Origins of the Cultural Revolution

In a follow-up to Monday’s post, I take a closer look at the sources of the trends today’s right wants to reverse

Daniel Cohn-Bendit, a student leader of the May 1968 unrest in Paris, France (and later member of the European Parliament), during a speech in Paris on May 9, 1968. (Photo by GERARD-AIME/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images)

My wife and I had dinner at the house of another couple on Saturday night. The next day, the husband started to cough, feel crappy, and run a fever. On Monday morning, he tested positive for COVID-19. Today (Tuesday) has been unfolding for me like his Sunday—except that I’ve already tested positive. I’ve been struggling to get this post finished on Tuesday night and will record the audio version soon. But then I expect I’ll be down for the count through the rest of the week. With any luck, I’ll be back on Monday, but I’ll keep you posted. (It’s been a tough October round these parts!)

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In Monday’s post, I wrote about John Daniel Davidson’s call (in a recent essay at The Federalist) for conservatives to stop using that word to describe themselves. He suggests, instead, that they begin thinking of themselves as radicals, counterrevolutionaries, or some other term that conveys an awareness that there is now very little worth conserving in our culture and civilization. Instead, the right needs to seize and use political power to impose new (or rather, old) moral and cultural standards on society from the top down.

In response, I wrote the following about this strategy, which is rapidly gaining support among right-wing intellectuals in our time:

[T]he original moral and cultural revolution to which Davidson is reacting—the one that began in the 1960s—wasn’t brought about politically. Cultural change usually unfolds according to its own logic, with politics often running along beside and even behind it, playing catch up.

This doesn’t mean that a democratic government can’t try to play a role in shaping the behavior and moral convictions of citizens. But first there needs to be democratic support for doing so.

In taking this position, I’m aligning myself with the assumptions of earlier generations of conservatives, who tended to treat politics as inevitably downstream from culture. But the contemporary right increasingly rejects this view of historical change, both as an approach to politics in the present, but also (and in some ways more importantly) as an interpretation of the past and present. The stakes in this dispute are high—but my own side of the argument requires more evidence than I offered in Monday’s post. That’s what this follow-up post aims to provide.

The Cultural Revolution Was Global

Today’s more radical right really appears to believe that the myriad cultural and moral changes that have transformed American life since the mid-1960s were brought about by politics—and specifically, by the left (liberals and progressives) using political power in the postwar period to effect a cultural revolution. The right’s hopes for the present and future depend on it doing the same in reverse.

The trouble is that this isn’t a convincing account of what happened in the country and the world beginning six decades ago.

My mention of “country” and “world” in the same phrase is intentional. It points toward a reality frequently forgotten by right-wing intellectuals, who prefer to think of the United States in exceptional terms.

There was little exceptional about America’s cultural experience during and immediately following the 1960s. On the contrary, mass protests, mostly by young people, took place across the world starting in the mid-1960s and reached a crescendo in 1968. The Wikipedia page devoted to protests in 1968 includes separate entries for Brazil, Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union, France, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Pakistan, Poland, Scandinavia, Spain, Tunisia, Great Britain, Northern Ireland, the U.S., West Germany, and Yugoslavia.

These protests were sparked by a range of issues. In the U.S., support for black civil rights and opposition to the Vietnam War were the precipitating causes. In most of Europe, protests usually targeted war, racism, imperialism, capitalism and consumerism, and expressed widespread support among young people for sexual self-expression, feminism, and gay rights. In France, where massive demonstrations and general strikes nearly toppled an elected government, countercultural issues blended with concerns about police brutality and working-class labor disputes. In Germany, contemporaneous headlines blended with a reckoning among the young with the country’s Nazi past. In the Soviet bloc, protests focused on dictatorial repression and economic stagnation.

The first thing to be said about this global wave of protest is that in every case it was directed against political and cultural establishments—and within the United States, those establishments were firmly liberal in orientation. That already upsets the preferred story of today’s right, which wants to trace the cultural destabilization of the 1960s to the political power of liberalism and progressivism.

Then there’s the incredibly broad character of popular discontents across the world, in the U.S., but also in Europe, South Asia, and East Asia; in free societies but also behind the Iron Curtain. Quite obviously, all of this unrest was not driven by political developments within the United States. On the contrary, the astonishing scope of the unrest points toward a deeper cause at work across the globe at that moment in history. It also points to the power of what political scientists call “demonstration effects,” or the tendency of each protest to inspire others when word of the event travels by way of the news media and other communications technologies.

Causes and Complications

In seeking out underlying causes, it’s wise to fasten onto commonalities that were present across all the protests. And I’d say that, although the precipitating cause was often political dissent from specific policies, the discontents often included or ended up culminating in calls for liberation from political and especially cultural constraints more generally. That means the most prominent commonality was a drive for an increase in personal (individual) freedom.

That makes it sound like liberalism might be to blame after all. Yet the story is far more complicated than pointing to the influence of Woodrow Wilson, FDR, Harry S. Truman, JFK, Lyndon B. Johnson, or some combination of them all.

Two books help to make sense of that complication.

The first, by historian Alan Petigny, is The Permissive Society: America, 1941-1965. Tracing the counterculture and other disruptions of the late 1960s back to the previous two decades, Petigny shows how various trends we’ve come to associate with the past half-century’s cultural revolution originated earlier. As the book jacket elegantly states the argument, “a traditionalist moral framework” began to erode shortly after the conclusion of the Second World War, giving way to “a less authoritarian approach to moral issues as demonstrated by a more relaxed style of child-rearing, the rising status of women both inside and outside the home, the increasing reluctance of Americans to regard alcoholism as a sin, loosening sexual attitudes, the increasing influence of modern psychology, and, correspondingly, the declining influence of religion in the personal lives of most Americans.”

Might “liberalism,” “progressivism,” or “the left” have been the hidden agent driving all of these changes behind the scenes? I suppose someone on the right might try to make that case. But doing so would be quite a scholarly undertaking—and in the end the account would still face the daunting challenge of having to explain why similar cultural and moral developments took place across so much of the world during the same span of time, and without being directly inspired or provoked by American liberalism.

In his complementary book, The Age of Abundance: How Prosperity Transformed American Politics and Culture, Brink Lindsey (who recently launched a promising Substack newsletter) does a much better job of explaining the origins of the cultural and moral revolution of the past several decades. In Lindsey’s view, both the cultural revolution of the 1960s and the reaction to it are expressions of the postmaterialist values associated with economic abundance that, in turn, followed from the postwar economic boom.

Which is to say that the United States—along with much of the developed world—grew wealthy (relative to prior human standards and expectation) in the postwar decades, and as a consequence we’ve been fighting about how to live ever since.

The Danger of Blunt Instruments

If Petigny and Lindsey are broadly correct, then we return to the argument of Monday’s post. The counterrevolutionary right can rail against moral and cultural trends all it wants. But two daunting practical tasks remain. First, the right needs to persuade a majority or plurality of Americans to support an attempted reversal of moral and cultural trends and not just assume it can do anything it wants. Second, even if the right manages to gain power with a counterrevolutionary mandate, it’s not at all clear how it would go about accomplishing what it wants.

Putting the moral and cultural genie back in the bottle is quite a challenge—and politics may well be far too blunt an instrument to get the job done.