Weirdly, I’ve recently seen multiple writings that bemoan the failure or selling out of the 1960s counter-culture movement. It seemed weird because: why now? None of them offer solid explanations — certainly no explanation that I buy in its entirety. So I came up with what I think is a fairly solid explanation on my own. And then I realized the answer to why now?

Examples

The first such piece I saw was on John Scalzi’s blog, where author Lewis Shiner penned a guest column about the ideas behind his novel Outside The Gates Of Eden. He said he wanted to write about “the death of 1960s idealism and the rise of the culture of greed”. He thought it had something to do with the 1970s scares over limited resources, Nixon’s eventual ending of the Vietnam War, and increasing divisions between various factions of “the movement”.

The latest was How The Baby Boomers Sold Out in New Statesman, a British magazine. This essay is about the ideas of Theodore Roszak, who is credited with coining the term “counterculture”. It argues that “the waning influence of counter culture figures” is at least partly due to inherent contradictions, including the attempt to build a solid movement on “fluidity and ambiguity”.

Other Theories

In the past, I’ve heard it suggested that aging was responsible. At some point, the flower children had to find actual jobs to pay for living quarters in which to raise children, and eventually — without even realizing it, became the establishment they’d all loathed. (When I was growing up, many of my teachers, bosses, and other authority figures fit that description exactly. Twenty years earlier, they’d been all about the peace and love, but now they had to earn a living and start running things.)

A more conservative theory I’ve heard is that the radical ideas espoused by the counterculture generation weren’t going to work anyway. Sure, some of the ideology and phrasing blended into mainstream culture — racial equality, marijuana acceptance, and gay rights. But, the conservatives argue, you can’t run a country or an economy on getting high and “peace and love”. (This is perhaps the dumbest theory I’ve heard for why the 1960s revolution “failed”, but I list it here because I know some who believe it.)

My Alternate Explanation, In Three Parts

My hypothesis has three parts, all of which are relevant to today’s liberal and progressive movements.

FIRST, I don’t think the movement failed entirely. Some progress occurred — it isn’t always noticeable because it’s now the new normal, the current status quo. The draft ended, as did the unpopular war. Congress passed civil rights legislation and protected the right to vote for minority citizens. Things improved for women — though the ERA still languishes — we got the 1963 Equal Pay Act, Title VII (as part of the 1964 Civil Rights Act), Griswold v. Connecticut, the EEOC, the founding of NOW and NARAL, and eventually Roe v. Wade. Now we have record numbers of women in Congress. Marijuana is legal in spots, and even Texas is working on a bill to relax marijuana restrictions. Additionally, the torch has been passed from the aging radicals of the 1960s to a social-media savvy new generation of radicals, like 16-year-old Swede Greta Thunberg, who began the School Strike For Climate and now leads more than a million student activists in protesting government inaction on climate change; or Emma Gonzalez, the 19-year-old survivor of a high school massacre who (along with other survivors) pushed for and achieved changes to Florida’s inadequate gun laws. This doesn’t look like a failure, so much as it looks like very slow progress. It didn’t happen in one huge, cataclysmic, overnight change, but it IS happening incrementally.

SECOND, something that’s easy to miss: It is mistaken to assume an entire generation was anti-establishment. Conservatives, regressives, and reactionaries were always among them. The protesting youth in the 1960s — who now are part of stock footage that shows up in any film or TV show that even mentions the era — were not the only youth in the country at that time. While Woodstock crowds swelled to half a million, countless other millions in the same age groups were not at Woodstock, and a bunch of them did not want to go. While college students protested the war at Kent State, other college-age youth held the guns that fired at them. For every 1960s counterculture moment we’ve been bombarded with in pop culture for the past 50 years, there were other, decidedly non-radical things going on with young people.

I first became aware of this by being born to parents who were of approximately the correct age but who were not part of the counterculture. Almost no one they knew was. They worked multiple jobs and went to college while their televised peers publicly revoluted. The men (including my father) responded affirmatively to their draft notices, while others (my uncles) joined voluntarily. When their military service ended, they started careers and families as their parents before them had. They never understood the counterculture movement, never understood the race riots, vocally denounced drug users and “homos”, and were always on the side of “law and order” policies, no matter how harsh.

And I was reminded of it regularly, when one or the other of my parents would describe from memory a very different perspective than what my high school history teachers said. For example, when my teachers told me “the whole nation mourned” over Kennedy’s assassination, my parents told me people they knew weren’t sad at all about it. Now when I watch the terrifying films from civil rights protests, it’s hard to miss that a bunch of the opposition were of the same exact age as the alleged radical generation.

So, when the 1960s antiestablishment folk began to age out of their youthful protests and begin their careers and start families, it wasn’t so much that an entire generation gave up and joined the establishment. It was that part of them had been the establishment all along.

THIRD, there was never a unified, single “1960s movement”. The compression of history and three-second clips slipped into movies make it seem that way, but there were so many things going on that I’m convinced few were even aware of all the disconnected movements. A lot of people in a lot of these movements didn’t agree with a bunch of what the other movements were advocating. Feminists were doing one thing; anti-war activists another. Black civil rights advocates and pot-smoking communists were two different groups. Some groups failed more than others. Some causes went mainstream more quickly than others.

Relevance Today

Today, though I am personally encouraged by the energy of youth and the downright spectacular eloquence of some of them in pushing for progressive change, I have to wonder whether something is at work now, similar to what happened in the 1960s. While I see plenty of college-age youth at various rallies I attend, I know it’s only a small proportion of that generation. While the Parkland shooting survivors preach to massive crowds on Twitter, there are millions of others — of about the same age — who don’t agree with the message.

Forty or fifty years from now, when the current crop of youth begins to collect its AARP membership cards, how many of them will be disappointed by how little was accomplished? To what will they attribute their failure? Will they accuse each other of selling out, giving in, or giving up? Will they be startled by how many of their own generation turned out to be pro-establishment?

The relevant lessons from the 1960s, then, are these:

1. The movements of the 1960s didn’t fail; they only succeeded differently, more slowly, and less completely than they had hoped. I think the same will be true for today’s movements.
2. Though the struggle feels generational, it often isn’t. Each generation itself contains the mostly silent folk who will eventually slow it by sheer inertia.
3. Just as the ‘60s movements were many and varied, so are the progressive and liberal causes of today. Though it sometimes feels like one massive group with the same list of ideals and beliefs, it isn’t. Someone who agrees with me on climate change might disagree with me on abortion. Someone who agrees with me on #BlackLivesMatter might disagree with me on #TransLivesMatter.

Conclusion

I think what we’re doing now will change things. Even if the progress is slower than we would like, and though there are serious setbacks, progress still occurs. No, the 1960s radicals didn’t overturn the entire machinery of the establishment, and no, the youthful influencers of today won’t either, but change is inevitable. Surveys and polls consistently show attitudes changing, however incrementally, from one generation to the next. Whether the question is gay rights, empowerment for racial/ethnic minorities, advancement of women’s rights, public funding of scientific research, better treatment for anyone perceived as outside the norm, avoidance of needless violence, environmental protections — the views are steadily changing. And more of us maintain these changed views later in life.