Insight Magazine
Published in Washington, D.C.
Vol. 14, No. 14 -- April 20, 1998

By Stephen Goode

That much-celebrated decade is best known for its inspired radicalism, but it also shaped the political attitudes of many of America's elite. Take our president and first lady, for example.

It has been called the Age of Aquarius and personal liberation, a time when sex was easy and drugs of all kinds available everywhere. But what may sum up the sixties generation better than anything else is that it was one with a very high opinion of its own worth and destiny.

"We are stardust/We are golden," sang Joni Mitchell. The politically correct journalist Jack Newfield termed the new left The Prophetic Minority in a highly laudatory book he wrote in 1967, concluding that the young men and women of the time had created not just another new political movement but formed the vanguard of a new elite whose vision for America's future was the best thing that had happened to the country since its founding.

Indeed, no generation in American history came with a more glowing endorsement. The young of the 1960s were told time and again by their elders, who should have known better, that they were the best-educated, the brightest and most moral generation in American history.

What is certain is that for better or worse the young of the sixties -- the new left, the hippies, the rockers and the druggies -- influenced American life enormously and, at the turn of the century, we're still sorting out the legacy that decade has left us.

Affirmative action in the workplace, multiculturalism on the campuses, radical feminism, fanatical environmentalism and a rock-music and drug-enthusiastic popular culture are only some of the problems America has inherited from that decade, which also was the time when the political and social attitudes of many of America's elite were formed. Both Hillary and Bill Clinton, for example, were college students in the era and, to this day, carry at least two of the traits characteristic of the time: a belief in egalitarianism when it comes to politics and society and a smug self-righteousness that assumes one's own attitudes and convictions are the best attitudes and convictions anyone might have.

Clearly, how people view the sixties says a lot about their politics. For Green activist Sam Smith, a community activist during the sixties in Washington and editor of The Progressive Review, the era was "a time of great optimism. People forget that it was when Lyndon Johnson and Adam Clayton Powell, not the most admired figures in our national history, nonetheless got progressive legislation through Congress in a shorter time than even FDR. In the 1960s, you saw what it was like when whole communities came to life and worked together."

But for conservative cultural critic Roger Kimball, author of a brilliant series of recent essays in The New Criterion titled "Reflections on a Cultural Revolution," the period was "an unmitigated disaster for America in every way." There was "the assault on intellectual standards which we are still experiencing today," Kimball tells Insight. "There was the assault on morality, to do away with a sense of shame." Both assaults, he says, proved successful.

There's been no shortage of books, articles and TV documentaries on the sixties. For some observers, it was the best of times. In his popular history The Movement and the Sixties, Texas A&M University professor Terry Anderson argued that the decade represented what was best in American history -- the pursuit of justice for all. In the 1960s, Anderson wrote, American society began a long-overdue "massive assault" on "the white male face of America." For Anderson, the sixties were creative, vital and progressive -- a time when the young were searching for what they called "authenticity" and declining to accept the world they'd inherited from their parents.

But Harvard University philosopher Harvey Mansfield wrote in "The Legacy of the Sixties," a recent essay, that the 1960s were a bad time whose "poison has worked its way into our souls, the effects becoming less visible to us as they become more ordinary."

For David Horowitz and Peter Collier, both of whom were far-left activists during the 1960s who became Reagan conservatives in the 1980s, theirs was a Destructive Generation, the title they gave to a book of their essays published in 1989 describing their former lives on the left and their political conversion. Far from recalling a creative and vital time, the conservative born-again Horowitz and Collier remember the barbarism of the decade and what in American life the sixties generation destroyed without offering the country anything of value in its place.

This radical decade began with the civil-rights movement and went on to encompass opposition to the war in Vietnam (an opposition, it has been noted, that petered out after President Nixon abolished the military draft). The SDS, or Students for a Democratic Society, never numbering more than 5,000 members (and that only for a short while), gained a notoriety far larger than its small size warranted, in part because some of its leaders were media-savvy. The most politically vocal of new-left movements, the SDS longed for socialism and was especially enamored of Fidel Castro's Cuba.

