Remembering 1968: Michael Kazin's view

Dissent magazine in its Spring 2008 issue has published a series of essays by various contributors commenting on the meaning of the events of 1968, which it calls 1968: Lessons Learned.

Michael Kazin in his contribution calls attention to the lasting effect of that period on conservatives in the US:

The populist right also became a mass movement in the late 1960s and quickly seized the political offensive. In the United States and later in Britain, it took over a major party and won several national elections. There and elsewhere in the developed capitalist world, left-wing parties stopped touting big, egalitarian policies and began to hum the praises of entrepreneurs and free markets.

He sees the liberal and left reform movements of the 1960s as having left a lasting, mostly constructive imprint on American culture:

Consider the fact that most ordinary Americans and Europeans enjoy a degree of personal freedom that was considered ultra-radical in the 1960s. Women can pursue a variety of occupations, gays and lesbians no longer have to lie about their sexuality, racial identity poses no legal barrier to full participation in civil society, and the urgency of protecting the environment is taken for granted.

... Today, most people under thirty - even a good many of those who vote for conservative parties - reject all forms of race-baiting, homophobia, and gender discrimination. As Richard Rorty once put it, the New Left greatly diminished the amount of sadism in American culture - and in much of Europe as well.

Considering the "race-baiting" we're already seeing from the far right, abetted in no small part by the Establishment media, and the success of so many anti-gay-marriage movements in various states the last few year, I'm not sure I would state the case quite so optimistically.

I also think that the effect of "the 1960s" on gays and women's rights needs further elaboration. The latter was clearly an issue that gained much ground during the 1960s. But to what extent it was part of the organized reform movements of that time is a more complicated question. And I'm not aware that gay rights was a significant issue at all in those movements. I would argue that the challenges that arose to conventional assumptions about love and family did create a political and psychological space for gay and lesbian activists. But, historically, "1968" raised issues of gay liberation only tangentially.

And seeing how solidly the Congressional Republicans have supported the Cheney-Bush torture policy I'm just not sure what it means to say that the "amount of sadism in American culture" has diminished since the 1960s. On the contrary, acceptance of the sadism of the Cheney-Bush torture policy among Republican leaders and a good part of the Republican base, the Christian Right especially, is a kind of embrace of sadism that is arguably qualitatively different from what we've experienced before.

Kazin also gives an optimistic but somewhat confusing assessment in the following passage:

The long march of the post-’68 left made its influence felt in many institutions. In the United States, it achieved something close to dominance in two particularly powerful ones: academia and Hollywood. That fact has long alarmed the American Right, and with good reason. [???] The anti-authoritarian, left-populist viewpoint taught in most history, literature, sociology, and government classes shows up, in wittier form, in films and television programs by the likes of Michael Mann, Spike Lee, Michael Moore, Oliver Stone, Matt Groening, and Jon Stewart. And such products of mass culture reinforce the reigning wisdom in colleges. Last year, Harvard, still the symbolic center of higher learning in the United States, confirmed that wisdom when it changed presidents. A well-known feminist historian replaced a well-known centrist male economist who had been accused of making sexist remarks, and nearly everyone in academia was pleased. (my emphasis)

Before agreeing that the rightwingers have "good reason" to be alarmed about the alleged leftwing influences in Hollywood and academia, I would need to know something more specific about both. Do most "history, literature, sociology, and government classes" in the US teach an "anti-authoritarian, left-populist viewpoint"? I doubt very seriously that such a generalization could be well supported. Unless maybe we assume that just some exposure to such ideas would be considered teaching that viewpoint, which is not what most readers are likely to take from Kazin's statement there.

All in all, Kazin's short essay leaves a confusing impression. He winds up trying to make some large generalizations without giving any real definition of what is understood by "1968", which could be the student-worker uprising in France that year and also the election of Richard Nixon and the beginning of his Southern Strategy or a number of other things. What's left is kind of a vague reflection on the state of the so-called culture war.

Tags: 1968, culture war, michael kazin