The Sixties at 40: Leaders and Activists Remember and Look Forward by Ben Agger

Author:Ben Agger [Agger, Ben]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: United States, Social Science, Popular Culture, Political Science, History, 21st Century, General
ISBN: 9781594516924
Google: oeztAAAAMAAJ
Publisher: Paradigm Publishers
Published: 2009-01-15T13:48:21+00:00

TODD GITLIN

And the Winner Is …?

“Small question. Okay, we’re now leaving the minutiae of fact, and we’re getting to the biggest political question of our time. My short answer is, for most of four decades, the Left won the culture and the Right won political power. What endured from the Left was the opening up of rights, civil rights, women’s rights, gay rights, civil liberties.

“The Left upheld rights of the Enlightenment liberal project, and in their name implanted itself after the sixties; graduates of the Left implanted themselves in the institutions of culture, universities, the media, art museums, that sort of thing.

“The Right set out to take state power. The Left was ambivalent about power. This is something I’ve written about since. I summarize at one point with the slogan ‘The Right won Washington, and the Left won the English Department.’

“If you look at the politics in terms of access to power, to national power, and obviously global power, this is something the Right set out to attain, and since Nixon, they’ve done it rather well—through 2008. The two Democratic presidents were white southerners; both of them had to act on the ground that had been staked out, actually less by Nixon, as it turned out, than Reagan. That was Reagan’s achievement.

“The Right demonstrated that [it was] capable of winning national power, and the Left was marginal. What went on for decades was that the academic Left, at least, was satisfied with another objective, a sort of party favor or consolation prize. That’s to put it dismissively, I know. But the Right essentially had the institutions of political power to itself after the sixties, while, until very recently, at least the critical mass of the graduates of the sixties have ensconced themselves in a niche that they can control or at least substantially contest as a sort of compensation for what they don’t have in the realm of political power.”

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