1 of 3
It has often been said that "everything happened in 1968." French poststructuralists, civil rights veterans, and baby boomers have been especially partial to this interpretation of history. It was in 1968 that disgruntled students mounted the barricades in Paris. It was in 1968 that Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert Kennedy were struck down by assassins, putting an end to the hopefulness of the decade.
Decade of Nightmares: The End of the Sixties and the Making of Eighties America
|
Born three days after King's death, I have always accepted this view of 1968. Too young to remember the events of that storied year, I have been forced to rely on the recollections of my elders, whether in Hollywood films, political journalism, or more scholarly treatments. One such work, Todd Gitlin's The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage, tells the story of the decade from the point of view of an activist-turned-sociologist, tracing the rise and fall of the era's various social movements. On the opposite end of the political spectrum, Myron Magnet's The Dream and the Nightmare: The Sixties' Legacy to the Underclass blames the cultural shifts of the decade for the decline of urban America, providing academic cover for the downsizing of the welfare state.1
For all their passion and exuberance, many accounts of the 1960s suffer from two major flaws. The first is their unrelenting partisanship. Too often, notes E.J. Dionne of the Washington Post, the history of that decade has been told through rival parodies of the Left and the Right.2 A second problem is their tendency to downplay the importance of the preceding and succeeding decades. If everything happened in 1968, nothing happened before or after.
Recently, a friend told me he wanted to write a book about how everything happened in the late 1970s. I'm afraid Philip Jenkins has beaten him to the punch in the just-released Decade of Nightmares: The End of the Sixties and the Making of Eighties America. Chronicling the period from 1975 to 1986, Jenkins successfully avoids the dangers of both political partisanship and Sixties myopia.
For Jenkins, the 1970s were as much a continuation of the 1960s as they were a departure. Describing what he calls the "mainstreaming" of the Sixties, he argues that the changes wrought by the counterculture took at least a decade to be absorbed by the wider society. This finding has been substantiated by survey researchers. As pollster Daniel Yankelovich pointed out in his book New Rules, most Americans remained untouched by the upheavals of the 1960s. Only in the 1970s did public opinion data reveal what Yankelovich called a shift in the "giant plates of culture." The sexual revolution, the drug culture, and the rise of alternative religions all trickled down to the masses in the 1970s.3 But the late 1970s and the early 1980s were also a time of reaction as more Americans became convinced that the social changes of the day had gone too far. It is this pendulum swing between countercultural radicalism and political conservatism that constitutes the heart of Jenkins' narrative.
All this may be familiar to those who have followed the scholarship on the conservative turn in American politics. What makes Jenkins' book unique is his focus on the "moral panics" behind the political movements of the 1970s and 1980s. Viewing American history as a series of "alternating cycles of hedonism and puritanism," Jenkins argues that the period from 1975 to 1986 was especially fertile for the proliferation of potent anxieties, worries, and fears. These "nightmares" included illegal drugs, sexual abuse, serial killers, and sexually transmitted diseases.
share this page
RSS Feed
