NINETEEN SIXTY-EIGHT

...A year later, the hated Richard Nixon was elected president...

...Roszak noticed the all-importance of mere demographic bulk: "The young seem to feel the potential power of their numbers," he wrote...

...The "prime strategy of the technocracy," he warned, "is to level life down to a standard of so-called living that technical expertise can cope with...

...And then, for good reason, the counter culture begins to look like nothing so much as a world-wide publicity stunt...

...They have been pampered, exploited, idolized, and made almost nauseatingly much of...

...It broke the lower classes' monopoly on grievances against society...

...So sex and drugs and, most of all, "feelings" became appropriate weapons in the political arena...

...Napoleon's aphorism is based on the premise that at 20, people are still suggestible, that they're still being influenced...

...That's because, in a democratic society dependent on technology and newly dominated by mass media, to be a big generation is almost ipso facto to be an elite generation...

...Otherwise, why should the sixties in Germany and Japan—where the Oedipal conflict was, to say the least, different—have so closely resembled the French and American ones...

...The events of that year—the assassinations, the riots, the wars—are pretexts for a discussion of that generation's "ideals," their "hopes," their "dreams...

...The Left split into a "socialist" political wing and a "Woodstock" lifestyle wing...

...America Online symposium The striking thing about the rash of 1968 commemorations—the articles, the documentaries, the books—is that none of the reminiscing parties has identified the grievance that blew the lid off the civilized world 30 years ago...

...As Robert Daniels remarks in The Year of the Heroic Guerrilla: World Revolution and Counterrevolution in 1968: The chances of igniting popular revolution by means of New Left-style confrontation are nil...

...Now, mass media...

...If they did not overthrow "the system," it is because the system served their needs well...

...The Civil Rights Act passed Congress in 1964...

...If not even the participants could figure out what they wanted, it's hardly surprising that the student movement—judged as a political movement—was a failure...

...But the students valued Marx as a progressive credential, provided his writings could be watered down and rendered relevant by one of the growing number of gurus of "alienation...

...That's why it is reasonable to ask whether sixties youth ever really shared the Roszak diagnosis, whether they really were in revolt against "technocratic totalitarianism" and "elitist managerialism...

...A politics of production was replaced by a politics of feelings...

...Even the vaunted "end of hope"—which the young radicals flatter themselves they bore so bravely in the wake of assassinations—was old hat...

...As Roger Rosenblatt notes in Coming Apart: A Memoir of the Harvard Wars of1969: Many of the cops who busted University Hall were the sons, nephews, cousins, and grandsons of all those Irish immigrants who . . . had been treated like the servants they in fact were by generations of rich Harvard boys...

...What's striking is how few of the '68 generation are bothered by such selfish elitism, even in retrospect...

...Many proud scions of 1968 are given to complaining that today's historians dwell too much on the superficial, libertine, recreational side of the year...

...Compare the legacy of birth-control liberalization with the legacy of SDS's economic position papers...

...He didn't," said Humphrey after the police clashes with rioters at the Chicago convention...

...Or Erich Fromm, who tried with less success to use Marx's recently translated Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 to apply the concept of "alienation" not just to the Labor Theory of Value but to the housewife trapped in a prefab house full of soulless appliances in a treeless suburb...

...Theodore Roszak was the first to describe where these new strands of political argument were leading, in his brilliant 1969 book, The Making of a Counter Culture...

...One can easily despair of the possibility that it will survive these twin perils: on the one hand, the weakness of its cultural rapport with the disadvantaged...

...Reduced to its essentials, the generation of '68 was pushing an agenda of self-aggrandizement that, thanks to the baby boom, it happened to have the size and social standing to carry out...

...Lowenstein, Gitlin writes, had a knack for galvanizing bright, competent, earnest, well-placed, go-getting young men and women—student government presidents, college newspaper editors, seminarians, Peace Corps returnees...

...Education spending rose from $742 million per year at the end of World War II to $7 billion in 1965, while the university population tripled from 1955 to 1970...

...Who commemorates the 30th anniversary of anything...

...Franco-German student agitator Daniel Cohn-Bendit made this plain when, at the height of the May 1968 unrest in Paris, he referred to the Communist literary icon Louis Aragon as a "Stalinist piece of s...

...The most nuanced understanding of this paradox can be found in Paul Berman's 1996 essay collection A Tale of Two Utopias: The Political Journey of the Generation of 1968...

...Perhaps the sixties was based on nothing...

