It is not hard to see why the Summer of Love has been romanticised in popular culture. It was when the young “seemed to be deserting their scripts”, according to Todd Gitlin’s sweeping history of the 1960s. That summer represented the high point of the decade. The Beatles sang a tune about love that was beamed across the world in an experiment for satellite television. A growing sense of optimism that the world could be changed with the application of a little love hit its peak before it all started to go wrong in 1968. More than two-thirds of respondents to a PBS online poll earlier this year said they would liked to have gone to San Francisco in that carefree summer of 1967.
The decade still reverberates in the American psyche. The reaction to George Bush’s recent comparison of the Iraq conflict to the Vietnam war is just the latest example. Some are quick to point to the similarities between then and now: a Texan in the White House, an unpopular war, an actor in charge of California. But the differences are just as stark.
In 1967, segregationist governors were still in power in the South. Race riots convulsed America, killing dozens in Detroit and Newark. The federal budget deficit, at the high point of big-government liberalism, accounted for a smaller percentage of GDP than the rough estimate of $200 billion for 2007. America’s involvement in Iraq is more unpopular now than the Vietnam war was in 1967. In early August, 57% of Americans said that sending troops to Iraq was a mistake, compared with 41% who thought in July 1967 that it was a mistake to send troops to Vietnam.
Attitudes have certainly changed.
Read it all. I found this article surprisingly unbalanced from the Economist. There is no question there have been changes for the better, but unfortunately there were other changes as well–and these are not mentioned. Sexual freedom led to, alas, sexual promiscuity, and a raft of unwanted pregnancies and the issue of abortion, for example, or the War on Poverty led, alas, to a subculture of dependency with all sorts of sad implications, and one could go on and on. The legacy is much more mixed than the picture painted here–KSH.
Whenever the subject of an exit strategy comes up with my liberal friends, I ask them what their exit strategy is for the War on Poverty. Now 40+ years and 6-7 trillion dollars with little good and much bad to show for it. After a period of stunned sputtering, I am usually told that we just need to spend some more time and money on it. I just smile, and after they think through the consequences of what they have said, their is another round of sputtering. Something to think about there for both liberals and conservatives.
[i]Now 40+ years and 6-7 trillion dollars with little good and much bad to show for it.[/i]
I’m curious what the “much bad” is. Some of Johnson’s socially directed legislation fell apart because it was not funded properly. Portions of the war on poverty that are still with us (and were adequately funded) are real bright spots in Federal programs (I’m thinking mainly of Head Start, WIC & Educational Television Services).
In the final accounting of the “sizzeling 60’s”, to me the bottom line is;
parentless children
abortion
inability to access doctors/healthcare
vacuous churches
escape from logic
STDs
women who don’t know their own value
men who don’t know their responsibilities
government devoid of a constitution
taxes and taxes
wicked movies and music
millions of dead humans in Southeast Asia (and elswhere) and no one cares
an educational system whose purpose is to not educate
abandoning parents to senior storage facilities (nursing homes)
Doctor Kavokianism (my own mother-in-law was killed against our wishes)
^^^^^^^^^^^
Those are just off the top of my head – I’m sure that there is more.
I wish here to honor my ancestors who did not take part in the insanity. My own father and mother just celebrated their 63rd aniversary. My father is 95 years old and they both live with my brother. Thank God that they, and my other ancestors, did not aspouse the ideas of the 1960s! My very life depends on it.
^^^^^^^^
Yet another afterthought:
You should check out the validity of my proposition that the 1960s arose from 1890s Anarchist movement.
@^&@@#$$ hippies.
APB, that is UTTERLY BRILLIANT! I will be quoting you on that one!
Always an interesting topic for those of us who actually graduated in the SF Bay Area in 1967. However, my summer was cut short due to immmediately starting at USNA 2 weeks after graduation.
Concur with MJD_NV that APB analogy is brilliant.
Nate, just one example of “bad” is that the rate of black American illegitimacy has doubled.
