Why we should look to the 60s, not the Civil War, to understand today

For a while now we have been bombarded with claims that the US is more divided “than at any time since the Civil War.”  Here is just one recent utterance, from Ronald Brownstein on CNN:  “Donald Trump ends his tumultuous presidency with the nation confronting the greatest strain to its fundamental cohesion since the Civil War.”

I beg to differ. I’m a baby-boomer, born in 1953, graduated high school in 1970, went to college in the early 1970s.  We boomers always think the world revolves around us; we were the first, the best, the baddest, the mostest.  In that spirit, I submit the boomer-driven 60s were more divisive than today  (and, just to be clear, closer in time than the Civil War).  They were certainly more violent, more openly confrontational.  And the divisions were about big things, real things, like civil rights, and Vietnam; not about whatever it is we’re fighting about these days.  We’re divided now mostly because a lot of people seem to have found a way to make money off Americans disagreeing with each other.  Man, give me the 60s any day!

However, I submit that today’s divisions largely go back to the 60s and how they were experienced, and interpreted, especially on the right.  We are still fighting many of the same battles.  Let’s review.

There is lots of disagreement about what “the 60s” really was.  No period fits neatly into 10 year increments.  But we can probably say without too much contradiction that it was the time when the post-war generation came of age and became a demographic force, especially in schools.  The number of college students exploded due to the boomer birth rate, the successful postwar economy that gave more people money and leisure for education, and the GI Bill and other government support for higher education.  The heyday of “the 60s” can be seen as starting around 1963 and extending through 1975, the end of US involvement in Vietnam.  

This concentration of kids on campuses coincided with the civil rights movement and Vietnam, which became the two most visible sources of mobilization and grievance.  But there were many others, including the environment, women’s rights, indigenous rights, and more.  

(And this was just in the US. It is critical to see that the 60s weren’t just an American phenomenon, it was worldwide.  Hundreds of thousands of students and supporters marched in 1968 in London, Paris, Rome, Mexico City, Tokyo, and around the world.  The baby boom and growing prosperity fueled rising expectations and demands everywhere.  The specific sources of discontent differed, but discontent of some kind was universal among the young.  One reason is that globalization, the connectivity across borders made possible by television and jet travel, allowed models of protest and countercultural memes to travel rapidly from the US to Europe to Asia and back again.) 

Common to the 60s’ demands was questioning of authority, of established leaders and institutions and rules.  A lot of it was puerile, as you might expect from a youthful, college-based movement.  More alcohol and drugs and commingling with the opposite sex, or any sex.  “Don’t trust anyone over 30.”

Colleges themselves became a prime focus of anger and demands, and the 60s saw an endless series of student ‘takeovers,’ sit-ins, strikes and other actions.  Often these were aimed at loosening campus rules; in other cases deans and presidents were convenient stand-ins for remoter, less tangible targets.  We can’t get rid of Lyndon Johnson, but we can make life hell for the provost!    

However, energy flowed back and forth between the personal and the political, to adopt a 60s slogan.  Protesting the war, supporting (or joining) the Black Panthers, ousting Nixon, bombing Dow Chemical, ending capitalism—for many these all merged seamlessly with taking drugs and free love and long hair and escaping from the other constrictions of suburbia.  And in the 60s America had some seriously radical dudes calling for real change: Weathermen, SNCC, Students for a Democratic Society, Timothy Leary.  Thousands burned draft cards.  Millions—millions!—protested against the Vietnam War on campuses and then in huge demonstrations in major cities.  African-Americans, angry over police violence and lack of opportunity, rioted violently and frequently.   

This cultural and social ferment coincided, in the US, with ambitious changes in law and policy, many of which moved broadly in the directions demanded on campuses.  The Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts; Medicare and Medicaid; the Immigration and Nationalities Act of 1965 (greatly expanding the number and diversity of immigrants); a panoply of Great Society, War on Poverty initiatives; federal aid to education at all levels, including the Higher Education Act of 1965.  And much more.   

