Did the protests and protesters of 1968, all together, make up the Weltseele on pavements? Those Old Regimes fell in the early nineteenth century only to be resurrected, re-overthrown and re-resurrected, re-invented and . . . and . . . and . . . . A lot happened before a stable, Western constitutional order emerged after 1945. Look only at the Big Historical Picture, you’ll miss contingencies. Nineteen-sixty-eight challenged the post-1945 order. Many people were surprised because what had seemed sound rattled. There was much original in the 1960s, but not this surprise. People (especially intellectuals) often mystify what is in front of them, imagining the past leads inevitably to it or that it opens an inevitable future. Recall the “end of history” riffs in the decade or so before 1968. Some reveled in what was perceived to be the end to challenges to the One Big Idea (liberalism). Others despaired. We were reduced to (circle one or more): lonely crowds, organizational men, one-dimensionality, or structures. There was truth in all this, but only some.
For then came 1968. Contestation!, as the French say. It was needed. But the left didn’t win. There are at least two ways to think of “1968”: as twelve intense months or as an emblem of a tumultuous period. Those twelve months were bleak. The period produced some very real good (such as social idealism) and enough bad things:
The United States: At the year’s start, we had Lyndon Johnson. At its end, Richard Nixon. In between? The deaths of countless Vietnamese and thousands of Americans. The assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Turmoil in cities and on campuses. Robert F. Kennedy’s assassination. The antiwar movement was beaten, politically and physically, at the Chicago Democratic National Convention. The liberal coalition that had furthered socioeconomic reform for decades cracked. Parts of the left descended into crackpot sectarianism or mistook anti-Americanism for an alternative political idea.
“You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.” Winds blew America rightward for four decades.
France: Students and workers mounted barricades and raised their voices on behalf of alternative visions of society. Then Gaullists pushed them down. The right won the ensuing legislative elections. Left parties lost badly, including left foes of the ’68ers, like the French Communist Party. Charles de Gaulle’s days in power were numbered, but it took another thirteen years before the left, led by socialist François Mitterrand (not quite a ’68er), captured the presidency. But last year’s vote was won by a man who stressed his contempt for ’68. In the meantime, the best ideas of France’s ’68—egalitarian humanism, a society of autogestion (democratic self-management)—have dissipated, their role and memory eclipsed by self-celebrations by “New Philosophers,” the self-preoccupations of “anti-humanist” postmodernism, and the mixed legacy of the French Socialist Party in power.
Czechoslovakia: Great hopes animated the Prague Spring. For a short, glorious season Marxists—that’s what they were—began to liberate their country. Soviet tanks crushed them. “Be practical, demand the impossible,” read a famous grafitto on a wall of the Sorbonne in May. What could this have meant in Prague? When the impossible happened in 1989, it was due first to changes in Moscow, not to demands in Prague. Without those changes, the Warsaw Pact would have ensured that the impossible remained impractical.
Nineteen eighty-nine was unforeseen. Afterward, many European and American liberal intellectuals rushed to take a bow at what they claimed was history’s finale. So too did Ronald Reagan’s mythologizers. They all imagined themselves alone at the curtain calls, and took their ideas or politics to be the Weltseele. But after a few ups and downs, they discovered there were others onstage too. Like Islamists.
Here, then, some lessons of ’68 (and after): What seems static, including ideas, is often not so. The consequences may be good, bad, both. What seems decisive is often not so. A projection of human possibilities, hopes, alternatives, is critical for our lives, but only so long as it is tempered utopianism, not the intoxicated utopianism that almost always brings us nowhere we’d want to be.
WHAT GOOD came from the 1960s? A lot. Rigid cultural patterns began to break down. Some of them were truly evil and were reinforced by law and politics.
Take race. I think that there was only one issue in that decade that did not allow two sides: civil rights. I can admit—this is difficult for me—that some folks defended the Vietnam War in good faith and with moral integrity. I cannot admit the same of foes of civil rights. Well, George Wallace was in “good faith” if that means he was frank about his bigotry. But I bristle when someone says that Barry Goldwater’s opposition to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was honorable because of his view of federalism or constitutionalism or individualism or whatever. There was a bigger matter of human and democratic decency that should have trumped these (easily). Instead, Goldwater heralded the Republican “Southern strategy,” with its coded messages.
Despite all this, the racial ancien régime has crumbled in significant ways thanks in part to the 1960s. Today’s reality is complex. That an African American and a woman became serious contenders for the Democratic presidential nomination indicates important, positive change. But America is not yet a postracist society, and I will be surprised if an African American can defeat a white war hero in national elections. Nonetheless, isn’t it hopeful that my undergraduate students are incredulous when I tell them that not very long ago violence would be provoked in parts of this country if a black person sat next to a white person to order a hamburger at a lunch counter? They—most of my students, anyway—would dismiss the idea that women should be paid less than men for doing the same job. They—certainly the women among them—would find senseless any gender-based restrictions on (most) professional opportunities. It was a different world before 1960s feminists questioned “normal” authority patterns and how personal and political matters intersect. (But I don’t accept the idea that the personal is always the political; it turns us too easily into one-dimensional persons).