It is not the summer of love, it is the entire period that was a social disaster. What happened, of course, was that a culture that had been rooted in self-restraint was superseded by a culture of self indulgence, and this created the atomistic individualism and the national narcissism that presently reign. In a decade, we passed from an Apollonian culture to a Dionysian culture. Just totalling the bill for the drug culture, the dollars and the human degradation and sorrow, should give a measure of how disastrous this period was. All of a sudden, adolescents ruled the world, and all America became ever more adolescent as the generation grew. This is liberalism’s legacy, and we have scarcely begun to live it down, if we ever do.
Larry
I’m surprised that you’re surprised at how unbalanced this is. The Economist tends to be leftist, and for this generation of leftists, the 1960s are the shining example, the model, the Good Old Days. People who have this template for their thinking are very unlikely to see the down side of their dreams.
Katherine, I probably shouldn’t be surprised, but hope spring eternal I guess.
‘I sometimes think that one of the greatest divides in this country at present is on this question: Resolved, the 1960’s were a net good for the country of America. Discuss (The key word in the resolution being “net”). This article leaves the impression that it is hardly even a question. That simply is not true.
A couple of “negatives” spring to mind for me as well. First, I and my family are forced to endure advertisements for Cialis on daytime TV. Second, we have to endure advertisements advising that young girls get vaccinated against HPV when they go to get the beginning-of-school checkup (this without any indication that the girls will be told anything about how HPV is acquired . . .).
Let me just say that for all of the blame which “liberals” receive for the supposed aftermath of the 1960s; it is often forgotten that the conservatives of the 1950s & 1960s made themselves so irrelevant (or incoherent or mad) to most folks, thereby allowing the liberal consensus politics of the 1960s. While McCarthy may have been a not-so-distant memory in the Johnson campaign of 1964, the GOP had other liabilities (namely Barry Goldwater and their failure to disavow the radical elements of their party –e.g. John Birch Society) which prevented them from mounting any sort of counter-effort until Vietnam gave political momentum back to Republicans. Even then, it really took them until 1980 to figure out that Nixon’s race baiting wasn’t exactly the face of traditional values that was either desirable or electable in the long-run (as an aside, I would add that a mainstream acceptance of the conservative counterpoint during that era was also hampered by the lingering element of racism in the American South and elsewhere, notably demonstrated by the Wallace campaigns of ’64 and ’68).
No decade has a monopoly on vice, just as no decade has a monopoly on virtue. The ills and excesses of the 1960’s have
been well laid out, but there was some good that occured. The
Civil Rights Act and the Voting rights Act were passed, as well as the first heart transplant and the Apollo mission to the moon.
It seems that we in the US go from one extreme to the other
instead of being more temperate. That seems to be the real
problem.
Nate, do you notice that you mention not one single policy problem of Republican/conservative positions of that time?
Don, Yes I did notice that. The main “policy problem” that the national conservatives of the ’50s and ’60s had was getting elected. Since they weren’t able to form majorities or elect a president outside of Ike (who governed more like a Dem), we don’t have a “counterpart policy” to the liberal politics of the ’60s. I wish it weren’t true, but that’s the way things shook out. Did you have something else in mind with your question?
Nate, just one example of “bad†is that the rate of black American illegitimacy has doubled.
I think we may not be able to assess in our lifetime the good and bad impact of the 1960s – on anything, probably, but almost certainly not the black community. There was the inestimable good, as A. McIntosh says, of the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act. But what has happened to “family” in the black community is even more devastating than what has happened to white families. In my work, I’ve had to interview many of the black people in my community who were involved in civil rights activities back in the day – they are some of the finest people I know and the thing that haunts me is that in the 1960s the white community missed a tremendous opportunity to come together in harmony with these people. Instead, change had to be forced by violence and the damage that caused may never be undone. What has happened to black families since those days, when children mostly had married parents and a supportive neighborhood, has its roots in the 60s drug culture as much or more than in the social programs of the era.
Another thing I have wondered about – HUD’s urban renewal programs did get rid of some terribly substandard housing, but, in my community at least, this funding was also used to destroy a thriving neighborhood, which was replaced by an enormous (white) church campus. Children who grew up in that community have told me how much they loved it and how bitter they still are that it was erased from the face of the earth for no apparent reason. I wonder how often this story was repeated?
