Symposium 1968: Michael Kazin

It’s tempting to view 1968 in the United States and Western Europe as a repetition of 1848—and, contrary to Marx’s axiom, one fully as tragic the second time around.

In both years, radical movements mainly of the young made daring, if ill-prepared, assaults on the forces of order. All were crushed and defeated, and the defeats ushered in a long period of left retrenchment and conservative triumph. That temptation should be resisted.

The populist right also became a mass movement in the late 1960s and quickly seized the political offensive. In the United States and later in Britain, it took over a major party and won several national elections. There and elsewhere in the developed capitalist world, left-wing parties stopped touting big, egalitarian policies and began to hum the praises of entrepreneurs and free markets. Four decades after 1848, a far stronger left had been born, based in mass socialist parties of the working class. A year later, they founded the Socialist International. But nothing like that will happen again, at least not in the postindustrial world.

But the fact that left parties abandoned their socialist dreams and came to adopt a “Third Way” program that inspired no one may obscure a quieter sort of victory. Away from the hothouse of national politics, the left gradually reinvented itself. Most activists shed their ultrarevolutionary illusions and began “the long march through the institutions”—cultural and social—that German radical Rudi Dutschke had advocated in 1968. The left’s influence on daily life, while it lacks the drama of mass insurgency, has been profound, particularly on people born since the 1960s. “The most enduring aspects of a social movement are not always its institutions but the mental attitudes which inspire it and which are in turn generated by it,” wrote British historian J.F.C. Harrison in 1969. That statement may be truer for the post-’68 left than for any of its predecessors.

Consider the fact that most ordinary Americans and Europeans enjoy a degree of personal freedom that was considered ultra-radical in the 1960s. Women can pursue a variety of occupations, gays and lesbians no longer have to lie about their sexuality, racial identity poses no legal barrier to full participation in civil society, and the urgency of protecting the environment is taken for granted.

“Making values explicit” should be the central task of politics, declared the Port Huron Statement: “We regard men as infinitely precious and possessed of unfulfilled capacities for reason, freedom, and love” [emphasis in original]. That sentence (its gender bias aside) captures, with an aptly romantic tone, how ’68ers came to believe a better society would be built: radical democrats would liberate themselves by expanding the definition of freedom itself. Of course, this impulse sometimes led to forms of “identity politics” that descended into self-parody. Bu...