How The ’60s Changed America For The Worse

Henry Kissinger, in his fine book, Leadership: Six Studies in World Strategy, captures the essence of the 1960s cultural and social revolution, not just in France, but in the western world generally:

In May 1968, a student revolt that grew into a general protest-one expression of a Europe-wide movement-consumed much of Paris. Students occupied the Sorbonne, where they festooned windows and columns with Maoist posters. They erected barricades in the Latin Quarter and engaged in street battles with police. Everywhere graffiti proclaimed the protesters’ anarchic sensibilities: “It is forbidden to forbid.”

“It is forbidden to forbid.” This pithy phrase encapsulates the core belief of the culture warriors of the 1960s across the United States as well as Europe. Paradoxically, the phrase combines both utopian and nihilistic visions of some prelapsarian world which, in the addled minds of some, dispense with personal responsibility, family, social bonds and a constrained and tragic view of the human condition. It is this pathological development, and its impact on American society, culture, and politics, even to this day, that is the subject of Timothy S. Goeglein’s compelling book, Stumbling Toward Utopia: How the 1960s Turned Into a National Nightmare and How We Can Revive the American Dream.

Goeglein pinpoints 1968 as the historical moment that brought us to “the beginning of America’s version of the Cold War, in which we could become divided as a nation, ideologically, spiritually, and eventually geographically. In many ways, it has never ended.” Assassinations, the Vietnam War and draft, racial unrest, the ascendancy of the Baby Boomers, sexual liberation and a general distrust of authority, tradition and norms all contributed to the age.

In 1968 I was a sophomore at a Jesuit university in the Midwest which, in a very few years, threw ROTC off campus, allowed African-American basketball players to segregate themselves on a separate dormitory floor, gave students a pass for missing class to protest the Cambodia incursion and other politically correct causes. As to sex and drugs, it was becoming de rigueur, although not quite mandatory as it seemed to be at many other campuses across the country.

Indeed, if I had but one mild criticism of Goeglein’s trenchant critique of the 1960s and its consequences, I would call it a stampede rather than a stumbling. Ideas are conveyed in light speed, more by contagion than discourse or persuasion. And Goeglein provides a masterful description of the origins and transmission of the toxic ideas which swept the nation and beyond in that decade. Like a good trial lawyer, he lets the evidence speak for itself.

After first relating a narrative on the decline of a small town of an old friend and correspondent, from the 1960s to the present time, he offers the reader several concise, data-rich chapters on the various “stumbles,” both cause and effect, of the cultural unraveling of that crucial decade. They encompass morality, education, entertainment, fiscal deterioration, family dissolution, religion’s decline and the loss of civility in America. The effect is staggering given the sheer carnage those times have brought to the national culture and body politic.

Timothy Goeglein’s rogues’ gallery of culprits for the forbidden-to-forbid culture, includes, but is not limited to, progressives such as John Dewey, Margaret Sanger, Woodrow Wilson, Herbert Marcuse and the authors of the 1962 Port Huron Statement, most prominently, Tom Hayden, future husband of Jane Fonda, and president of the Students for Democratic Society (SDS), an organization that called for a “New Left” in the nation’s politics. The Port Huron Statement defended Castro and the USSR, promoted sexual liberation, radical feminism, dismantling the military, the takeover of private enterprise, universal health care, the closing of prisons and on and on.

Add to the list Allen Ginsberg, Saul Alinsky, the author of Rules for Radicals: “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.” Then there’s Norman Lear, Dr. Alfred Kinsey, truly a piece of work, Masters and Johnson and Hugh Hefner. Hostility to moral restraint, families, patriotism and the market economy were common themes for most of these icons of modernity.

“At its core, the sexual revolution replaced the self-sacrifice required of both spouses to make a marriage work with a selfish ‘all about me’ philosophy based on personal ‘satisfaction’ rather than mutual respect,” writes Goeglein. “Once it became all about sex, love and commitment took a back seat.”

Most enlightening is Goeglein’s explanation of the Great Society’s deleterious influence on the work ethic and family formation resulting in more poverty and misery in its wake then before. At the beginning of the ’60s, 73 percent of children lived in a traditional two-parent never-divorced home, headed by a father and a mother. By 1980, it was 61 percent and 46 percent by 2015, with predictable results on poverty and prison populations. The Brookings Institution reports that children in single-parent families are about five-times as likely to be poor as children in married-couple families. These are the fruits of no-fault divorce, sexual liberation, and the welfare state created by the Great Society.

Goeglein marshals crushing statistical evidence for the decline in educational attainment in America tracing the decline to educational theorist John Dewey, “a self-proclaimed humanist and ‘democratic socialist,’” and opponent of Christianity as a “dying myth.” Reading, writing, and arithmetic took second place to socialization and collectivism.

Stumbling Toward Utopia places the nation’s debt crisis in a moral context stemming from the utopian perspective of the 1960s. The national debt in 1960 $286 billion but $32 trillion (with a “T”) in 2023 and growing. Entitlement spending trumps infrastructure and national defense. Inflation followed culminating in “stagflation” in the Jimmy Carter years. This is a bipartisan phenomenon. Richard Nixon grew entitlement spending 20 percent faster than the Johnson administration.

Timothy Goeglein does not outline any wonkish policy recommendations, although the reader may infer a few here and there. He does counsel a kind of new “Great Awakening” if you will, a term he does not use, but accurately characterizes his argument for the theological virtues of faith, hope and love to heal the nation, our families and the hearts of our citizens rendered isolated, lonely and forlorn by the social and cultural devastation of the 1960s. At root he is calling for a revival of personal responsibility, and love, in each of our lives, homes and communities.

G. Tracy Mehan, III, is an adjunct professor at Scalia Law School, George Mason University, and served as Assistant Administrator for Water at US EPA in the George W. Bush administration.