A reader politely points out that I am old man.
You have lived much longer than I have. . .Please contrast the 60s to the 20s. From my limited vantage point, I feel like our current situation is completely irredeemable and won’t end well. We are too divided on basic common values. Am I wrong? What does the knowledge gained from the 60s indicate (if anything)?
As of 1968, the country seemed to be coming apart. Assassinations, riots, the Chicago convention, etc.
In hindsight, we know that the movie ended without a civil war. The divide between hippies and straights healed, with the former deciding to get jobs and the latter deciding to wear blue jeans, grow long hair, and celebrate female sexuality and women in the workplace. The mainstream media held onto a reputation for straight reporting (whether or not you think they deserved it). President Nixon ended the draft, which cooled things down a lot.
We don’t know how today’s movie is going to end. Some remarks:
1. As Martin Gurri has pointed out, today’s mobs have more bark than bite. People show up at demonstrations to take selfies, and then they go home and do nothing. Bottom-up revolts break out all around the world, and they almost all have no agenda and accomplish nothing. Maybe Tunisia and Egypt were exceptions, but in the latter it seems like “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.”
2. The real action is a battle between elites.* I don’t think that the average Joe is exercised one way or the other about the progressive religion. There is a segment of the elite that swears by the religion, and there is a segment of the elite that despises it.
3. It is reminiscent of the 1960s in that the elites of the young generation are overwhelmingly on one side. Just as a lot of middle-aged conservatives and war hawks in the 60s discovered that their children were in the anti-war movement, a lot of middle-aged conservatives today are finding a lot of wokeishness in our children.
4. I think that the battle lines between elites are much harder than they were in the 60s. Back then, there were plenty of liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats. Bipartisanship was still a thing, and it remained so at least through the first years of the Clinton Administration. Perhaps when the Dems owned the House they felt they could afford to be generous and the Republicans felt that they had no choice but to compromise.
5. I agree with Martin Gurri and Andrey Mir that a lot of the dynamics these days reflect the changes in the media environment brought about by the Internet. For example, it was easy to be pro free speech when it was hard for extremists to get control of a newspaper or a TV station. It turns out that a more democratized media environment has a lot of people longing for central control and suppression.
6. In the 1960s, hippies had straight friends, and vice-versa. Today, progressive zip codes are devoid of Trump supporters, and vice-versa.
7. I think that in 2020, just as in 1968, the public longed for a lowering of the political temperature. President Nixon delivered, governing well to the left of where the hearts of the Republicans were. He was re-elected in a landslide. President Biden is doing the opposite, carrying out a progressive offensive. Whether that is due to differences in the makeup of the two men or to differences in the cultural atmosphere I cannot say. I expect Biden to be much less popular in 2024 than Nixon was in 1972.
Andrew Sullivan is also disappointed with the way that Biden is starting. But Sullivan sees Republicans as equally immoderate.
8. I am, perhaps wrongly, anticipating that the Woke Movement will meet its Waterloo. I thought that perhaps there would be sufficient backlash against Major League Baseball and other elite institutions for their posturing on the Georgia voting law that this would prove to be such a Waterloo. But I may be over-estimating the strength of my own side in this contest.
My bottom line is that I think that the country could recover its balance, as it did after 1968. But not if every CEO and Democratic politician decides to act like a university administrator.
*This may also have been true in the 1960s, but I think back then the hippies and war protesters really were outside of the power structure. I am not sure how much effect the anti-war protests actually had. We are unable to run a controlled experiment without the protest movement, but I am willing to venture the opinion that Democratic and liberal Republican elites would have gotten sick of the war, anyway. Nobody ran as a pro-war candidate in 1968.
but I think back then the hippies and war protesters really were outside of the power structure.
That is certainly true of the real hippies, though there weren’t many of them. However, I’m not at all sure about “war protesters”. University professors were very majority against the war, and of course it was they who organized “teach ins” designed to influence the students against the war. It was a powerful Supreme Court which decided that you didn’t need to have a religion to be a conscientious objector and get out of the draft. About the time of the Tet Offensive, news coverage of the war went from “big country helps small country resist outside aggression” to “big country inadvertently destroys small country in futile intervention in a civil war”.