There were other groups, other sides to the culture of the sixties. The Yippies, or Youth International Party, for instance, prided themselves on their "spontaneous" happenings -- such as throwing dollar bills onto the floor of the New York Stock Exchange from the mezzanine. The hippies were men and women who had dropped out of the "rat race," wore odd clothes, grew their hair long and formed urban and rural communes with their own kind in which to smoke dope and enjoy communal sex.

What united these diverse movements? Very little, it once seemed. But from the vantage of three decades it's possible to point to three traits these young men and women of the sixties shared, regardless of whether they called themselves hippies, Yippies or SDS members.

First was a commitment to radical egalitarianism, the belief that in a just society everyone was to be absolutely equal and that every effort should be made to level society as much as possible. The second was an anti-Americanism that increasingly raised its head as the decade wore on. Third was a self-righteousness -- a certainty about the rightness of their own views -- that probably characterizes most true-believing political groups but was virulent and fanatical in the new left and what came to be called the sixties generation.

The three traits are interrelated. "So many of the leaders of the new left were insufferably unbearable when it came to self-righteousness," says Richard J. Ellis, chairman of the politics department of Willamette University in Salem, Ore., and author of the recently published book, The Dark Side of the Left: Illiberal Egalitarianism in America.

Why so self-righteous? "They start off with certain connections to the political world, pursuing their goals of equality," Ellis explains. "But then they increasingly wall themselves off. Why? Because their demands are so huge and can't be realized. They grow frustrated with the world as it is."

But more significantly, they conclude "that contact with the world means defilement of their ideals. This belief that the real world is impure and contaminating grows stronger over time," says Ellis, and often ended up in a justification of the use of violence as necessary to purge an impure society of its evils.

"There is nothing sacrosanct about the fabric of our society, if the fabric is a snarl and a strangling cord," wrote Tom Hayden, one of the founders of the SDS in 1963. For Rennie G. Davis, only a biblical metaphor would do to express his disdain for America: "If the eye be jaundiced, pluck it out. If the society is rotten, rid thyself of it," he declared in Guerrilla Theatre: A Way of Life.

During the summer of 1964, the tiny SDS chapter at elite Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania, one of the most radical in the country, began speaking about the necessity of creating "moral communities within an amoral society." So removed from reality were these young radicals that they drew up a draft proposal for the SDS National Convention that approved of "revolutionary change" that would come from "islands of transformed society within the old" and be "spread by force of example or by guerrilla warfare until they control the whole country."

By mid-decade, new-left literature regularly denounced the United States as a "profoundly ... diseased society" and "a fundamentally rotten system." As SDS moved closer to advocating violence to overturn the American system, Hayden said it wasn't because the SDS wanted to turn to violence but was "a last resort" because "we ourselves became infected with many of the diseases of the society we wished to erase." To maintain its purity, it had to lash out against a very corrupt system if SDS was going to save its own soul.

As early as the Free Speech Movement, or FSM, at the University of California, Berkeley in 1964 the deep radicalism of the new left was visible. "There is only one proper response to Berkeley from undergraduates," wrote FSM activist Bradley Cleveland in an open letter to students at a campus rapidly undergoing radicalization. That response, Cleveland claimed, was to "organize and split the campus wide open! From this point on, do not misunderstand me. My intention is to convince you that you do nothing less than begin an open, fierce and thoroughgoing rebellion on this campus."

Cleveland's call to action at Berkeley was prescient. During the next five years, student radicals and assorted schoolboy Lenins would close down for a while or severely disrupt campus life at Harvard, Columbia and Cornell, among hundreds of other colleges. By 1969, radical Marvin Garson summed up the counterculture's demands in these words: "Remember. The First Revolution (but not, of course, the last) is in your own head. Dump out their irrational goals, desire, morality.

"Our purpose is to abolish the system (call it the greed machine, capitalism, the Great Hamburger Grinder, Babylon, Do-Your-Jobism) and learn to live cooperatively, intelligently, gracefully."

To what extent are the Clintons heirs to all this? Interestingly, pro-sixties pundits such as Sam Smith play down the Clinton connection to the era. "There are certain types who use the 1960s as a crash pad for their souls," Smith tells Insight, meaning that Bill and Hillary Clinton were never "committed 1960s activists. They were just passing through the 1960s" with an eye toward their political futures.