The question is, how did all this ‘net out,’ so to speak.  What kind of country did we have as a result?  

Here’s how I think it shaped up to one large part of the population.  By the mid-70s, a lot of things seemed to be headed in the wrong direction.  Crime was rising, rapidly.  The economy was stalling in the wake of growing global competition, the 1973 oil embargo, and inflation from the Vietnam War debt and the costs of other new government problems.  The US position in the world was weaker, partly because we had visibly lost the war and communist opponents on the other side—the USSR, China, Cuba—were emboldened.  The first Cuban troops in Africa started showing up in 1975.

If you were less than enthusiastic about the cultural side of the 60s, the sex and drugs and rock n’roll, and more generally the push for equal rights for blacks and women, it was easy to link these developments with American decline.  Correlation is not causation, but it’s often hard to resist.

 And plenty of powerful interests were eager to make the linkages seem obvious.  The Republican Party swooped in quickly in 1968 to use fear of crime as a tool to pick up the alienated white vote, in the South but also elsewhere.  Business interests, embodied in the infamous Powell letter of 1973, mobilized via the US Chamber of Commerce and other groups to fight back against taxes and regulations by building the narrative that government programs always make things worse, not better.  Conservative churches began to see political engagement as necessary to fight the erosion of traditional values, first and foremost new roles for women.  Anti-communists on the right joined forces with the emerging neo-conservatives to raise the alarm about the Soviet threat and against appeasers here at home. 

This reaction to the 60s was key to creating the modern conservative movement.  It gave those motivated by race, business, religion, and anti-communism a clear story about what had gone wrong
in America, and allowed them to cooperate across previously strong barriers.  By 1980 these groups had coalesced around Ronald Reagan.  

So is it useful to point to the 60s as the relevant Time of Troubles to compare with today?  I think what we have today is not a replay of the 60s, but rather a kind of 60s unraveling.  Our polarization, and the attacks on a common reality, come from the toxic decay of this anti-60s coalition on the right.  As it disintegrates, it has been forced to move further and further from reality to try and stay in business.  

• It no longer has a counterculture to fight against (America’s non-judgmental capitalist/entertainment industry having long ago absorbed and monetized the heck out of it)  but pretends it does, inventing ever less convincing cultural enemies determined to seize everyone’s guns or force Americans to take anti-racism training.  

• There is no serious anti-capitalist, pro-socialist movement in the US (please, you can’t compare Bernie Sanders to the SDS), but that hasn’t stopped conservatives from trying to win elections by leveling shrill charges of ‘radical socialism’ against liberals and progressives and claiming they want to turn the US into another Cuba.  

• The Christian Right’s political partisanship and opposition to gender equality has contributed to the alienation of many Americans, especially young Americans, from Christianity and from organized religion more generally; nevertheless, conservative Christians doubled-down on Trump and are retreating further and further into fantastical—and dangerous—apocalyptic visions.    

• International communism is long gone, and crusades against Islamic extremism have badly misfired and no longer unite most Americans against a clearly second-tier threat.  China is now being plumped up as a new focus, even though the US business sector has spent the last three decades swooning over China and its billion-plus market.  

This backwards looking movement, no longer conservative but deeply reactionary, has no interest in finding solutions for the actual problems now facing the country.  Its instincts are only to block and undermine government action, while engaging in performative dramas to retain supporters with anger and nostalgia. Income inequality, global warming, healthcare,  (“You’ll have healthcare the likes of which you’ve never seen!”), racial injustice, deaths of despair—all these could benefit from smart, conservative policy proposals.  None have been forthcoming.  

Sorry folks, the 60s have come and gone!  They were both a more playful and a more serious time.  Some of the conservative critique was justified, but it has long outlived its sell-by date.  The anti-60s core of today’s radical reactionary movement is rotting and stinking to high heaven.  Please, put some Beatles records on the stereo (EVERYONE likes the Beatles, they’re, they’re…traditional), smoke some recently legalized weed, and let the 60s go.