“The Economist tends to be leftist, and for this generation of leftists, the 1960s are the shining example, the model, the Good Old Days”
Economist writers more likely to be libertarian (even Thatcherite liberterian) than leftist.
#11 and #12. !2 is correct of course, but does not allow for the significance of differences of degree. The causality is all there and we trace these causes back as far as we want in American politics, but this misses the point. I was not arguing a change in kiind, but a change in degree when I spoke of the effects of the 60s and 70s. The self-restraint/self-indulgence has always been around, the Apollonian/Dionysian has always been around, but the degree and totality of their effects are radically different, era by era.
In the case at hand, the liberal forces have had a disproportionate effect on American culture over the last fifty years and these effects may have created a new bell curve that may not allow the pendulum to swing back in favor of self-restraint.
I might add that the civil rights success, claimed so often by the liberals, is probably not their handiwork. The blacks themselves were preparing to go face-to-face with The Man on this issue and would have succeeded without all those white civil rights activists.
It is true that America goes from extreme to extreme, but that’s probably because we pay no attention to the past and have so little use for it. The past is a sea anchor and holds any culture steady into the wind. American doesn;’t ride out storms. it lets the storms wreak immeasurable damage and then we throw money are the rebuilding. Larry
Adding to Larry’s comments, Dems would like everyone to forget that all the original Civil Rights legislation and actions were by Republicans (President, Senate, House). Even in the 60’s Republicans were stronger supporters of Civil Rights legislation than Dems (who mostly embraced the concept out of political necessity).
And contrary to Nate’s slander of Barry Goldwater, show me any Senator who personally did more for Civil Rights than BG (integrating the AZ Guard before Truman did it for the US military).
Bill, I’m really not sure how saying that Goldwater was unelectable in ’64 and refused to disavow the Birch Society amounts to slander. Those facts are well documented. Of course you are right that the ’50s & ’60s represented a wonderful opportunity for Civil Rights legislation. There were still socially liberal & libertarian republicans at that point who were working with the newer breed of democrats to get it done. If we had waited until the 1970s, civil rights legislation might have well nigh been impossible. Not to create animosity–just suggesting that the ineffective nature of the conservative party at mid-century played a role in introducing the liberalism they would come to detest.
Nate, the slander is in lumping him in with allegations of racism, a tactic which was very successfully employed by the Dems in ’64 and which you perpetuate, even if unintentionally.
I would argue that it was not ineffective conservatism that gave rise to liberalism. First, in spite of the facts (noted above), Dems managed to spin that they were responsible for civil rights legislation. Then, in one of the most incredible ironies, the Dems’ massive foreign policy failures (especially Viet Nam) led to a wave of loss of trust in societal institutions (including churches) that somehow created a groundswell of support for liberalism. I.e. Dem failures ultimately created support for Dems.
Bill:
Just to clarify. I’m not trying to infer that Goldwater was a racist, however, the fact that he was perceived as such (rightly or wrongly) was one of his problems. I agree with you that the ineffectiveness of mid-century conservatism did not directly give rise to liberalism, however, the absence of a strong populist conservative voice on the national level certainly helped the Dems. There was no counter-point. I blame this partly on Goldwater (as he was not wont to compromise or to follow a big-tent strategy). George Wallace shares some of the blame too (if blame is the right word); in that while Goldwater was busy pursuing a purist vision of conservatism, Wallace was just as busy confounding conservative principles with racist speech. Again, not trying to slander anyone, simply saying that had the right formed a coherent and popular message in the early ’60s, the social reforms of that decade might have been tempered.
If Vietnam was a failure, it was certainly not considered so in 1964…Not 1966 either. The anti-war movement didn’t begin in earnest until 1967-68…After the Great Society legislation was done passed. I’m sure that the era provoked a loss of faith in organized religion as you say, but it certainly provoked a loss of faith in government as well (evidenced by Reagan’s wildly popular anti-Washington message).