Missing the '60s

An obsession with political power as the wellspring of meaningful living is at the root of all that was wrong about New Left ideology.

Lynn Scarlett & Jim Trotter from the December 1988 issue

(Page 3 of 3)

The economic prosperity of the ’50s opened up the doors for many to move out of the cities and into homes in the suburbs in search of better lives. And it was a time of burgeoning community ties through voluntary organizations. People were making decisions about their lives. They just weren’t making the decisions the New Left wanted them to make.

Nowhere was this more evident than among the poor, who were, according to New Left mythology, the most dispossessed and powerless (along with students). “We did not anticipate,” Hayden wryly admits, “that the oppressed in whose name we spoke would want to enter the middle-class world we were rejecting.” Many of America’s poor, including blacks in the South, were busy working, however menial the job, because they saw work, not political action, as the path to personal empowerment.

It didn’t occur to the New Left that American affluence resulted from the productive efforts of entrepreneurs, workers, investors—big and small—making choices and responding to opportunities. Instead, caught up in Marx’s misconceived world of elites and masses, they imagined that wealth is just simply out there. All one needs is a bit of political power in order to divvy that wealth up as the enlightened see fit. They saw no connection between economic freedom and the wealth they observed around them.

Which brings me to the missing history. Though the New Left did not understand that political power cannot bring personal empowerment, many in the so-called youth movement did.

The New Left was always a small minority in the ’60s, trying to fit slogans onto a movement that had its own dynamic. Ironically, however, their most widely circulated document, the Port Huron Statement, captured the essence of the era when it underlined the importance of human independence, of finding “a meaning in life that is personally authentic."

There is ample evidence of this individualism, this personal pursuit of happiness (and not in the hedonistic sense), in the ’60s. It is evident in the popularity of the Whole Earth Catalog, with its panoply of tools for self-sufficiency. It is evident in the back-to-the-land movement the resurgence of handicrafts, the human potential movement, the withdrawal from party politics, the growing self-confidence of gays and women, and the healthy skepticism of authority. It is evident in the personal sagas of writers such as Julius Lester and Martha Bayles in Political Passages.

P. J. O’Rourke rightly satirizes the excesses and absurdities of some of these pursuits. And “second thoughts” chroniclers rightly point out that socialist mumbojumbo got mixed in with the personal striving. But, on the whole, the search for “personal authenticity” turned into productive activities that have endured.

The surge in entrepreneurship in the ’80s is a legacy of the ’60s. The ’60s was, after all, an era of doers. That same group of baby boomers who grew their hair long, demonstrated, and meditated, is now described as economically conservative and socially liberal—in short, they value economic and personal freedom.

The New Left overlooks this legacy because it is still caught up in a description of the world borrowed from Rousseau and, consciously or otherwise, Karl Marx. The second-thoughts contingent of remade conservatives overlooks it because they, too, think the ’60s was the New Left (and drug-crazed drop-outs). Lawrence Wright, more of a regular guy, comes closest to conveying what the ’60s was really all about. The missing history, the tale not told in New Left or second-thoughts reminiscences, is the story of the silent (and not-so-silent), productive majority in pursuit of independence.

Comments

Trackback| 1.5.10 @ 10:30PM

ca credit repair, on ca credit repair, links to this page. Here’s an excerpt:

Wow This place is great. I have to bookmark it and come back here again!

nfl jerseys|11.26.10 @ 8:29PM|#

rysh

log in or register to reply