Many writers are inclined to view the current unrest in the United States through the lens of “the Sixties.” That decade actually spanned 1963 to 1973, beginning with the assassination of President John F. Kennedy through to America’s ignominious exit from Vietnam.
It gave us the so-called counterculture -- hippies, communes, the increasing use of drugs, anti-Vietnam War protests, and the American umbrella organization Students for a Democratic Society (SDS).
But these authors are wrong. This is a very different political moment.
The Sixties activists challenged the structures of the state, including bureaucracy, the military, big business, and university administrators. All those sectors in turn resisted the activists. Also, though the New Left opposed racism, that wasn’t the very core of its critiques.
Today, many of these same, now older, radicals are themselves part of the political establishment. They control the Democratic Party and much of academia, the courts, the media, and the cultural industries, including films, publishing and television. Many became tenured university professors and brought the revolution into the classroom, Corporations are no longer seen as evil, the military is no longer smeared.
Also different is the situation of today’s protestors. Though iconoclasm now reigns, and protestors topple statues and eliminate the names of streets, sports teams, buildings, and even towns, with wild abandon, this is met with little resistance, something unimaginable 50 years ago.
While the main protests are carried out under the Black Lives Matter banner, the Antifa (for anti-fascist) far-leftists are mostly white.
The extremists in SDS, who spawned white militant groups like the Weathermen that bombed buildings and killed cops, were hunted down and destroyed by the police and FBI. Yet today’s radical Antifa rioters, whose core belief includes the embrace of political violence, are, by comparison, treated with kid gloves; they know the police won’t intentionally kill them.
Particularly different is the African American experience then and now. Urban insurrections were met by National Guard troops firing real, not rubber, bullets. Hundreds were killed in cities like Chicago, Detroit, Los Angeles and Newark. Groups like the Black Panthers were suppressed, their leaders jailed, murdered, or driven into exile.
Black Lives Matter, on the other hand, has the backing of virtually the entire Democratic Party, including members of Congress, state governors and big-city mayors. One mayor, Ted Wheeler of Portland, Oregon, himself joined a Black Lives Matter-Antifa protest in his volatile city July 23.
Multinational corporations are in support of its aims. Major league sports teams have “taken the knee,” and American media outlets like the Atlantic, CNN, MSNBC, the Nation, the New York Times, the New Yorker, and the Washington Post are in favour. And don’t forget Facebook, Google, YouTube and the rest of the Silicon Valley billionaires.
Indeed, anyone who questions the left’s program and tactics is branded a racist by most Americans and becomes a pariah, often losing their job. Such is the power of ideological hegemony.
So if all those sixties radicals are now part of what sociologist C. Wright Mills 60 years ago called the “power elite” in his seminal book by that name, who are the new protestors?
For the most part, the members of groups like Antifa have always been the pampered children of the white professional class.
But they are also angry, because in today's high-priced American cities, especially on the globalized coasts, it is increasingly difficult for college graduates to find a job that will allow for upward mobility.
The protestors realize that they have little hope of attaining the usual milestones of entry into the middle class, such as gaining a useful and marketable skill, starting a small business, or buying a home. They now suffer consistently lower wages than their counterparts from previous generations.
They are not rebelling against their elders, as was the case on the New Left, but rather because they cannot attain what those sixties radicals, now in power, managed to acquire. And those guilt-ridden “boomers,” their grandparents, are reluctant to admonish them.
For these reasons, today’s revolution is not a second iteration of “The Sixties.” One thing, though, is certain: a society whose history and founders are hated by millions of its members will not survive.
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