Are the Sixties finally dead? Even liberals are now rebelling

One of historians’ favourite parlour games is to debate when the French Revolution — or the Russian, Mexican or Haitian — can be said to have ended. The American version of this game is less frequently played. But we have our own 20th-century spinoff: debating when the Sixties ended.

Did the spirit of the decade, first liberal and optimistic and later radical and enraged, die with the assassination of JFK in 1963, or of Martin Luther King, Jr in 1968? Did it end with the bloody Democratic convention in Chicago later that year? Or with the disastrous Altamont concert at the very end of the decade? For Joan Didion, it was the Manson murders: “the Sixties,” she wrote, “ended abruptly on August 9, 1969, at the exact moment when word of the murders on Cielo Drive traveled like brushfire through the community.”

A common move in this game, one made by François Furet, is to claim that the revolution in question never ended. And one can certainly make such an argument about the legacy of the Sixties in American life and domestic politics — on issues ranging from race to immigration, environmentalism, drugs and the politics of sexuality. Shorn of its radicalism, Sixties liberalism and its descendants have in many ways become a hegemonic governing worldview on issues like gay rights or drug legalisation. Moments of conservative retrenchment like the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act, which forbade gay marriage, or the Reagan-era War on Drugs, have proved temporary (at least within American borders, in the latter case).

Today, even solidly red states such as Ohio and Missouri have legalised marijuana as the old moralising stigma around the drug has vanished, and the Republican administration is now planning to reclassify the drug under a less restrictive category. Gay marriage is the law of the land, codified in 2022 with 39 Republican votes in the House, and the Trump administration has the most openly gay officials of any Republican administration in history.

A better answer, though, to the question of when the Sixties ended may be — right now.

At one level, the reasons to think so are obvious. Where past Republican administrations have held back, Trump has dealt fierce blows to the liberal factions, clamping down on immigration, targeting minority preferences and tearing up Biden’s green energy and transgender policies. The private sector has gone along with him too, with universities shuttering DEI offices en masse for fear of losing their federal money, Wall Street jettisoning ESG, and trans clinics closing their doors.

Regarding America’s enduring racial inequalities, there is a sense of a cycle closing. Sixties liberals were too slow to realise that guaranteeing legal rights does not resolve material inequalities, discovering to their confusion and chagrin that neither civil rights nor the massive legal bureaucracy it originated abolished black poverty and discontent. Affirmative action — the awkward concession that took shape in the wake of their too-late realisation, still today the centrepiece of liberalism’s remedy for racial inequality — reached new heights in the 2010s and early 2020s, and now has been brought violently to earth by the Supreme Court and the Trump administration.

All these things might be reversible under a future Democratic administration. But at the same time, a bitter split within liberalism has opened up on several fronts, putting a possible restoration in doubt — and, ironically, mirroring some of the events of the Sixties. Like Vietnam before it, Gaza broke liberalism into two, setting young pro-Palestinian Democrats against their pro-Israel seniors across media, academia, activism and politics. For the first time in more than a decade, liberal divisions could not be papered over, and just as before, the resulting acrimony and disaffection helped deliver power into the hands of the Right, which ironically took the lead in tamping down the very conflict that brought the split into the open.

The discontent goes beyond foreign policy — in fact, criticism from liberals has started to weaken consensus on several of the topics where the legacy of the Sixties appears most solid. Drug legalisation is a good example. No less weighty a liberal voice than The New York Times editorial board stated a few weeks ago that “It’s Time for America to Admit That It Has a Marijuana Problem”. “More Americans now use marijuana daily than alcohol,” the article states, citing the 2.8 million who suffer annually from a painful vomiting condition caused by smoking marijuana, and the helplessness of the authorities to combat a wave of people driving high. The Atlantic last year struck a similar note when it published an article contending that “Legal Weed Didn’t Deliver on Its Promises”.

This discomfort within the bastions of liberalism comes as marijuana has exploded in popularity and potency. Its users have grown sevenfold since the turn of the millennium, and the American landscape has become dotted with billboards advertising the drug and its derivatives. Weed is suffering from its own success, and no one has any ideas for what to do now. Few advocate a return to the old prohibitionist regime, but there is a growing awareness that haphazard legalisation gave rise to a massive vice industry without eradicating illegal dealers, weakening promised tax revenues and putting an ever more powerful drug in the hands of everyone from teenagers to seniors. That bodes ill for the strand of political thought that, since the Sixties, has advocated for the liberalisation of drug laws. It is surely true that a more competent rollout of legal weed would have brought better results, but the damage is done.

Deinstitutionalisation is another issue where a previously ironclad — and in this case bipartisan — Sixties-ist consensus seems to be breaking down, even if the structural reality seems, at this point, difficult to alter. The reasons for closing down America’s abuse-laden mental institutions from the Sixties onward had seemed obvious. They were cruel and they were expensive to run. New drugs seemed to offer a technological fix for the social problem of mental illness.

