All this and more is described in great detail by Perlstein. That one of America’s most promising historians has devoted so much analysis to these few years of his country’s history is because he believes, as many do, that it has defined American society and politics ever since. Ever since there has been, he argues, a battle between the two kinds of Americans who both lay claim to the soul of their nation: the suburban ‘values voters’ of the Silent Majority versus the liberal urbanites of the Great Society. An echo of that argument is regularly made here in Britain about the divide between those who think that the Sixties was the best thing to happen to the country and those who think it was the worst.
I am not sure how compelling an argument it really is. No one doubts the cultural or political significance of the period, but the flower-power generation is now starting to collect its pension. As its places in politics, academia, business and the media are taken by the generations who came after, the debate has moved on. We talk now not of a permissive society but of a broken one, of crack cocaine not purple haze. The fight for civil rights is now a search for social responsibility. The struggle for the means of production and exchange has become a consensus in favour of globalisation and the free market. Yes, we live in the world that Richard Nixon, for better and worse, helped to create — ask yourself, would the Olympics be in Beijing if he had never visited China? But while I enjoyed his magisterial book, I disagree with Perlstein’s conclusion. We don’t have Nixon to kick around anymore because a new generation hardly knows who he is, unless they Google him of course.
Comments
There are currently no comments for this article.