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We're all refugees of the '60s now
Regulatory zealots are legacies of age that equated tradition with
repression

By K.L. Billingsley

History's odometer will soon roll over to the year 2000, but the 1960s
remain the decade that won't go away. The staying power of the 1960s has
been attributed to nostalgia as the babyboom generation slouches into
middle age. It more likely springs from Richard Weaver's dictum that
ideas have consequences because trends launched during the '60s have
become key public policy issues. Take for example the debate on race.

By the mid1960s, the civil rights movement had succeeded in abolishing
the Jim Crow system of racial segregation which had deprived black
Americans of their rights. In "The Year the Dream Died: Revisiting 1968
in America" (Warner; 534 pages; $25), columnist Jules Witcover recalls
the idealism of the time and wonders what might have happened if the
Rev. Martin Luther King, John Kennedy and Robert Kennedy had not been
assassinated. At the same time, the 1960s was a decade of identity
politics that went beyond the slogans of "Black power" or "Chicano
power."

In his book "Radical Son," (Free Press) former New Left leader David
Horowitz reveals the criminal side of his former colleagues in the Black
Panthers, a group which offered class struggle and violence in place of
the Rev. King's message of peace and unity. The Panthers, United Slaves
and other groups have passed from the scene but the legacy of identity
politics remains in the current tendency to downplay individual rights
and define people by their ethnic group.

While the civil rights movement deemphasized race, current affirmative
action policies, developed by both Democrats and Republicans, deploy
complex racial classifications reminiscent of South Africa. King's dream
of a nation in which people were judged by the content of their
character remains elusive.

So engrained is this policy that the Clinton administration, which wants
to "mend not end" affirmative action, has rejected the notion of a
multiracial classification on the Census. The racecentered policies are
justified in the name of "diversity," but this concept ascribes a set of
political views to people based on their race and tacitly forbids blacks
and Hispanics to hold ideas contrary to those of designated group
spokespersons lest they be tarred as "sellouts" or worse.

The 1960s were the heyday of accredited victim status, which divided the
nation into creditor and debtor classes and held that people were not
ultimately responsible for their actions. Something called "society" was
to blame, a destructive dodge that lives on still in our justice system
and attempts by the politically correct word police to turn the L.A.
riots, an orgy of murder, arson and looting, into a justified
"rebellion."

Likewise, only the willfully blind can deny the fallout from the 1960s
piety that drugs were a harmless form of chemical recreation no
different than knocking down a beer after work. Drug use has always
existed in America, but during the 1960s the popular culture gave its
approbation. Thirty years later, use of LSD and marijuana are increasing
among the young, cocaine remains a staple, and heroin is staging a
comeback. The cost to family life and the justice system remains
incalculable.

The same can be said about the legacy of 1960s erotomania, the creed
that sex of all sorts could be indulged without responsibility, in the
name of "free love," without adverse consequences. Herpes, AIDS and a
host of lesser complaints have laid that myth to rest, but the
consequences remain.

So do those of the fundamentalist pantheism which led to the first Earth
Day and has since gone on to become a kind of approved national
religion. An everencroaching praetorian guard of regulatory zealots,
and a state of affairs in which people are jailed for "wetlands
violations," are direct legacies of a '60s mysticism which equated
tradition with repression. The lingering '60s mindset considers old
buildings and old forests worthy of preservation but dismisses
timehonored beliefs.

While conservatives criticize the '60s, the tenured radicals now
ascendant in the American academy are working three shifts manufacturing
excuses for the decade. Both trends are visible in "Reassessing the
Sixties: Debating the Political and Cultural Legacy," edited by Stephen
Macedo (Norton), dealing with themes such as feminism, race and the
academy from points of view ranging from the radical Todd Gitlin to
conservative George Will.

Here, political philosopher Harvey Mansfield calls the '60s an assertive
era which "pretended to liberate but actually enthralled." And he offers
a compelling reason why those who cross that vaunted bridge to the next
century will do so lugging a considerable load of baggage. The decade's
toxin, he says, has "worked its way into our souls, the effects becoming
less visible as they become more ordinary."

In other words, we're all '60s refugees now.

BILLINGSLEY is a journalism fellow at the Center for the Study of
Popular Culture in Los Angeles.