...rather, by the time they grew old enough to produce presidents, around 1992, their cohort accounted for an anemic 13 percent of the electorate, vastly outnumbered by the boomers who produced and elected Bill Clinton...

...As in cartoons where the coyote saws off the roadrunner's branch and it is the tree that falls, the Woodstock limb survived and the socialist tree collapsed...

...The ones that the protesters themselves had grown up taking for granted...

...It was only a matter of time before lifestyle demands were masquerading as political ones, and self-interest as social conscience...

...One of them sits in the White House...

...In fact, according to William Strauss and Neil Howe, in Generations, the largest pro-war subgroup in the late sixties were baby boomers who had not attended college...

...What 1968 did was introduce a politics in which the problems of production and prosperity are assumed solved...

...Daniels betrays an enduring secret of the sixties protesters: an elitism that played itself out in a poignant semi-ritual whenever the police were called in to quell a campus takeover...

...The boys called all the servants Biddie and Mack and passed them in the street as if they were walking through them...

...American progressives were far more supple in adapting to new social priorities than the European Lefts bound to their Communist/laborite institutions...

...Vietnam was of course the focus of most American Christopher Caldwell is senior writer for THE WEEKLY STANDARD...

...on the other, its vulnerability to exploitation as an amusing side show of the swinging society...

...They had little use for Marxist dogma...

...The best answer thus far has been provided by Jacques Jul-liard, editor of the French magazine Le Nouvel Observateur...

...There was less to them than meets the eye...

...Meanwhile, "Generation X," those born after 1960, have gained a reputation as listless slackers not because they're lacking in inner resources but because, by the time they began arriving in the workforce in the early 1980s, all the positions on the most promising career tracks were clogged to overflow by baby boomers jealously protecting their status...

...This new politics turned the lack of a broad-based Marxist-style radicalism in America, long lamented by the Left, into a colossal advantage for the United States—even, paradoxically, a key to American global hegemony three decades later...

...But their children wanted something more exalted...

...The students—often seen as arrogant and unlovable—might rail against Vietnam, but there was scant danger of their going there...

...A quarter-century later, this same cohort would show higher support for the Gulf War than any other group...

...in France, many of the leaders' parents were Holocaust survivors...

...They were protected, as the sons and nephews of the cops were not...

...Those sociologists who look at the '68 generation as having brought about some kind of sea-change in human character are wrong...

...It is a commonplace to describe Nixon's success in 1968 as a right-wing reaction to sixties protest...

...Let's look first at technology...

...Napoleon said that to understand a man, you have to know what was happening in the world when he was 20...

...Robert Kennedy, debating Eugene McCarthy during the California primaries, backpedaled on withdrawing American troops from Vietnam...

...But the more we learn about the sixties, the more it seems that it was the political side (the socialism, the anti-war protests) that was recreational...

...The difference is that the younger generation had been specifically educated in huge numbers to run such a society, while the older generation had not...

...Given that, the young were right to be "distrustful of authority and suspicious of leadership," even—and especially—of old-style communism, which took for granted a dehumanizing industrial order...

...And most of the political/cultural business that late-sixties youth in America deluded themselves they were mobilizing around had already happened...

...What a giveaway that "creature comforts" is...

...It will finish as a temporary style, continually sloughed off and left behind for the next wave of adolescents . . . Any politics arising from elite complaints and based on feelings rather than "objective conditions" was open to abuse...

...One danger was clear from the outset...

...Once the boomers came of age, these two generations shared responsibility for running a technological society...

...The victory of lifestyle politics over class politics had huge consequences...

...In a democracy, this is an extraordinary concentration of power—not just in raw numbers of people, but in per capita education, training, and credentials...

...Hubert Humphrey, too, seemed to think the country's heart was on the right...

...There was less to them than meets the eye...

...Between sixties protesters and their antagonists lies an insufficiently explored division—that of class...

...What were those hopes and dreams...

...Even if history was not haunting their minds, there was always the cops' resentment of the fact that students as privileged and cosseted as Harvard's should act as they did...

...Roszak claimed that "technocratic" social organization and a pervasive managerial ethos had created a "Myth of Objective Consciousness," which impoverished human relations, making life lonely and frightening at any income level...

...The working classes had almost nothing to do with what we call "the sixties...

...Roszak's insight was largely right...

...Alienation, not immiseration, was "the central political problem of our day...

...If the counterculture were to fail to overturn the technocracy, it could well leave things worse than before: It isn't far to go before the counter culture finds itself swamped with cynical or self-deceived opportunists who become, or conveniently let themselves be turned into, spokesmen for youthful disaffiliation...