In the undeniably grim and often dangerous reality on America’s streets and public spaces — most dangerous for sufferers from mental illnesses left to languish there — lies the bleak harvest of that hope. The killing of Jordan Neely on the New York City subway in 2023 occasioned reflection in The New Yorker on “the system that failed” him: the cash-strapped psychiatric system that discharges patients before their condition can be meaningfully improved and the “alphabet soup” of outreach groups, dedicated yet overwhelmed and uncoordinated, that failed to keep him from making the angry outburst on the subway that prompted Daniel Penny to put him in a deadly chokehold.

“Slipped through the cracks” is the term that is often used for these cases — but who imagines that the archipelago of nonprofits, hospitals, jails and courts offers any substitute for the long-term mental institutions they replaced? As studies on “psychiatric boarding” and rates of mental illness in jails and on the streets indicate, and as any regular rider of the New York City subway can tell you, the system is all cracks.

In a recent Times opinion article, a psychotherapist describes how the authorities are unable or unwilling to keep her child from risking harm to himself and others on the streets. “We do not need to return to the large, abusive psychiatric asylums of the past,” she writes, “but the law has swung so far toward individual autonomy that the concept of ‘do no harm’ has all but vanished… Being left to die on the street is not freedom.”

The old Sixties-era convictions about the rampant abuse and unnecessary coercion involved in the old mental institutions might still be with us, yet no one believes anymore in the old remedy. Here too, there’s little sense of a way forward: the Right does not want to pay for more psychiatric beds, and the Left does not want to force anyone to stay in them.

On environmental review, on the other hand, liberalism’s break with the Sixties has become decisive and unapologetic. Advocates like Ezra Klein lead the charge for “abundance”, which assails environmental review and aims to cast aside this key plank of Environmentalism 1.0 (as well as the unions that have traditionally been a key element in the Democratic coalition), in an effort to escape the stagnancy in which blue states have been mired. Klein’s California is not alone in finding itself unable to construct ambitious public projects, build adequate quantities of housing for its population or achieve the green energy buildout necessary for Environmentalism 2.0.

Here there is a clearer idea of a remedy for the ills bequeathed to us by the Sixties, though not, at least as of yet, the political constituency to accomplish it. Developers would doubtless be delighted, but a building frenzy would involve casting aside the by-now long-entrenched class compact in blue states, where rich homeowners agree to pay high taxes and receive paltry state services in exchange for the appreciation in home values that is the inevitable consequence of not building. Abrogate that pact, dysfunctional as it clearly is, and wealthy lawyers in blue-state suburbs, faced with high-rises breaking ground across the street, will swallow their pride and move to Florida.

The abundance liberals are right, however, to think that elements of Sixties liberalism (as opposed to Sixties radicalism) deserve to share in the blame for America’s hollowed-out state capacity, for having set up elaborate roadblocks to government action. While they were not anti-statist in the way of the neoliberals who succeeded them, the decade’s liberals went all in on anti-institutional thinking while taking little account of the institutions they created. One of their major themes was that government — at least when it builds nuclear plants, or runs mental institutions, or forbids drugs, or makes war in Vietnam — is bad. The reply articulated in much of the current liberal backlash is that government that does bad things may be preferable to government that is capable of doing nothing at all.

In retrospect, now seems like the most likely time for the Sixties to truly end, as the Baby Boomers who dominated the political, media, academic and business establishment for decades, and whose worldview was deeply shaped by that decade, have grudgingly begun to retire from public office. The best way to move on is not by rejecting the decade wholesale, which would be impossible and morally wrong. Instead, we should reevaluate its legacy, discarding what has served its purpose and reclaiming what has been neglected but shouldn’t have been.

Most importantly, liberals should shed their fear of the state, a feeling that became a dogmatism in the Eighties and Nineties but that had its first stirrings in the Sixties-era anti-system posture, and which exists among both the Left and the centre, from “defund the police” to Joe Manchin’s insistent gutting of Biden-era legislation. Doing so will help dispel some of the confusion over what to do about the miscarriage of projects like drug legalisation and help Democratic cities reclaim key governance functions from the expensive and incompetent potpourri of nonprofits which often exercise them today. In doing so, liberals can draw from a parallel legacy of the Sixties, one that has had far fewer legatees in subsequent decades: the Great Society programme of welfare-state expansion under Lyndon Johnson, which gave the country healthcare for the old and food for the poor. Young Leftists such as New York’s Zohran Mamdani have learned this lesson already, proclaiming that “there is no problem too large for government to solve, and no concern too small for it to care about”. Mamdani has a difficult task in managing a Right ready to blame him for disorder and a Left-wing base deeply sceptical of police. But if challenges like these prove manageable, perhaps a new and less dysfunctional approach to government can rise from the ashes of Sixties liberalism.

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