I find it easy to see “the sixties”–which actually ran from about the Kennedy assassination in 1963 to Carter’s election in 1976–as a contest between academically oriented elites and non-academically orientated elites.
I would say the biggest similarity in this parallel is that both the Vietnam War protesters and today’s wokies are primarily astroturf movements, whose top leaders and bankroll come primarily from Communist-country governments and whose real purpose is to destabilize and degrade western countries. (Back then, I worked in defense and was given a CIA-originated briefing about that fact; the agency didn’t want our people contributing to the enemy’s effort. But today the CIA is almost certainly in China’s pay just as the Biden family is.)
#2 may be true some places, but I know several non-far-left parents, including some liberals, who took it as a personal attack when they discovered how the K-12 schools are indoctrinating their kids with CRT. And I’m in California!
#6 is an illusion. The biggest result of the ongoing BLM/Antifa thuggery and its “Cancel Culture” allies is that a lot of conservatives don’t dare let their neighbors or co-workers find out their real leanings. This suppression breaks the marketplace of ideas and is one of several reasons open-mindedness is no longer a viable position to take. (The other major reason is that Antifa-supporting politicians and prosecutors are deliberately destroying the defenses of civilization by making sure their favored thugs always get off scot-free.)
I would like to join or start a project to publicly name, and get voted out, all the malicious prosecutors that have quietly gotten installed with Soros’ help. If this is prevented from happening, peaceful transfers of power may no longer be possible.
I’ve also worked in defense and had some of those briefings. I suspect the intelligence services aren’t corrupt, just incompetent. Anyone who actually has spent enough time in a foreign country (away from the US defense establishment) to know what’s going on there usually can’t get a security clearance.
For example, the CIA recruits a lot of Mormons because their missionary experience sends them abroad but in a structured way where they don’t immerse themselves in the culture. Mormon missionaries have the sort of paper trail that makes for a good security clearance application. Whether or not Mormon ex-missionaries can blend in with the locals and understand their politics is much more questionable.
Excellent essay Arnold. I think you captured the main differences between these eras.
Back then the political parties were sorted more by region than ideology. Today they are separated by urban versus rural across regions and that does line up much more with ideology. Back then politics was more about a generational split than it is today and the War in Viet Nam was the centerpiece of that split.
There was much more political violence then. Every summer, for a few years, major cities burned in riots that left dozens dead in each of these major cities. Political assassinations were regular events and it was understood you couldn’t peacefully demonstrate for civil rights in the deep south without risking your life. Police killings of unarmed black men rarely, if ever, made the news despite being more commonplace. The Weather Underground conducted a left wing campaign of bombings that went on for several years.
In both eras, politics was more of a cultural clash than a clash of economic interests. The stereotypical Nixon supporter was a card carrying, hard hat wearing, union construction worker. Nixon supporters tended to be highly offended by the sexual revolution, drugs, the anti-war movement and long hair and rock and roll music.
Nixon prefigured Trump in many ways. His economic policy was pretty ideology free and something entirely in the service of his short term political interests most famously with wage and price controls. Nixon’s idea of the limits on Presidential power was captured in the quote “When the president does it, that means it’s not illegal.” He was racially bigoted. He was publicly opposed to abortion in most cases but the tapes revealed that he thought it was “necessary” “when you have a black and a white.” He didn’t say that publicly but there wasn’t any confusion his racial politics.
I would say that things felt more dire at the time back then but there is no guarantee that the way things feel at any given time is an accurate indication of what is to come.
Most people see themselves as “ideology free” but most people are wrong about that.
And in particular when Nixon said “the difficulty with the conservatives is that they have a totally hard-hearted attitude where human problems and any compassion is concerned” he was expressing an ideological position. Because of course a word like “compassion” doesn’t simply mean whatever Nixon says it means.