...Because that civilization was so reasonable, so democratic, to argue on its rational terms was merely to make oneself a dupe of power...

...In fact, with its international abortion harangues, its racial quotas increasingly imitated in other countries, its "recovery" industry, its pushing of "women's rights" on traditionalist societies, the United States has assumed a role none would have predicted for it in the 1960s: It has become the world capital of left-wing politics...

...But the politics that arose from it was directly in conflict with the politics that had gone before—indeed, with ideology as most people still understand it today...

...Some legacy...

...Is it worth noting that of all the postwar developments despised by the sixties protesters, the ones despised most fervently and most unanimous-ly—from Levittowns to the modern kitchen—were the most egalitarian ones...

...He notes that the parents of the '68 generation had all survived the Depression...

...As university attendance ceased during the 1960s to be an exceptional privilege, the exceptional discipline that once characterized university was felt to be more onerous, and the 20-year-old boomers demanded libertarian changes...

...Compare the legacy of the Beatles with the legacy of the Industrial Areas Foundation...

...Stanley Rothman and Robert Lichter before him had described the liberation the activists sought as being "freedom from guilt over one's privilege," but Berman is more specific...

...Or, more precisely, a something that is a nothing: the sheer demographic mass of the generation that is now celebrating itself...

...Thirty years, he points out, is a generation, and now is the natural time for the most generation-conscious generation of all to assess its achievements...

...But such an explanation goes only so far...

...Indeed, as he bemoans the unfortunate spread of sixties hedonism "down through less educated and less philosophical strata of the Sixties Generation," Daniels seems still to partake of the heedless upper-class contempt that marked 1968-style leftism...

...Herbert Marcuse, for instance, who sought to synthesize Freud and Marx into a psychoanalytic socialism that would honor states of mind...

...The very "technocratic" society Roszak speaks of spawned a need for administrators and a massive increase in college attendance...

...They had been raised and schooled to believe in the promise of America and they hated the war partly because it meant that the object of their affections, the system that rewarded their proficiency, was damaged goods...

...Medicaid and other Great Society legislation became law in 1965...

...At 50, this very same generation has ruthlessly reimposed a pre-sixties moral regime to keep the streets safe and the campuses quiet—in other words, to keep their own 20-year-old children in line...

...They were the inheritors of the vision of a moral America, and they did not want their moral capital squandered...

...But what were those ideals, those hopes and dreams...

...It was the newfangled and faddish-looking political tendency that proved enduring...

...This might explain why antiVietnam student protests all but stopped after Nixon announced the end of the draft in 1970, even though the next three years would see the most ferocious bombing of the entire war...

...This made it next to impossible for the young to assume moral authority, for "their own childish lives were singularly free of suffering or heroism...

...If Jacques Ellul is right that "propaganda" is only the sum total of mass media buzzing around society, then the largest age cohort in society—that is, the largest advertising market—will almost automatically create a spontaneous rah-rah campaign on behalf of its wishes and its politics...

...That there was never a president from that generation has nothing to do with its temperament...

...What kind of revolutionaries spend their entire maturity seeking to undo the revolution they made as children...

...Timothy Leary was ejected from Harvard for his LSD demonstrations in 1963...

...A Left that turns its back on the working classes has for three decades been a norm disguised as an anomaly...

...Their "revolution," from the moment they left home for college, was aimed at carving out—in the heart of drab, prefab, egalitarian, one-size-fits-all America—a niche that was fit for such a ruling elite to live in...

...In a masterful piece of reporting in the Financial Times this spring, Andrew Jack revisited a protest at France's elite Ecole The counterculture has long since bound itself intimately to power and government Nationale d'Administration in 1968...

...campus politics, but that hardly explains the student uprisings in Mexico, England, Ireland, Italy, Czechoslovakia, Germany, and France...

...It is the cultural experiments that draw the giddy interest of just those middle-class swingers who are the bastion of the technocratic order," he wrote...

...By 1970, fully 18 percent of the adult population was between 18 and 24...

...To dethrone expertise was to dethrone authority, and once you do that you run the risk of replacing it with a new set of crackpots, cults, and con artists, as Roszak realized...

...By upbringing, training, and ambition, these children of affluence were winners...

...A good standard of living was no mean achievement for Depression-era men who had spent their teens and twenties dodging German and Japanese gunfire...

...The Myth of Objective Consciousness could not—by definition—be dethroned through rational argument...

