Rolling Stone magazine, along with various other media outlets, have been reviling in nostalgia for the “Summer of Love,” the summer of 1967. I’m not all that nostalgic simple because I’m not sure it’s possible to be nostalgic about things that happened twenty years before you were born.
Anyway, this is part of an overall wistfulness for the Sixties (brought on by LSD flashbacks?). Many left wingers will say that the civil rights movement and the anti-Vietnam war movement were the greatest period in Americ
an history in terms of social change and upheaval.
An article in the latest Rolling Stone by Sean Wilentz, a Princeton historian, explores what he calls “The Year the Split America in Two.” Wilentz attributes to 1967 “the beginning of an era of intense polarization - one in which, arguably, we are still living.” Now, unnecessary swipes at our current president aside, it is a fascinating article, and far too short for Wilentz to substantiate most, if not all of his arguments.
In his article, Wilentz contrasts two people rising to prominence at the dawn of 1967, Timothy Leary and Ronald Reagan. He puts them as figureheads for the coming conflict. But neither was all that revolutionary in that regard. Reagan’s main opponent was communism, embodied by the Soviet Union, whose revolution happened fifty years prior to the “Summer of Love.” Reagan was only the current herald of conservatism in America, but it could be argued that the Boomers’ revolt was something else entirely.
I find fault in Wilentz’s thesis that 1967 is the root of all of our polarization. The classic epitome of the domestic fight over Vietnam is hippies vs. Nixon. It was a generational conflict (though there were many of that generation who weren’t hippies), with Nixon representing the paternalistic government (he started the EPA, after all) and the hippies representing youthful idealism. I would argue that neither side won, since McGovern lost in ’72 and Nixon resigned in ‘74. That doesn’t stop anyone from idolizing the anti-war movement from that era, especially when they are still fighting it.
Many of the most passionate anti-war activists today are the same activists who protested Vietnam (Most of the anti-war activists I’ve met are old and grey). While the “Summer of Love” certainly had an impact on our culture, it did not have much of one on our long-term politics, though Wilentz correctly asserts that disagreements over the use of force is “one reason why the Democratic Party has spent much of the past forty years wandering in the political wilderness.” If the wilderness is one of ideas, I agree, as this issues marks the major fault-line in the Democratic Party, the one between neoliberals and renegade Marxists.
The domestic conflict over Vietnam was much more generational that politics today. Sure, kids in college tend to be more liberal, but there does not seem to be a sharp political divide between those people in my generation compared to those in my parents’ (who were 11 during the “Summer of Love”).
But at least we got some good music out of it, as Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band is the most important album ever, if not the best. I think Piper at the Gates of Dawn gives any other Pink Floyd effort a run for its money, though The Velvet Underground and Nico and The Who Sell Out are also works of genius. Love is all you need.
Labels: History, Music, Ronald Reagan
