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The 1960s Today: A Summing Up
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16486 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
5 / 1989 |
3,625 Words |
| Author
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Morris Dickstein
Morris Dickstein teaches English at Queens College and is the
author of Gates of Eden: American Culture in the Sixties,
which will appear in a new edition from Penguin Books in
January. |
One remarkable thing about the 1960s is how much they're still with us twenty years later. The activists of the era keep reliving their youth by writing books about it, while their conservative opponents, sour amid all their successes, never tire of invoking it as the root of all evil. Above all, though many of the events of the decade seem to belong to another world--to a raucous party that lasted long but ended badly--the sixties remain a tangible myth, a point of departure for every kind of social argument, as well as the source of values diffused throughout our culture. Some revolutions fail by suceeding; this one seemed to succeed by failing. How did this happen? Why did it happen? How do the 1960s continue to influence us today?
Nearly all the recently published books on the sixties deal primarily with the political side of the decade--with the Vietnam War, the student radicalism and growth of SDS, the civil rights and antiwar movements, the bloody riots, assassinations, street demonstrations, and university uprisings. But it was on the cultural side, in the sphere of closely held feelings and social mores, that the tremors the 1960s have been most far-reaching. The sixties were not simply a time when the young grew long hair and took to the streets; it was also when many others dramatically altered their lives, with consequences that can still be felt.
Feelings and Attitudes
This shift in the landscape of feeling extended to politics. The political forms of the sixties have proved perishable; the attitudes that developed have cast a long shadow. As a national movement, the sixties Left disintegrated when the SDS destroyed itself in the streets of Chicago, when the McGovern campaign was swamped by a Nixon landslide, and when the end of the war and the draft undercut the basis for large-scale protest. These tactics have only been revived when issues like nuclear arms, apartheid, or Central America evoke intense passion and moral outrage. The sixties left behind not a mass movement but a deep sense of skepticism and suspicion directed at our leaders, especially on question of war and peace, on environmental issues, on official lying and corruption, and on threats to individual rights. Still, as economic issues became more pressing in the early seventies, a conservative reaction set in, and Ronald Reagan sprang forth to exploit and benefit from it, indeed, to try to reorient American politics around it. More traditional values--religion, family, patriotism--came to the fore, and many Americans recoiled from the carnivalesque instability of those earlier
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