...By 1980, with the entire baby boom having found its way into the electorate, those born between 1946 and 1962 made up 38 percent of the voting-age population—as they will, more or less, until boomers begin to die of old age in significant numbers...

...The anti-draft demonstrators, that is, sought the very opposite of Power to the People...

...And they pushed their claims of oppression under a wholly new type of political discourse...

...As early as 1960, the United States had more undergraduates than farmers...

...What could put a bigger crimp in one's lifestyle, after all, than getting blown to pieces by a grenade in the Mekong Delta...

...For Daniels and New Left-sympathizers like him, the best and the brightest cared about "ideals," while the proletariat clung to "creature comforts" like so many head of livestock...

...The "Port Huron Statement" of the Students for a Democratic Society bemoaned a loss of ideals in 1962, even before President Kennedy was killed...

...But even Democrats behaved as if the political landscape were shifting rightwards— and well before Nixon's triumph...

...Because of their numbers, the '68 generation—or at least the university-educated segment of it—was destined to be a ruling elite no matter what they did...

...The seemingly recreational, the sex, the drugs, the fashion, the identity politics— that was where the serious business was taking place...

...I think we ought to quit pretending that Mayor Daley did anything wrong...

...Early SDS activist Todd Gitlin, in The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage, described his own intellectual predicament with considerable honesty: 'Asked to write a statement of purpose for a New Republic series called, 'Thoughts of the Young Radicals,' I agonized for weeks about what it was, in fact, I wanted...

...If the protesters of the sixties despised technocracy, it was clearly not the authoritarian aspects they objected to...

...In every country where it once existed, the counterculture has since bound itself intimately to power and government...

...Until they can, another question is bound to take center-stage: Why 30 years...

...Todd Gitlin is closer to the mark in a portrait he draws of the New York Democratic activist and congressman Allard Lowenstein, who laid the groundwork in 1968 for both the McCarthy and the Kennedy campaigns...

...the welloff—or subgroups of them, presenting themselves as "women," or "gays," or "students"—could suddenly be "alienated," too...

...Over the long haul, as a result of technological and media conditions already in place, the generation of 1968 was able to suck power away from both the generation above and the generation below...

...If as astute an observer as Berman can't name the specific grievance of the sixties, it is worth entertaining the radical possibility that there was none...

...And in response to McCarthy's suggestion that suburbs should share the cost of public housing, Kennedy (the great racial "healer") accused McCarthy of wanting "to take ten thousand black people and move them into Orange County...

...As Herbert Marcuse said, "A comfortable, smooth, reasonable, democratic unfreedom prevails in advanced industrial civilization...

...For the aging counterculture has become today's seatbelt-law culture, the product-liability culture, the no-smoking culture, the speechcode culture...

...In this, the rebels of 1968 proved to be winners indeed...

...Berman examines the problem of prosperity from another angle...

...The obscenity, the profanity, the filth that was uttered night after night in front of the hotels was an insult to every woman, every mother, every daughter, indeed, every human being...

...In November 1967, only 10 percent of Americans favored withdrawal from Vietnam...

...All of a sudden," he writes, the '68ers "are historical...

...The "Silent Generation" of 1930-1945 was pushed aside by sheer force of numbers...

...Today, they run the country...

...In other words, it's the generation of '68, not any particular event it lived through, that is being celebrated...

...But the 20-year-olds of 1968, because of their preponderance, have always been influencers...

...He showed that those ENA grads who had refused their diplomas as an act of political protest were today all in powerful government positions...

...If the counter culture should bog down in a colorful morass of unexamined symbols, gestures, fashions of dress, and slogans, then it will provide little that can be turned into a lifelong commitment—except, and then pathetically, for those who can reconcile themselves to becoming superannuated hangers-on of the campus, the love-in, the rock club...

...I'll tell you what kind: ones with no values, only interests...

...True, opposition to the war rose, but contemporaneous polls showed distrust for the student anti-war movement rising pari passu...

...Where the great majority have become reasonably well fixed in matters of creature comforts, they are much more likely to respond to disorders and provocations by turning to those leaders who claim to represent order and tradition—in other words, the right...

...You'd put anybody in jail for that kind of talk...

...They made a big show of giving up the trappings of hierarchy, but exhibited a red-in-tooth-and-claw unwillingness to relinquish hierarchical power...

...The 1968 generation has extended the "unfreedom" of Marcuse's technocracy into areas that the old American elites could scarcely have imagined...

...More babies were born in 194853 than had been born in the previous 30 years...