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Roundup: Media's Take

Why 1968 May Not Have Been a Factor in the Election of 2004

Christopher Caldwell, in the London Financial Tmes (11-27-04):

When Bill Clinton published his memoirs last spring, he presented his life as but one episode in the great cultural drama that "broke up" America in the 1960s. That break-up explained pretty much everything. "If you look back on the 60s and think there was more good than harm, you're probably a Democrat," Mr Clinton wrote. "If you think there was more harm than good, you're probably a Republican." For many observers, the all-explaining power of the 1960s has offered a way to present the results of the recent US presidential election as bizarre and unique. In the US, this account runs, the apostles of rectitude and small-town conformism have carried the day against the forces of tolerance, sexual openness and individual autonomy - against the 1960s.

But if you look more closely at that decade, there is reason to be sceptical about American uniqueness. The political movements of the 1960s present an optical illusion. In every western country they happened in almost exactly the same way and won almost exactly the same reforms - sexual freedoms, bigger welfare states, women's rights, attention to minorities. Yet each national culture finds a mythological cause of the movement in specific, local grievances. For the US it was Vietnam, race and empty consumerism, for Britain the class system and postwar drabness, for France the dead-end of Gaullism and the shame of Algeria, for Germany an older generation ambivalent about shouldering the country's war guilt.

The movements of the 1960s wiped out local injustices, but they were a global phenomenon, and those local injustices are not why the 1960s happened. Its causes are to be sought not in ideas but in large social and demographic forces. That is why Marxist historians such as Eric Hobsbawm have had better luck than most in explaining the 1960s, even if there is room to differ on which forces predominated. (Education? Prosperity? The baby boomers sensing their future electoral might?)

In the same way that America was not the only country to experience the 1960s, it is not the only country now reassessing and drawing back from them....