Sometimes you wonder if it is possible for a progressive agenda to be argued for and implemented in the US at this time. The central tendency of the public debate is so far to the right, and there seems to be so little room for moving things leftward. Some bright spots appear on the national scene, like Senators Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders and Sherrod Brown, and Mayor Bill DeBlasio, but it is hard to work up much hope for their success. There is a consistent voice for progressive policies from MSNBC, albeit one not listened to by all that many people. And Barach Obama, circa 2007, gave us all some hope for transformative leadership. But that seems like a long time ago.
For decades, I have been telling my students that we are stuck in a timewarp, a skewed and corrupted decade from which exit seems difficult. Let me explain.
The Fifties
I grew up in the Fifties. In the Fifties, I grew up thinking that there were good guys and bad guys. The child of a Holocaust survivor, I knew that Hitler was a bad guy. So were Stalin and Khrushchev. The Communists were the biggest bad guys we faced. Television provided me with a long list of good guys, fathers who knew best, masked cowboys who captured outlaws, superheros who fought for truth, justice and the American way. The science fiction books I read non-stop had good buy/bad guy plots; you rooted for the good guys and were happy when the bad guys lost, as they always did. The President of the United States was one of the chief good guys. Over the next few decades, this easy understanding of “good” and “bad” became more complicated.
Decades are not numerical. They are cultural. So, the Fifties probably didn’t start in 1951, the year of my birth. I believe they probably started in August of 1945, when we used the atomic bomb on Japan. We ended the war, but we began the Cold War. With that explosion, America became a dominant force on the world scene.
The Sixties
I grew up in the Fifties, but I came of age in the Sixties. You can get a lot of discussion on when the Fifties ended and the Sixties began. Maybe when President Eisenhower warned us of the “military-industrial complex.” Or when we elected Kennedy. A good argument could be made for the unheralded moment in 1962 when U.S. troops first accompanied Vietnamese forces on a raid. We might choose November of 1963, when Kennedy is shot.
But the cultural tone that enlivened the Sixties can’t have started without the music. I think the best date for the beginning of the Sixties was February 9, 1964, when the Beatles first performed on the Ed Sullivan show.
The Sixties turned out to be quite a challenge for those of us who believed in the potential triumph of the good guys, but ultimately the lesson was that “doing Good” was still a worthy goal, and that struggles for justice and reason could prevail. As the Sixties started, the country was already deeply and, apparently, inextricably involved in the Viet Nam War, but most of us didn’t know it, as the Good Guy in Chief had not shared this information.
Of course, good guys wouldn’t have pursued a war they knew was unwinnable, at extraordinary cost to our treasury and the inexcusable loss of life on all sides. Good guys would have told us the truth about our interests and our prospects. When the total bill of that misadventure is calculated, it would be a grave mistake to underestimate the cost to American policy-making of the cynicism that arose as a result of those lies.
While the Sixties were a time of social conflict, they were also a time of great idealism. We learned that a struggle for civil rights could move a powerful and, at times, deeply prejudiced majority to cede rights to a minority. We declared a war on poverty, recognized that women were a minority group, turned the nation away from an ill-conceived war. We virtually eliminated poverty among the elderly by paying for their healthcare through Medicare. We promised healthcare for some of the poor, with Medicaid. And the early successes of the fledgling environmental movement demonstrated that caring for the future of our ecological niche might have broad appeal.
Even the War provided some hope, as a generation learned that sometimes being a good guy meant you had to “take it to the streets” and, if you did, others would listen. It was a generation that learned two important lessons: if you aren’t cynical enough, you will be a victim of those in power, but if you are too cynical, you will be paralyzed to work for change. Changing the world was a valid and admirable ambition, and many young adults decided to try to blend this calling into their professional plans. Some of us decided that we needed to “do Good” as our life’s work. Being an efficacious good guy seemed a noble and an obtainable goal. We went to the Moon in the Sixties, and, after all, if we can go to the Moon. . . .
The Seventies tried to change that view.
The Seventies
There is some reasonable debate on when the Sixties ended and the Seventies began. Arguable candidates are the early 1968 Tet Offensive, when the notion that the War was winnable became hard for almost everybody to hold onto. Later that year, the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy did great damage to our hope, but their messages continued to inspire us.
Maybe the Sixties ended the day we first elected Richard Nixon. After all, good guys wouldn’t have appealed to our North Vietnamese enemies to delay peace talks until after the Presidential election, or secretly bombed Cambodia, or broken into the offices of their political opponents and then covered up their involvement. But in that first election, Nixon did promise to extract us from Viet Nam, and in his first term he did establish, by executive order, the U.S. Environmental Protection.
A compelling case could be made that the Kent State killings in May of 1970 should mark the end of the Sixties. Many of us still can’t see the picture of the student wailing over the body of her fallen friend without an urge to cry along with her.
Maybe the Sixties ended when the Beatles split up. That would provide some sense of balance. But by then, their catalog of music was voluminous and so much an unquestioned part of our lives that their break-up didn’t seem to end anything with finality. Forty years later, that catalog is well-known by kids the age we were when the group called it quits. Nothing really seemed to end with their decision.
My best guess is that the Sixties ended in November of 1972, when we re-elected Richard Nixon in an overwhelming landslide over an opponent, George McGovern, who was widely ridiculed at the time, but whose proposed policies have almost all been adopted by future administrations.
My, but the Seventies tried to grind out of us our faith in the potential achievement of “the Good,” but they couldn’t quite do it. The Watergate scandal gave us an uncomfortable look into the unseemliness of presidential behavior, but it also showed that the bad guys still lose, or at least resign in disgrace.
A whirlwind of inflation buffeted us and the gas lines of the energy crisis reduced our sense of exceptionalism. We started the Seventies with that most cynical of foreign policies, Henry Kissinger’s realpolitik, where it didn’t matter how bad a country or its leader was behaving, they would get our support if our interests demanded it. And no matter how much an international good guy might struggle, if their struggle did not advance our global interests, they were irrelevant.
That foreign policy has played out to America’s horrible disadvantage over the intervening decades, as the rest of the world has come to see us as cynical and self-centered and greedy, hardly the archetype good guy. But the Seventies also brought us a catalog of federal environmental laws, Supreme Court decisions that recognized reproductive rights, and Jimmy Carter’s foreign policy, where the central organizing principle was human rights.
For a brief moment in the latter part of that decade, we stood for something noble on the world stage. Yes, there were a lot of bad guys around the world. And, yes, sometimes we had to associate with them, and at other times we had to fight them. But our eyes would be focused in the long run on supporting the birthrights of all humans to food, shelter, education, healthcare, meaningful work.
The values embedded in the Carter domestic and foreign agendas gave many of us children of the Sixties hope, even as we were daunted by the problems we faced: stagflation, interest rates that made home ownership difficult, energy costs, environmental degradation, competition with the Soviets, and the early foreshadowing of Islamicist violence in the Iranian embassy takeover. We were daunted, but we also had a sense that we were led by people who were doing their best to be good guys. When the Seventies ended, our hope was bruised, but we were still ready for a fight.\
Then came the Eighties.
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