Street riots, eminent liberals fired, the Democratic party veering sharply Left: these trace directly back to events of fifty years ago.
"The 1960s" (which in fact ran from 1965 to 1975) was a decade of massive change, a rebellion against the stability, growth, and (yes) smugness of the immediate post-World War II era, 1945-65. The 60s are now remembered primarily as a time of youthful rebellion, of sex, drugs, and rock 'n roll. University hippies in Volkswagen microbuses decorated with peace signs represented the vanguard; mellow students followed. Woodstock represented the heights and Altamont Free Concert the depths. British poet Philip Larkin memorialized this spirit in a famous poem with its first line, "Sexual intercourse began/In nineteen sixty-three/(which was rather late for me)."
 A Volkswagen microbus decorated with peace signs. |
But it was not all fun, the leftists of yore adopted classic themes of Marxism-Leninism, focusing on imperialism and insisting that the Western wealth came from plundering the rest of the world. The imperialist system, with its perpetual drive for new markets on which to dump its industrial surplus, stood as humanity's central evil; the war in Vietnam supremely represented its rapaciousness.
Ethnicity and race hardly mattered. Yes, it was the decade of civil rights, but leftists did not drive this transformation; outside of parts of the Deep South, a national consensus emerged that Blacks finally deserved full citizenship.
I experienced this would-be revolution first hand, especially during my college years, 1967-71. As a budding conservative, I crossed "picket lines" to eat the dormitory food and to attend the classes my parents paid for. Sadly, not being a leftist felt terminally uncool. It also seemed like the leftist hegemony would spread from the university to the rest of society.
Of course, that did not happen. After the communist horrors that followed America's 1975 defeat in Vietnam, left wingery lost momentum. Worse, the Soviet Union imploded and China abandoned Maoism for state-sponsored capitalism. Vietnam became a mini-China and Cuba decayed beyond redemption. Venezuela hardly inspires.
Progressives self-isolated in the "counterculture." Old ideas did not burn out but remained mostly limited to the educational system. In retrospect, that proved to be a wise long-term investment. For today's full-blown leftist revival fifty years later results directly from generations of assiduous left-wing indoctrination.
 Herbert Marcuse (1898-1979) was much more dangerous than he looked. |
The Left then had dreams, today's has nightmares. That one had fun, this one suffers.
But this one also has a far greater reach in "the real world." Democratic politicians and labor leaders resisted leftist pieties a half-century back and submit to them now. The schools, media, and arts then tolerated a range of viewpoints hardly imaginable in this era of suffocating progressivism. The church of Black Lives Matter, with its outrage at even the slightest dissent, epitomizes this "Great Awokening" era of cancel culture and de-platforming.
 Leftists like Matthew Yglesias use the term "Great Awokening" in all seriousness. |
For all their differences, the Left of the two eras shares a fundamental similarity in its anarchism, its arrogant innocence, and its (Saul Alinsky-style) treating opponents as enemies to be destroyed. Obsessive hatred of Nixon transferred neatly over to Trump. David Horowitz' observation, "Inside every progressive is a totalitarian screaming to get out," holds true in both eras.
And the Right, as ever, fails to keep step. The kids flock to Bernie Sanders who mixes promises of free stuff with rage against the 1%. Concepts like microaggressions and intersectionality meet no conservative response. #AbolishICE inspires street demonstrations, #ProtectTheBorders barely exists. #ClimateChange swamps #SecureTheGrid. #BlackLivesMatter tromps over #StopRacialPreferences. Which has more caché, #MeToo or #AbolishTheAdministrativeState? The Left says "trust women" when Brett Kavanaugh is accused but nimbly switches to innocent-until-proven guilty when Joe Biden is in the dock.
America's first far-left surge prepared the way for the second. Decades of hard work by dedicated cadres has paid off.
Western civilization is in play, threatened from within. Today's deeply grounded movement could succeed in taking over; after all, it is doing just that through most of Europe.
Mr. Pipes (DanielPipes.org, @DanielPipes) is president of the Middle East Forum. © 2020 by Daniel Pipes. All rights reserved.
 The Washington Times illustration for this article. |
June 14, 2020 addendum: (1) Andrew Breitbart's aphorism, "Politics is downstream from culture," sums up the Left's new, correct approach.
(2) I allude above to the parallel hatreds of Nixon and Trump. It's also worth noting how differently the two presidents responded. Nixon tried to appease his opponents by moving to the center and even the left (wage and price controls?). Trump has responded by becoming much more conservative. This makes one wonder, had the Democrats held their fire four years ago, would he have emulated Nixon? I suspect so. In other words, hatred of Nixon worked and of Trump failed.
June 15, 2020 update: A frequent commentator at this website who goes by "Dhimmi No More" adds: Islam replaced Hare Krishna. (How did I miss that?)
June 20, 2020 update: Peter Hitchens draws the same conclusion as I do above: power defines a main difference between 50 years ago and today, the lack of it by the Left then and its possession of power now:
in the 1960s the wild Left were still the outsiders, the weird nuisances with their funny ideas and their long hair, shouting their radical slogans. I remember it well. Now they have come into their own. Then, they wanted to communicate their ideas to those on the pavement as they passed. Now they get angry if anyone on the street does not assent to their views.
Then they regarded the police with something close to hostility. Now they see them as their protectors. (On Tuesday, I watched them actually ask the police to 'keep an eye' on a drunk who had been following the protest and annoying people.)
July 23, 2020 update: Victor Davis Hanson gives his somewhat parallel explanation of how then and now differ at "Why This Revolution Isn't Like the '60s."
Dec. 28, 2020 update: Barbara Kay focuses on Gramsci's success at "Communism's Long March Through the Institutions Has Succeeded."
The collapse of the Soviet Union discredited Lenin's bayonet-forward version of socialism, but it did not deter the triumph of Marxist doctrine via the "long march through the institutions" that Gramsci prescribed. Gramsci's acolytes became the West's "tenured radicals," and with the universities as their sandboxes, they indoctrinated the children of America into their pernicious belief system. The result is that as these students graduated and made their way up their professional ladders, every single one of the institutions we have been trained to trust—education, physical and mental health, media, the arts, sport, the bar—have been infected.
Sep. 2, 2021 update: Henry Payne caught the distinction between 50 years ago and now in a cartoon titled "The Left 1970s versus 2020s."
