Mary Brennan's Turning Right in the Sixties is the first on what will most likely be a lengthening and important list of detailed studies of the rise of American conservatism. But by neglecting the rise of the right they have left us with an incomplete and one-sided view of the 1960s. These studies have greatly enriched our understanding of America after the Second World War. "What," Gitlin asks, "did 'the Sixties'-the movement, the spirit-accomplish?" The author explains that the book is "a history of domestic liberalism in the 1960s," telling "the story of how liberals attained political power and attempted to use it for extending the blessings of American life to excluded citizens." He also examines the "great uprising against liberalism in the decade's waning years by hippies, new leftists, black nationalists, and the antiwar movement-an uprising that convulsed the nation and assured the repudiation of the Democrats in the 1968 election." Matusow writes, "Thus, in a few short years, optimism vanished, fundamental differences in values emerged to divide the country, social cohesion rapidly declined, and the unraveling of America began." John Morton Blum's book on the 1960s, Years of Discord, is dedicated to the "liberal spirit" and is essentially "a reexamination of American liberalism." And The Sixties (1987), by the sociologist Todd Gitlin (note the definitive title), focuses on the hopes, dreams, and disappointments of the new left and the counterculture. From today's vantage point, this is arguably the most significant development of that decade, yet scholars and journalists have focused almost exclusively on the new left, civil rights, and the decline of American liberalism.Īllen Matusow's The Unraveling of America (1984) is a case in point. Very little has been written about the rise of the right in the 1960s. Much of this is the fault of scholars and journalists. More than three decades later Americans are still struggling to understand the rise of modern American conservatism. The Washington Post described members of one conservative group as people who liked to "complain about the twentieth century." And even a sympathetic commentator in Commonweal wondered whether a right-wing student group was a new political voice or "merely a new political organization out to repeal the twentieth century?" In 1962 a writer in the The Nation suggested that conservatives were more interested in thinking up "frivolous and simple-minded" slogans than in developing intelligent proposals to meet the complexities of post-Second World War America. It is the plain fact there are no conservative or reactionary ideas in general circulation" but only "irritable mental gestures which seem to resemble ideas." The historian Richard Hofstadter echoed Trilling's assessment, arguing that the right was not a serious, long-term political movement but rather a transitory phenomenon led by irrational, paranoid people who were angry at the changes taking place in America. In 1950 the literary critic Lionel Trilling spoke for a generation of scholars and journalists when he wrote that "in the United States at this time liberalism is not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition. In the late 1950s and early 1960s conservatives were widely dismissed as "kooks" and "crackpots" with no hope of winning political power.
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