2021 in the USA bears more than a passing resemblance to London circa 1910: the current crop of USA intellectuals are profoundly silly Bertie Wooster types nattering on with their climate change, Black supremacy, and white inferiority nonsense. With the populist working class playing the role of Jeeves, desperately trying to keep the train on the rails, the whole shambling farce will come to an end with a major war in the next year or two invited on by Biden’s idiocy and weakness.
The good part of that analogy is that Britain won that war.
Fingers crossed.
My recollections as a college student in the 60s focused on the Vietnam War and the civil rights movement. Black Americans faced widespread discrimination and our participation in the War was a terrible mistake. However, we also believed that our public institutions were fundamentally sound. Bipartisanship was a reality and substantive reforms were possible. Today, many Americans view the American experience as hopelessly racist and, accordingly, our public institutions are built on a rotten foundation. We are in worse shape today.
I don’t agree about number 1. I think that a huge difference between today and the 1960’s is that everyone is carrying a recording device in the their pocket, and that everyone has a virtual identity which is very difficult (maybe impossible?) to escape. So to some extent everyone is living in a society where everyone else is an informant, even though the government is not really directing anyone to do so (though maybe they are with rooting out “racists” in the military?).
In this kind of environment, people don’t actually need to do all that much to achieve modification of people’s behavior. Very few people need to be fired or blacklisted for expressing or supporting dissenting views to scare millions of others into silence and to make them conscious that they cannot readily trust their fellow citizens.
Here’s what happened to the 1960s: the 1980s. As a committed leftist radical in those years, I was profoundly shocked by how my generation turned on a dime, as it were, and completely changed what I had thought was our agreed-upon status hierarchy. In the 60s and 70s, young people earned status by being the most extreme radical in the room, by having the most daring wardrobe, sex life, and drug history, and by flouting all the rules of health and morals.
Suddenly, in almost exactly 1980, the rules changed. High status for young people was a career in business, expensive suits and ties, big shoulders, going to work diligently, rising up the corporate ladder, getting fit, and money, money, money. (See the career of one Jerry Rubin for a particularly vivid example.)
It was shocking to me at first, but I quickly got on the bandwagon. It was exhilerating to be free of all that hippie, leftist baggage. Ten years later, Communism failed in Europe and no respectable person would confess to being a Marxist. What a world!
My point is that, right up until the 80s happened, NO ONE predicted the changes they brought. In the same way, whatever takes the place of our current dilemma will be something no one can predict. I only hope that when our 1980s comes along to change everything, I’ll still be alive to see it.
It may have changed on business, but not in culture. Every decade since the 1960s has been more left than before on feminism, the tilt of the humanities, religion, the complicity of whites in all the evils in the world, and a general weakening of standards in education couple with affirmative action starting as a tip in admissions to a heavy hand in the name of equity. The damage due to the invasion of the Left elites in media, big business, and government has been a total disaster that cannot easily be reversed. I’ll believe we have recovered from the 1960s when an Eisenhower figure with literally the same views today (especially on illegal aliens) is not viewed worse by the elites today than Che Guevarra or antifa.
The hippie movement was largely focused on the particular grievance of the Vietnam War, and lost much of its steam when that ended. To the extent that the movement was about more enduring issues, it didn’t really end; it won: pot has been steadily approaching legalization and normalization, sexual norms have dissipated, the civil rights movement (if it can still be called that) has reached a point that would shock most of the original hippies. Black pantherism is mainstream. The ethos of the movement may have waned, but isn’t that merely because much of the substance of it became, essentially, the status quo, and lost its rebellious connotations?
The ‘woke’ movement on the other hand is not about any specific thing like the Vietnam War that can be ended. Its opportunity for grievance is essentially infinite, and hippies never had near the institutional power woke leftists have today. In a few short years nearly every primary school student in the country will be taught its tenets as facts. Opinion polls consistently show each generation is more woke than the last, opposition to free speech, support for reparations for slavery, etc. are strongly inversely correlated with age, and the ordinary rightward movement of people as they age is slower than ever before. At the very least I think we can say the Waterloo for the woke is not coming within the next 20 years, and for the foreseeable future it will keep getting worse.
