the first years of our time: the sixties or the seventies?

I’m pretty sympathetic with Bruce Shulman’s argument from The Seventies, that if we really want to locate the origins of our own current times, we could hardly do better than look at the transitions, left and right, that took place in what I call in my lecture on the subject “the most embarrassing decade.”

But for a book I’m now writing I’ve been thinking a lot about liberty, and had something of a Katie Lofton/Oprah Winfrey “a ha! moment.”  Then I saw my idea written up in the New York Times by someone else.

The op-ed piece, called the Downside of Liberty, was by Kurt Anderson.  In short, it argues: “What has happened politically, economically, culturally and socially since the sea change of the late ’60s isn’t contradictory or incongruous. It’s all of a piece. For hippies and bohemians as for businesspeople and investors, extreme individualism has been triumphant. Selfishness won.”

He got a lot of flack for that “selfishness” comment, and with good reason too, as he later admitted.  It’s hard to think of the civil rights movement as selfish, for instance.

But the force of the argument brings us back to the 1960s again, seeing them, contra Shulman, as “the first years of our time,” to use the subtitle of Henry F. May’s great The End of American Innocence (which is about the 1910s, the first years of May’s time–the book written in 1959).  No matter who you look at in the 1960s was advocating a kind of libertarian notion liberty.  Advocates for social justice wanted individual creativity to thrive.  Advocates for economic transformations wanted the preservation of individual entrepreneurs. 

At root, what changed was language.  The idea of sacrificing for the common good took a hit for the argument that no one should impinge on my liberty.  For better and for worse, it has been the dominant rhetoric in American political discourse ever since.

As teachers, is it useful to think about “the first years of our time” as a teaching too?  And if so, what gets the nod?  The traditional champion: the sixties?  The contender: the seventies?  Has Wilentz convinced anyone that it should be The Age of Reagan?  Or is this all pedagogic conceit?

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