In both years, radical movements mainly of the young made daring, if ill-prepared, assaults on the forces of order. All were crushed and defeated, and the defeats ushered in a long period of left retrenchment and conservative triumph. That temptation should be resisted.
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. Four decades after 1848, a far stronger left had been born, based in mass socialist parties of the working class. A year later, they founded the Socialist International. But nothing like that will happen again, at least not in the postindustrial world.
But the fact that left parties abandoned their socialist dreams and came to adopt a “Third Way” program that inspired no one may obscure a quieter sort of victory. Away from the hothouse of national politics, the left gradually reinvented itself. Most activists shed their ultrarevolutionary illusions and began “the long march through the institutions”—cultural and social—that German radical Rudi Dutschke had advocated in 1968. The left’s influence on daily life, while it lacks the drama of mass insurgency, has been profound, particularly on people born since the 1960s. “The most enduring aspects of a social movement are not always its institutions but the mental attitudes which inspire it and which are in turn generated by it,” wrote British historian J.F.C. Harrison in 1969. That statement may be truer for the post-’68 left than for any of its predecessors.
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.
“Making values explicit” should be the central task of politics, declared the Port Huron Statement: “We regard men as infinitely precious and possessed of unfulfilled capacities for reason, freedom, and love” [emphasis in original]. That sentence (its gender bias aside) captures, with an aptly romantic tone, how ’68ers came to believe a better society would be built: radical democrats would liberate themselves by expanding the definition of freedom itself. Of course, this impulse sometimes led to forms of “identity politics” that descended into self-parody. But an expanded and durable meaning of “freedom” did win the day. 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.
The transition to a newer kind of left had its painful moments, of course. In Dissent, Irving Howe denounced the “New Styles in Leftism” that glorified violence, lauded Leninist regimes in the third world, and often wrote off white workers as a force for social change. The new social movements—of blacks and Latinos, feminists and gays, greens and punks—also had to combat the cynicism of a union-centered left and returned its fire with gusto. In Europe, radical splinter parties emerged to compete with the socialists and communists, sowing much bitterness but, until the creation of the Green Party, winning few votes. But, by the late 1970s, especially in the United States, a cultural revolution within the revolution had triumphed: women’s health clinics, gay pride marches, and protests against nuclear power plants were now the face of the grassroots left. “The personal is political” outlasted “Off the Pigs” and was fast becoming the accepted, if still controversial, wisdom on both sides of the Atlantic.
THE NEW movements were riding a current whose power transcended—and sometimes mocked—the work of activists. In the post-Fordist economy, those who had some higher education and a talent for self-expression fared best. Hip, sexy advertisements, often with a rock-and-roll soundtrack, made consuming by such “post-materialist” classes seem a mild sort of rebellion. I recall a layout in a French magazine that depicted an attractive, blissful thirty-something couple with paintbrushes in hand. “In 1968, we remade the world; in 1986, we are remaking our kitchen!” ran the copy. But profitable co-optation is an inevitable by-product of social change in a mass-market world.
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.
SUCH CULTURAL changes do not, of course, eliminate the need for mass movements in politics and the workplace. Millions of Americans smile at their screens when they see thieving, polluting corporate bigwigs get busted, but their joy isn’t reflected in the membership totals of unions or grassroots environmental groups. As Terry Eagleton wrote recently, “If the 1930s left had undersold culture, the postmodern left overvalued it.” Still, democratic leftists have always believed, with Marx, that “the free development of each will lead to the free development of all.” And the cultural awakening helped make it possible to legalize abortion, preserve affirmative action, move gay marriage from wild dream to legislative possibility—and to pass living wage ordinances in a growing number of cities and counties.
The last item on that list points up a less heralded but no less telling success of Dutschke’s long march, American-style: a new flowering of the organizing tradition. In the 1970s, thousands of educated New Leftists in retreat from revolutionary fantasies advanced into communities and local institutions where few radicals lived or worked. Their careful, undramatic efforts undergirded such national groups as Citizen Action, the Environmental Defense Fund, the Service Employees International Union, and the Children’s Defense Fund. The ranks of public-interest lawyers mushroomed, as class-action suits became a central device for challenging the power of corporations. Meanwhile, left-wing believers refreshed the Social Gospel in three of the oldest Protestant denominations—the United Church of Christ, Episcopalians, and United Methodists.
Most of these activists, like their academic and film-world counterparts, made their electoral home in the Democratic Party. From the 1970s through the 1990s, they lacked the unity of purpose and pragmatic skills to emulate the movement conservatives who held sway in the GOP. But the multiple fiascoes of George W. Bush’s administration built their confidence and their numbers. Groups like MoveOn, magazines like the Nation, and the progressive blogosphere migrated from the margins into the center of political debate and mobilization.
The 2008 campaign has so far been a heartening display of what the post-’68 left made possible. Both Democratic candidates still in the race as of mid-February came out of one wing of that inchoate but consequential movement: Hillary Clinton as staff attorney for the Children’s Defense Fund and Barack Obama, as a community organizer in a multiracial rust-belt city. They took advantage of the crisis of the right to advocate ideas that were long branded as ultraliberal: universal, government-guaranteed health insurance, full spousal benefits for gay couples, rigorously progressive taxation, union recognition through card-check elections, and a compassionate plan for solving the legal dilemma of undocumented immigrants. These are all essential to the agenda of a realistic left. Perhaps it just took a bit longer after 1968 than it did after 1848 for our side to start moving again.
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