The '60s Vs. the 2020s? It's No Contest. Today Is Much Worse

“You say you want a revolution? We’d all love to see the plans.” — John Lennon

The editorial board of the L.A. Times wants to ditch The Star Spangled Banner. Apparently it’s too old and fusty for them. “Land of the free and the home of the brave”? That is so last week. And a flag with no reference to Colin Kaepernick, the new founding father? The Times suggests Bill Withers’ Lean On Me as a substitute. Because a nation is now a therapy group.

After events of the past few years, don’t bet against them.

This latest intrusion of comedie ironique has some asking if America has reached ground zero in its history. Others reply the ‘60s and ‘70s were far worse. They refer you to the release of the film American Woman about the Patty Hearst saga. Hearst was a trust-fund heiress (her grandfather was William Randolph Hearst, the inspiration for Citizen Kane) who was kidnapped in 1974 by something called the Symbionese Liberation Army, a rag-tag band of political anarchists and cranks.

Hearst went full Stockholm Syndrome, participating in their robberies and other crimes. She was finally freed 19 months later, and despite claims she was coerced, served 22 months in prison before having Jimmy Carter commute her sentence. 

Some historians contend that episodes like the Hearst kidnapping or the Manson murders prove that the 1960s- 70s political chaos was worse than today’s resurgence of racial and political upheaval. They cite the 1968 riots in Europe and the anti-Vietnam civil unrest of 1965-75 as indications that things can get much worse in the current situation.

Certainly the vilification of Donald Trump is similar to the treatment afforded Lyndon Johnson (“Hey, Hey, LBJ how many kids have you killed today?) and, later, Richard “Tricky Dick” Nixon. The echoes of Mao and the USSR that beguile AOC and her callow crew had also captured the ‘60s youth wing of the Democratic Party. And the infatuation of some media for the Jerry Rubins and Tom Haydens was palpable.

The end of the middle class’s involvement with the draft for the Vietnam War— the real animating factor behind the mainstream upheaval— and the ascension of Ronald Reagan eventually squashed any notions of hippies capturing power. The fall of the Iron Curtain consigned totalitarian socialism to the waste bin of history. It seemed that by 1990, that was all she wrote for the overthrow of the status quo. 

Not so fast. The significant difference between the Manson years and today is that, in spite of the widespread rioting, looting, protest marches and media attention to the counter-culture in the 1960s, the forces of anarchy and political upheaval never got close to real power in the corporate and business world of the West. They met Chicago mayor Richard Daley head-on in Grant Park and lost. While the counterculture kept trying (and keeps trying) they never got past the 1968 Democratic convention. 

The Democratic Party (still controlled by its Dixie segregationists) held their radicals at bay after the George McGovern massacre in 1972. The ascetic monk Jimmy Carter was the response in 1976 to the over-heated circus of the ‘60s and 70s radicals. 

The business community never felt any need to appease the SLA or the anti-war movement. Instead the co-opted it. Remember The Monkees?  And while some in the media were amused by Flower Power and Jane Fonda being a traitor, the corporate media never felt the slightest need to abandon the power structure. 

Now, however, a vast segment of America has apparently adopted the words of Desmond Tutu, the anti-apartheid campaigner. “If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.” It is culture war on a grand scale. 

“Man the boats, we’re going under” describes the panic on Wall Street and in network TV offices to all this. The recent decision to remove the name Redskins from the Washington NFL franchise is an unmistakable sign that the radical left has achieved a status unknown in the 1960s- 70s. The move, which has been soundly rejected in polling of native Americans, nonetheless has long been a hobby horse of the white-guilt faction of the cancel-culture industry— particularly within the sports media. (We’ll have more on the very liberal sports press in I Don’t Like Mondays.)

But it was the urgings of the Redskins sponsors, cowed by online pressure from activists, that turned the day. FedEx threatened to remove its sponsorship of the team’s home stadium. A number of other major corporate sponsors, wanting no part of the heat from social media and the activist left, also threatened to pull their money. Voila. Washington owner Daniel Snyder, who’d vowed never, never to change the name, collapsed his opposition. 

At every level of American corporate life, this Redskins debunking is being repeated as American business acquiesces to the strident rhetoric of cancel culture They’re falling all over themselves to throw money at groups who were, until recently, at the very fringe of society.

Chris Marquez, who heads up the Black Employee Resource group at San Francisco based Levi Strauss fashioned a typical apologia for why they’re sending money “The disproportionate amount of deaths related to COVID-19 for Black and Brown communities, the continuation of police brutality and other violence against Black Americans simply for being Black are just too much. Every time another incident of racialized violence takes place, it breaks us.”

Hey, #BLM couldn’t have written it better. 

Walmart, Target and Home Depot have made large donations to people leading the street violence, who were (and presumably still are) Marxist insurrectionist groups dedicated to the overthrow of the free-market system. Clothing manufacturers H&M, Etsy, Spanx, Tom’s Shoes and Everlane (among many) have also donated to leftist causes, few with any real idea whether that the money is not going to finance the next purge against them.

One only has to read Joe Biden’s policy papers as he heads into an election with Trump to see that the party that once outright rejected the quasi-socialist Eugene McCarthy is a client state of #BLM, #antifa and the culture industry in Hollywood. It would not be a stretch to see radicals such as Bernie Sanders, AOC, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Talib and Ayanna Presley in prominent positions under a Biden/ Warren administration.

The only impediment left to the Left is the courts, which Trump, in one of his true accomplishments, has stocked with conservatives and federalists. But that, too, is at peril should he lose the November election. Democrats have talked of stacking the Supreme Court in their favour while reducing the filibuster rules in Congress that limit their wholesale policy implementations. It will be bombs away.

So yes, the ‘60s make great material for films. But for political theatre they’re just an opening act for the enormous societal transformation taking place in the time of Covid19.

Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy is the editor of Not The Public Broadcaster (http://www.notthepublicbroadcaster.com). The best-selling author of Cap In Hand is also a regular contributor to Sirius XM Canada Talks Ch. 167. A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada's top television sports broadcaster, his next book Personal Account with Tony Comper will be available on BruceDowbigginBooks.ca this fall.