Mrs. Clinton ordered officials at Wellesley College, her elite alma mater, to seal her senior thesis on Lyndon B. Johnson's War on Poverty after her husband entered politics in Arkansas so that journalists couldn't read it, Smith notes. We don't know what views she held. For Smith, the Clintons' 1960s beliefs parallel the president's extraordinary claim that he had smoked marijuana but hadn't inhaled. "They were of the 1960s, but they didn't inhale," Smith contends.

Still, there is much that is 1960s about what the Clintons -- and particularly Mrs. Clinton -- have said and done in the White House and before that reveals the strong influence of that decade on their formation. There was the now-famous ill-fated effort to foist socialized health care on the American public by the first lady and advisers such as Ira Magaziner, for example --a program arrived at secretly but one, Americans were assured, that was in their best interests.

There's also the first lady's charge that attacks on her husband are orchestrated by a "vast right-wing conspiracy." It's a charge that reeks of the kind of self-righteousness that views all opposition as based on bad faith and can discern no value in the opinions of others.

But Hillary Clinton is at her 1960s best in her speeches, particularly the one she delivered as president of her class at her 1969 graduation from Wellesley and a second made shortly after her husband became president. Twenty years after she gave the graduation speech, the first lady recalled it as "full of uncompromising language." That isn't quite accurate -- the speech is fairly tame, the kind of talk people expect at graduation exercises -- but it nonetheless is laced with the political language of its decade. "The challenge now is to practice politics as the art of making what appears to be impossible possible," said Hillary Rodham, echoing new-left sentiments. "We are not interested in social reconstruction," she averred, but in something far more difficult: "human reconstruction."

With standard 1960s self-congratulation, she praised the young of the time. Students are struggling "to come to grips with some of the inarticulate, maybe even inarticulable, things that we're feeling.

"We are, all of us, exploring a world that none of us understands," she said. Then forging ahead with words that could have been uttered by almost any new left or radical political leader of the time, she added: "Every protest, every dissent, is unabashedly an attempt to forge an identity," concluding somewhat cryptically: "I would like to talk about reality sometime, authentic reality, inauthentic reality and what we have to accept of what we see."

More than two decades later, Mrs. Clinton still was forging that identity she sought in her commencement address. "We are, I think, in a crisis of meaning," she declared during her first year as first lady, and this crisis permeates our lives. "What do our government institutions mean?" she demanded. "What do our lives in today's world mean? What does it mean to be educated? What does it mean to be a journalist?"

Not pausing for an answer, she went on with her queries: "What does it mean in today's world to pursue not only vocations [but] to be part of institutions ... to be human?"

Then Mrs. Clinton quoted the late GOP activist Lee Atwater: "You can acquire all you want and still feel empty," urging on her listeners what she called "a new politics of meaning."

"Now, will it be easy to do that?" she asked, answering her own question with: "Of course not, because we are breaking new ground.... It's not going to be easy to redivine who we are as human beings in this postmodern age."

From beginning to end, the talk was pure sixties blather: The claim to be heroically "breaking new ground," for instance, with ideas that were anything but new and the notion that a phrase so vague as "politics of meaning" would actually resonate among those who listened to her and add substance to their lives.

In his book on Bill Clinton, Shadows of Hope, Smith underlines another distasteful aspect of this speech by wondering just who the first lady thought she was addressing in promising to add meaning to meaningless lives. She clearly was "out of sync with the 94 percent of Americans who say they believe in God," and who presumably don't share her worries about a crisis in meaning, Smith says.

The New Criterion's Kimball hopes Americans have learned from the excesses of the new left and the ravages wrought in the 1960s. Kimball quotes the Polish philosopher Leszek Kolakowski on the dangers of attempting to force utopia upon reality. "To construct a utopia is always an act of negation toward an existing reality, a desire to transform it," noted Kolakowski. When utopia proves too remote from reality, "the wish to enforce it would be grotesque" and lead to a "monstrous deformation" of the social and political order, threatening the freedom of mankind.

This precisely was what the new left tried, with lamentable results, Kimball asserts. Still, for Smith, the 1960s has a very positive side: "It was a period of incredible optimism," he says. "As bad as things were, there was optimism, there was the assumption that things really would get better. What would we pay for that kind of hope today?"