Stumbling Over the 1960s

How did we get here? Where did we go wrong? Those are the questions a lot of people seem to be asking these days. Underlying those questions is the premise that things have, in fact, gone wrong. This week's inauguration underscored just how widespread this sentiment is. Whether one sees the incoming administration as evidence of just how wrong things have gone or as the remedy to so much that has gone wrong, the most solid consensus in American life these days is that somehow things should not be the way they are. Things could have been better. They ought to have been better. These are also questions for which there is no shortage of purported answers. Any number of books have been written in recent years which trace the river of our present troubles back to their sources, locating the historical headwaters in some person or idea or movement: the epistemology of John Locke or the method of Francis Bacon or the nominalism of William of Ockham or wherever. One reason for the popularity of the genre is that a lot of people have a sense that things haven't turned out the way we hoped or expected they would turn out. Of course, it helps to understand where we went wrong so that we can correct those errors and try to avoid repeating them in the future. If we're being honest, another reason for the popularity of the genre is that we find it immensely satisfying to have someone to blame for our problems. Not that there's anything wrong with laying blame where it belongs. Some people are most certainly blameworthy. Some ideas are corrupt and corrupting and should be named as such. Ideas have consequences, as one of the titans of the genre famously put it. Timothy S. Goeglein has written a book - Stumbling Toward Utopia: How the 1960s Turned into a National Nightmare and How We Can Revive the American Dream - in which he points to the 1960s as the decade in which America really began to stumble. Goeglein traces these various stumbles - stumbles in morality, education, family, entertainment, public policy, and so on - in the hope of answering the question, "How did we end up in such a mess?" The radical activists, Goeglein writes, "took a wrecking ball to society and America has never been the same. All one has to do is look at our current culture to see the damage the 1960s utopians created." That, Goeglein insists, is what happened to America: "The latest attempt to create utopia has failed . . ." Goeglein's thesis is not new, but he does provide a concise, if somewhat cherry-picked, account of how various strains of progressive thought ultimately produced the social, political, and cultural upheaval that made the 1960s such a watershed. Some of the thinkers whose ideas Goeglein rightly takes to task were around long before the decade in question. Woodrow Wilson and John Dewey, for example, were both born in the 1850s. In this regard, the book is less a critique of the utopian 1960s than of the progressive ideas that laid the groundwork for the revolutions of the 1960s and the lasting consequences of those revolutions for American life. I make that point not to quibble about dates or timelines but because, as Goeglein himself acknowledges, the roots of "the Sixties" reach back well into the 19th century and even earlier. For the most part, Goeglein chooses the targets of his various criticisms well. Margaret Sanger, Saul Alinsky, and Alfred Kinsey (among many others) take their deserved lumps. The unintended consequences of Johnson's Great Society, the collapse of the Mainline Protestant churches, and the advent of no-fault divorce (under Ronald Reagan in California), and Roe v. Wade all joined the cascade of horribles that flowed into, or poured out of, "the 1960s." But here we come to the biggest weakness of Goeglein's work - and similar accounts. Goeglein's story sometimes reads as if America were strolling through history - innocent and bright-eyed - when the 1960s came along and mugged her. But the 1960s were not something tha...