I wish there were betting markets for specific predictions related to the oft-predicted recession of wokeness. I think it would be easy money betting against it.
Richard Nixon endorsed the EPA, national unemployment insurance, Keynesian federal spending, and an early form of national health insurance.
A lot of liberal Democrats would probably welcome him today, ideologically though never personally.
Yeah everyone says the overton window has moved so far over to the left but thats not my experience. My dad was a Republican. Worked for Reagan a couple years. He was pretty disillusioned by the party the last few years of his life.
I thought the consensus was that it moved right on economic policy issues in the late 1970s and 1980s (when neoliberalism happened), then has been moving left on economic issues since the Bush administration, and left on everything else for longer still. There is no president in history, for example, that was to the left of Joe Biden; Bill Clinton would be to the right of every Democrat today (even Joe Manchin, excepting the issue of abortion).
If you were a Republican at any point between 1980 and 2000 and a Democrat in 2010 or 2015, it’s definitely because you’ve changed, not the times.
You can’t have a moral majority without a majority.
We are less white, less married, less fertile, more indoctrinated, and more credential dependent then 1972. The numbers just don’t add up. If a politician tried to call upon a moral majority it wouldn’t be there.
Napoleon lost at Waterloo for the same reason he lost the wars generally and would have lost if he won at Waterloo. He was outnumbered, and that wears you down in the end.
Hippies were the surfers of the sixties.
It is hard to realize how different 1960 was to today. Even for those who said bad things about America, you knew–you just knew–that being in America gave you lots of powers and possibilities. You could try new things and they would just work. You could try to live your life (at least for a while) surfing and bumming around. Later it would be bumming around and consuming drugs and music.
For many young people, their biggest problem was perceived to be getting forced to do things by “society”. They felt constrained and wanted liberation. After all, “freedom” had been the official reason for fighting WW II and the Cold War. There was a feeling that if everybody were just allowed to do what they want, things would work out fine. Thus, all the movements with “liberation” in their names: black liberation, women’s liberation (“women’s lib”), gay liberation.
These were people who were used to dealing with a large amount of unstructured time, aka freedom. There was little day care. Kindergarten was at most, half day. Kids roamed around their neighborhoods and “made their own fun”. It made them naively brave.
Contrast that with today. Most kids start life in day care–where strangers literally provide for your every need. One doesn’t just leave the house and find some friends; one goes on a “play date” organized by grown ups. Something bad could happen if you just did something by yourself. Structured schooling begins early. Kids are taught how to behave in a group run by an outsider, made to internalize what is “appropriate” and what is “not appropriate” (both big classroom terms).
But these are nice outsiders. Teachers know that the most powerful tool of “classroom management” is convincing kids that you are “on their side”, that you care about them and want them to succeed. Teachers who insulted kids or rapped knuckles with a ruler are long since gone. Meanwhile, schools have had mission creep. Kids can’t learn unless they are “ready to learn”. So schools should provide nourishment in the morning, and maybe in the afternoon. Kids must be mentally ready to learn, so a proliferation of counselors. “We care. We care. We care.”
Kids are taught, “if you have a problem, see a teacher of counselor.” It is all with the best of intentions but it means kids have less experience finding their own solutions. Freedom becomes scary.
And this nurturant environment now continues to college. Kids are used to it and they want it and many feel uncomfortable without it. Far from wanting to throw off society’s shackles, they want a caring society to tell them what to do. Thus, the boom in support for socialism, for a socialism that is “the good people run everything for the public good so everyone has a good life.”
Thus also, Arnold’s “fear of other’s liberty”. If everybody is allowed to do whatever they want, they will do lots of inappropriate things and screw things up.
(FWIW, I, like Arnold, am an old man.)