The Boom Still Echoes

There's a great piece in the April issue of First Things by George Wiegel called The Sixties, Again and Again (sub req):

I don't propose to revisit the question of whether what we call the Sixties was in fact born in the Fifties, or whether it unfolded its full plumage in that low decade, the Seventies. Rather, I want to examine six crucial moments in the Sixties with an eye to how they reshaped American political culture, with effects still being felt today. What a large segment of American political culture learned from those moments constitutes the issues-beneath-the-issues in 2008--and in that important sense, America is still fighting battles begun in the Sixties, like it or not.

The six crucial moments he looks at are:

1. The Assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963

2. Griswold v. Connecticut in 1965

3. The Tet Offensive in 1968

4. The Kerner Commission in 1968

5. The Publication of The Secular City in 1965

6. The Rise of Environmentalism in 1969

While most of these events are somewhat familiar (excepting number five), I've never seen their individual (and collective) impact on American society, culture, and politics described as effectively as Weigel does here. In summary:

Taken together, these six moments suggest that something of enduring consequence happened to liberal politics, and thus to American political culture, during the Sixties. A politics of reason gave way to a politics of emotion and flirted with the politics of irrationality; the claims of moral reason were displaced by moralism; the notion that all men and women were called to live lives of responsibility was displaced by the notion that some people were, by reason of birth, victims; patriotism became suspect, to be replaced by a vague internationalism; democratic persuasion was displaced by judicial activism. Each of these consequences is much with us today. What one thinks about them defines the substratum of the politics of 2008, the issues-beneath-the-issues.

That this trajectory was unaffected by the victory of democracy and the free economy in the Revolution of 1989 and the collapse of the Soviet Empire tells us something important about the post-Sixties phase of the story. Beginning in the late Sixties, American liberalism followed the path of the global Left, substituting social issues and lifestyle libertinism for its previous concerns with economics and participatory politics. American liberalism, like its European counterpart, adopted the strategy of the Italian Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci and began a long march through the institutions--first the universities, the media, the philanthropies, the religious communities; today the institutions of marriage and the family. That this has had the most ­profound impact on our politics is obvious: The American culture war, which is one of the preeminent issues-beneath-the-issues, shapes the public discourse on both domestic and foreign-policy questions every day.

The Baby Boomers were essentially handed the greatest country on earth in the Sixties and many of them (especially the leaders) did their damndest to try to destroy it and piss away two-hundred years of American tradition, excellence, and achievement because THEY knew better. Thanks again Boomers.