Generational Conflict and Left Politics

The subtitle of Todd Gitlin’s book about the sixties, Years of Hope, Days of Rage, echoes the famous tag, “the best of times, the worst of times.” It was an intensely political time and for some the memory shines with nostalgic glow; others remember it as quite the worst of times. Each memory suppresses the other, and what is needed, but hard, is to see both.

It was also a time of significant cultural changes inseparable from politics: a shift in sexual mores, beginnings of the women’s movement, the spread of casual drug use, changes in popular music. Gitlin reports that early SDSers followed Bob Dylan’s career “as if he were singing our song; we got in the habit of asking where he was ta...