Taking advantage of this Great Forgetting, a new group of Economic Royalists rose up and plotted their way back into power.
The Sixties
According to the first few paragraphs of the Wikipedia entry on the 1960s—Wikipedia being a heavy target of right-wing think tanks that pay people to essentially rewrite history all across the Internet—the 1960s was a horrible dystopia.
“The 1960s have become synonymous with the new, radical, and subversive events and trends of the period, which continued to develop in the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s and beyond.…
“Some commentators have seen in this era a classical Jungian nightmare cycle, where a rigid culture, unable to contain the demands for greater individual freedom, broke free of the social constraints of the previous age through extreme deviation from the norm.”29
As a young activist in the 1960s, someone who’d tried drugs, meditation, and “free love”; who’d fought and demonstrated against the Vietnam War; and who’d attended college, built a business, and traveled from one end of the country to the other, I don’t remember it as a dystopia. For me and many of my generation (I was born in 1951), the sixties were a time of great spiritual growth, insight, and positive social change.
But from the point of view of establishment, wealthy, white male conservatives, the era was a nightmare. They were under siege from every quarter—from their wives, to their children, to their employees.
African Americans—explicitly kept from the American Dream for over four centuries on this continent—were let into previously white-only schools by the Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954. In 1964 and 1965, President Lyndon Johnson and a Democratic Congress built on Brown with a series of laws enforcing the civil rights of racial minorities and guaranteeing their political rights.
More than four hundred years of pent-up desire for participation and equality collided with the political conservatives who believed social and political change should happen slowly over time, and the spillover was seen from the Afro hairstyle, to a series of sometimes violent Black Liberation movements, to Martin Luther King Jr.’s nonviolent calls for revolution.
The birth control pill was approved for sale to the public in 1961, leading to an explosion of “sexual liberation”—known at the time as “free love.” Perhaps more important, it allowed women nearly absolute control over their reproductive decisions (assisted by the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision in 1973), allowing women who wanted to compete with men in the workplace to choose to do so without the burden of pregnancy or fear of social ostracism. Then referred to as the “women’s liberation movement,” everything about it horrified conservatives, from young women going braless (and even burning bras), to the emergence of Ms. magazine in 1971.
LBJ not only gave free health care to seniors with a program called Medicare, but he raised taxes on the very, very rich through a sleight of hand that involved dropping the top rate from 90 to 74 percent but closing up so many loopholes that the highest earners actually ended up paying more in income taxes. If there was to be social justice, after all, somebody had to pay for it.
There were over 70 million teenagers during that era, a demographic bulge that in both absolute and relative numbers had never before been seen in America. It was the age of youth, and every marketer in America was pandering to the kids, adding to their feeling of empowerment—and to their willingness to openly confront social and political institutions they saw as corrupt or unfair.
Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) was jump-started in large part by Tom Hayden’s “Port Huron Statement” in 1962—long before the Vietnam War was an issue—and concerned itself mostly with the inequality of wealth and power in America, and with American militarism. It explicitly called out American institutional racism and the military-industrial complex (a phrase coined by outgoing Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower in his 1961 farewell address).
In 1962, Rachel Carson published the fifth-best-selling nonfiction book of the entire twentieth century—Silent Spring—and ignited an environmental movement that challenged the right of chemical-industry CEOs to poison the environment for profit. In 1965, Ralph Nader published his blockbuster book Unsafe at Any Speed, which ignited a consumer movement and challenged the right of auto industry CEOs to risk consumers’ lives simply for increased profits. In just a few short years, corporate bigwigs had gone from being hailed and respected to being reviled and suspected.
In the midst of all this, the Supreme Court in 1961 and 1967 made decisions that prevented illegally obtained evidence from being used against criminals (including kids smoking pot) and required that people (including antiwar protestors) be told the rights they had—among which were the right to a free lawyer—when they were arrested.
While the world of America’s wealthy was being shaken, their homes and families seemed to be under assault as well. Newspaper heiress Patty Hearst was kidnapped in 1974 by the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA) and then participated with them in robbing a bank.
Self-styled gurus and messiahs—from Reverend Moon to the Maharishi to the Hare Krishnas—popped up all over the nation, popularized by the Beatles’ 1967 embrace of Transcendental Meditation. In every city of consequence in America you would see street corners occupied by young people who had given up everything, left family and friends, and joined one of the many cults that sprang up from coast to coast. They sang, they danced, they sold flowers and incense, they begged. In the spirit of Henry David Thoreau, they were on a spiritual pilgrimage, having rejected the religious institutions of the country.
Conservatives tried to push back against the flood that threatened them. Governor Reagan and others began dismantling opportunities for free college education, as this “gift” seemed to simply breed antiwar dissidents and free-loving potheads. Police cracked down—particularly at the 1968 Chicago Democratic Party Convention—and began extensive intelligence-gathering operations against students involved in politics. From coast to coast, political activists were arrested, and when it wasn’t easy to jail them for their political activities, they were set up for drug busts.
W. F. Buckley wrote a series of articles with titles like “Let the Rich Alone” (1967), and Russell Kirk joined in with his 1964 “Religious Instruction: A Natural Right.” Dr. Hyrum S. Lewis brilliantly documented the entire process in his book Sacralizing the Right.30
Senator Everett Dirksen attempted to pass a constitutional amendment providing for prayer in public schools, hoping it would calm down future generations; it failed to get even fifty votes.
None of this made sense to the Economic Royalists. History, they believed—from the Roman Empire to feudal Europe to Victorian England—showed that societies were most stable when the middle class was the smallest—not the largest—class in a nation. At the top there should be a small but very, very, very wealthy (and, thus, powerful) ruling class. Below them, a small middle class of professionals and mercantilists—the doctors, lawyers, bankers, and shop owners—and below them a huge class of the working poor.
As Charles Dickens pointed out in nearly all his books (his father had been thrown in debtors prison when he was a child—he knew the system well), the working poor don’t turn universities upside down or go nuts with sex, drugs, or religion. His famous A Christmas Carol was the story of Ebenezer Scrooge, a middle-class mercantilist who ran a two-person small business. Scrooge discovered that while it was still important to keep his working-poor employee (Bob Cratchit) in poverty, it was OK to give the man a turkey and a small bit of health care for Tiny Tim. But, of course, never was there even a mention that Cratchit should get partial ownership of the business or have any real power or wealth.