Cultural conservatives are apoplectic about “countercultural” changes, as if their own parochialism defines culture. They fear a slippery slope: push aside “Father Knows Best,” you will end up with the Charles Manson Family. They are a bit like our economic right-wingers: start with Social Security, next you’ll have the KGB. There are, of course, alternatives, such as a pluralistic culture (in which celebrations of individual liberty don’t mask social and sexual conformism) or a pluralistic economy grounded in social solidarity and a judicious rather than religious view of markets.
The counterculture had diverse, far-reaching effects (good and bad), yet perhaps it did not go quite the distance that its proponents and foes imagine. After all, a leading contender for the Republican nomination this past year, Mike Huckabee, plays guitar in a rock band while espousing reactionary cultural and political agendas. Another lesson of the 1960s: cultural change does not always (or simply) enable political change. Here let me be both personal and political. My aim is not to talk about me—that endless “me” of my generation irritates me—but to use an experience to illustrate a political problem.
In 1968, I was a high school foot soldier in Eugene McCarthy’s presidential campaign. I wanted the real foot soldiers out of Vietnam. I handed out leaflets and stuffed envelopes in Queens, New York, a borough speckled with quarreling local Democratic Clubs. There were “regulars” (pro-Johnson and later Humphrey) and “reformers” (antiwar), all of them in some way parts of neighborhoods. I went to demonstrations, read Ray Ginger’s biography of Eugene Debs, and decided I was a socialist. I did not know of Dissent magazine, and when I came across its twentieth-anniversary issue in a college bookstore in 1974, I found it too “social democratic.” I had become increasingly radical because “working within the system” failed in 1968. Fortunately, a reading of What Is to be Done? left me allergic to Lenin, and Maoists seemed to have, well, all screws loose. (Peasant revolution in America? Really?)
That midsummer of 1968, I could often be found staffing a table with other McCarthy volunteers in front of Alexander’s department store on Queens Boulevard. We asked passersby to sign a petition declaring that they would never vote for pro-war Hubert Humphrey. (No chance that I would: I was underage.) We were furious that the vice president was poised to win the nomination in Chicago thanks to the party machine and without contesting primaries.
I noticed something during those warm, agitated days, and was perplexed. Some whites signed. Every black person we approached said no.
One man, declining to sign, said, “1948.” I made the connections only some years later when I read some ancient history—about the 1948 Democratic Convention. A young Midwestern mayor spoke brave words there. Here is a passage from Hubert Humphrey’s speech:
My friends, to those who say that we are rushing this issue of civil rights, I say to them we are 172 years late . . . .To those who say that this civil-rights program is an infringement on states’ rights, I say this: The time has arrived in America for the Democratic party to get out of the shadow of states’ rights and to walk forthrightly into the bright sunshine of human rights. People—People—human beings—this is the issue of the 20th century.
Southern Democrats stormed out, formed the States Rights “Dixiecrat” Party, and ran Strom Thurmond, future Republican hero, for president. His campaign anticipated George Wallace’s third-party effort in 1968, which helped to deliver victory to Richard Nixon and defeat to . . . Hubert Humphrey. Nixon was also served by those of us who were so incensed about the war, Humphrey’s support for it, and the nominating process that everything else went out of focus. Our anger was justified. Nonetheless, here is another lesson of 1968 for the left: we need to know when to be political rather than virtuous, because virtue can be a little too easy.
This doesn’t mean we should cast off left idealism; it means that those black Americans who refused to sign our petition were right, whether the reason was “1948” or the Civil Rights Acts of the 1960s or Richard Nixon. (Imagine if postmodern academics had been there in 1948; they would have “deconstructed” Humphrey’s “discourse” on “People” and “human rights,” and “disclosed” the real danger: “liberal humanist essentialism.”)
Consider what happened to the Democratic Party after 1968. The nominating process was reformed. George McGovern became the candidate in 1972 and inspired many young people. His campaign was a political disaster and he lost badly. The bad reform of the party was later reformed badly (creating “super-delegates” to the convention without rethinking seriously the organizational role and needs of a democratic—small “d”— party). The old machine did decline, yet instead of better democracy we ended up with candidates who are dependent on their personal fund-raising abilities and consultants rather than on organized people. Let’s be difficult. That declining party machine was a New Deal machine committed largely to social liberalism—the Democratic Party’s ancien régime. What wouldn’t we have done to have something like it (renewed, recalibrated, updated, to be sure) with which to challenge the priorities of the Bush administration? (The Internet, whatever its values, should not be mistaken for the new World-Soul of politics.)
I am suggesting that the left learn to be “’68ers” and “compromised social democrats” at the same time. That doesn’t work, you protest? It is “contradictory”? Well, yes, true—to my intellectual dismay. But one thing to be learned from ’68 and after is that these are bad criticisms. Did the “noncontradictory” left do so well?
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