WHY THIS REVOLUTION ISN'T LIKE THE '60S

Victor Davis Hanson [1]
Townhall.com

In the 1960s and early '70s, the U.S. was convulsed by massive protests
calling for radical changes in the country's attitudes on race, class,
gender, and sexual orientation. The Vietnam War and widespread college
deferments were likely the fuel that ignited prior peaceful civil
disobedience.

Sometimes the demonstrations became violent, as with the Watts riots of
1965 and the protests at the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago.
Terrorists from the Weathermen (later called the Weather Underground)
bombed dozens of government buildings.

The '60s revolution introduced to the country everything from hippies,
communes, free love, mass tattooing, commonplace profanity, rampant drug
use, rock music and high divorce rates to the war on poverty, massive
government growth, feminism, affirmative action and race/gender/ethnic
college curricula.

The enemies of the '60s counterculture were the "establishment" --
politicians, corporations, the military and the "square" generation" in
general. Leftists targeted their parents, who had grown up in the Great
Depression. That generation had won World War II and returned to create a
booming postwar economy. After growing up with economic and military
hardship, they sought a return to comfortable conformity in the 1950s.

A half-century after the earlier revolution, today's cultural revolution is
vastly different -- and far more dangerous.

Government and debt have grown. Social activism is already
institutionalized in hundreds of newer federal programs. The "Great
Society" inaugurated a multitrillion-dollar investment in the welfare
state. Divorce rates soared. The nuclear family waned. Immigration, both
legal and illegal, skyrocketed.

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Thus, America is far less resilient, and a far more divided, indebted and
vulnerable target than it was in 1965.

Today, radicals are not protesting against 1950s conservatism but rather
against the radicals of the 1960s, who as old liberals now hold power. Now,
many of the current enforcers -- blue-state governors, mayors and police
chiefs -- are from the left. Unlike Democratic Chicago Mayor Richard J.
Daley in the '60s, today's progressive civic leaders often sympathize with
the protesters.

The '60s protests were for racial assimilation and integration to reify
Martin Luther King Jr.'s agenda of making race incidental, not essential,
to the American mindset. Not so with today's cultural revolution. It seeks
to ensure that racial difference is the foundation of American life,
dividing the country between supposed non-white victims and purported white
victimizers, past and present.

In the '60s, radicals rebelled against their teachers and professors, who
were often highly competent and the products of fact-based and inductive
education. Not so in 2020. Today's radicals were taught not by
traditionalists but by less-educated older radicals.

Another chief difference is debt. Most public education in the 1960s was
bare-bones and relatively inexpensive. Because there were no plush dorms,
latte bars, rock-climbing walls, diversity coordinators and provosts of
inclusion, college tuition in real dollars was far cheaper.

The result was that 1960s student radicals graduated without much debt and
for all their hipness could enter a booming economy with marketable skills.
Today's angry graduates owe a collective $1.6 trillion in student loan debt
-- much of it borrowed for mediocre, therapeutic and politicized training
that does not impress employers.

College debt impedes maturity, marriage, child-raising, home ownership and
the saving of money. In other words, today's radical is far more desperate
and angry that his college gambit never paid off.

Today's divide is also geographical in the fashion of 1861, not just
generational as in the 1960s. The two blue coasts seem to despise the vast
red interior, and vice versa.

Yet the scariest trait of the current revolution is that many of its
sympathizers haven't changed much since the 1960s. They may be rich,
powerful, influential and older, but they are just as reckless and see the
current chaos as the final victory in their own long march from the '60s.

Corporations are no longer seen as evil, but as woke contributors to the
revolution. The military is no longer smeared as warmongering, but praised
as a government employment service where race, class and gender agendas can
be green-lighted without messy legislative debate. Unlike the 1960s, there
are essentially no conservatives in Hollywood, on campuses or in government
bureaucracies.

So the war no longer pits radicals against conservatives, but often
socialists and anarchists against both liberals and conservatives.

In the '60s, a huge "silent majority" finally had enough, elected Richard
Nixon and slowed down the revolution by jailing its criminals, absorbing
and moderating it. Today, if there is a silent mass of traditionalists and
conservatives, they remain in hiding.

If they stay quiet in their veritable mental monasteries and deplore the
violence in silence, the revolution will steamroll on. But as in the past,
if they finally snap, decide enough is enough and reclaim their country,
then even this cultural revolution will sputter out, too.

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