feminism or Mad Pride. This fatalism saves the youth the trouble of explaining themselves—they have only to assert their youth to be placed on the right side of history.
Thinking of history as one long march of progress is bad enough, but thinking of this progress as the gradual elimination of all constraints, stigmas, constructs and prejudices by each new and boldly open-minded generation is worse. Whether young people are always more liberal than their elders or not, it is still dangerous to imagine that the next generation of liberals — or conservatives, for that matter — should be defined by the ideas they had when they were in their twenties, uncorrected by the resistance of their elders.
Comments
If indeed anyone who remembers the ‘60s wasn’t really there – why are there so many tottering relics now unwilling to shut up about the Love Generation? Unfortunately for the rest of us, 2008 brings a milestone – and an excuse for more endless, pompous prattle. (…Although the significance of a 40th anniversary escapes me.)
The “uprising” of 1968 provides these grizzled candle-dippers one last chance to relive that time – now strangled in myth - when their unlikely revolution appeared… likely. Imminent, even. For a dwindling selection of dreary, misfit younger folk who grow misty-eyed over long-ago idylls of sex, drugs and manifestoes, this cultural pow-wow affords an excuse to turn all mushy and faux-nostalgic over second-hand oral history and broken-down pop totems. (Our unyielding national reverence for this junk costs us dearly.)
But, fact is, by 1968 all the fun had piddled out of the ‘60s, and the jarring turn to what seemed a bright, new path – in Day-Glo – had been co-opted by the tired old dictums of the traditional American left.
Forty years down the line, the picture gets a little clearer: The foot-soldiers of the 1968 “revolution” may have mutinied against their parents, mostly – and the perceived corruption and failures of an older, traditional social vision. But I wonder if, for the brainstormers of ’68, this was not about repudiation, but instead was an affirmation of their forebears’ relentless animosity toward all things Not Them, and as so was, for some, at least tacitly understood as a much older covenant with an even hoarier fairy tale.
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An excellent piece by Ms. Rittelmeyer.
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Once upon a time an academic adviser - herself a baby-boomer - explained to me that the engine of the 60s generation wasn’t ideology or passion or courage or youth. It was simply their numbers. There were considerably more of them than those of the generations immediately preceding and succeeding them. That and television, that damned idiot box.
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I so tire of the strawman argument, as if this pretty young lady can read the minds of the American left. For the record I was born in America, in Texas, a democratic state then, and most nearly every store was closed on sunday. Yes, I know thats hard to believe given the God is Republican ideology spewed by the GOP think tanks. But its true. Texas was much more moral under conservative democrats. That said, I find this pretty young womans comments somewhat skewed by her ideological preference. GOD takes no sides.
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BTW, todays modern leftists see Marx and his ilk as has beens. Attributing the American left to Marx is about as resposible as attributing the right to Hitlers Germany. Its simply a jump that cannot be reasonbly and realistically made. If you wish to apply left right terms to today, thats just wrong.
They say those ignorant of history repeat the past, I say those who apply history of the past repeat it. [they confuse the past ideology with present]
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you are simply gorgeous !
this is late in night here in san francisco . when i am more alert then perhaps comments on the matter .
plus i want to enjoy mr. raimondo’s polemic a little longer .
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There’s a strong tendency these days when looking back at the 60’s to assume that “those longhair radicals” were a unified group.
They were not--there were distinct factions, and about the only thing unifying them was discontent with some aspect of the preexisting order.
Some of the 60’s radicals were political revolutionaries--think Berkeley types, Yippies, SDS. They wanted to an end to the war, redistribution of wealth, and all the other nonsense laid out in the other nonsense in the Port Huron statement.
The other radicals, the real hippies, were a purely cultural movement, with no larger political ambition. They really did just want to go to San Francisco, have sex, do drugs, and stop altogether stop being a part of the society which they (mostly correctly) saw as stifling and conformist. They collapsed because of bad economics, but the ideas they espoused have larger lived on, and not entirely for the worse.
If you want to condemn the 60’s, it’s important to deal with each faction of the revolution separately. Of course the entire New Left program is hogwash, as are all leftist economic theories.
But do you really want to go back to a time of complete sexual repression, total disregard for the environment, and a musical world without the influence of Hendrix, the later Beatles, and the Dead?
I don’t.
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