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Sat Oct 1 16:23:26 PDT 2005

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THE TIMES THEY ARE A CHANGIN'. REALLY 
Sep 29th 2005  

Believe it or not, America is beginning to escape its groundhog decade

WE'RE told on good authority that history repeats itself, but this is
getting ridiculous. The past week has been a giant flashback to the
1960s. On Saturday 100,000 anti-war demonstrators descended on
Washington, DC, to chant peacenik slogans and listen to Joan Baez sing
"Where have all the flowers gone?" The only thing missing was Abbie
Hoffman trying to levitate the Pentagon. And that's not all. PBS
broadcast Martin Scorsese's lengthy homage to Bob Dylan, alongside a
week of tributes to "the years that shaped a generation" (including a
special edition of "Antiques Roadshow"). Both the Rolling Stones and
Jane Fonda have dragged their aged limbs on tour. 

There have been a few attempts to update things. This time, some
anti-war protesters wore T-shirts that read "make levees not war",
while Sir Michael Jagger has penned a song about the evils of
neo-conservatism. But for the most part, everybody seems happiest with
golden oldies. 

Why are the 1960s so difficult to escape? One reason is the sheer size
of the baby-boom generation. Giant arboreal slums of boomers now sit at
the top of every establishment tree, not least the media. And like all
ageing geezers they continue to see the world through the prism of
their youths. Listen to Charles Rangel, a black congressman from New
York, comparing George Bush to Bull Connor (the notorious white police
boss in Birmingham, Alabama); or Jesse Jackson likening the peace
protesters to the civil-rights heroine, Rosa Parks; or just about every
pundit doing the "Iraq war as Vietnam quagmire" routine. 

The other reason why the 1960s are so hard to shake off is that the
decade split America down the middle, launching the culture wars that
still haunt American politics and redefining America's two great
parties. The Democrats became the party of people who regarded the
1960s as an unmitigated good (particularly feminists, blacks and social
liberals) while the Republicans regarded the 1960s as an unmitigated
evil (particularly white southerners and other "conservatives of the
heart"). 

This has made for "Groundhog Day" politics. Every election the same
arguments appear about draft dodging, the permissive society and so on.
Last year, while Iraq burned, American politics fixated on which Swift
Boat veteran did what 40 years ago. 

Is there really no escape? In fact, last year's election looks like the
last hurrah for 1960s politics. John Kerry presumably thought that
turning the 2004 election into a referendum on his war service in
Vietnam was a slam-dunk, given that he fought heroically while Mr Bush
skulked at home. But many voters were less obsessed by the Mekong
Delta, and others remembered him as a war protester, not a war hero.

The future of both parties is in the hands of people who want to
jettison their 1960s baggage. On the Democrat side, before Mr Kerry
reintroduced Vietnam, the Clintonites had spent much of the 1990s
distancing themselves from Eugene McCarthy. They demonised black
radicals such as Sister Souljah, embraced tough policies on crime and
welfare, supported school uniforms and V-chips, and sent American
bombers into Bosnia. In her preparation for 2008, Hillary Clinton has
taken positions on military force and abortion rights that would have
scandalised her younger self. Barack Obama, a possible running mate, is
very different from the older black leaders. On the relative merits of
liberal and conservative solutions to black poverty--spending more
money versus changing the behaviour of the poor--he says: "It's not
either/or. It's both/and."

For their part, the Republicans have been trying to get beyond Richard
Nixon's "southern strategy". Mr Bush has appointed blacks to more
senior positions in his administration than any previous president and
lavished more attention on wooing black voters. The reason why black
Democrats seized on the catastrophe in New Orleans to demonise Mr Bush
is not because they really think that he is Bull Connor reincarnated,
but because they worry that his strategy of creating a multicultural
Republican Party might get somewhere.

THE OLD ROAD IS RAPIDLY AGEING
More broadly, American society is beginning to make its peace with that
divisive decade: it is becoming neither a pro-1960s culture nor an
anti-1960s culture but a post-1960s culture. Polls show only 5% of
voters objecting to the civil-rights revolution. For all the rage of
the culture warriors, most Americans--particularly young ones--put a
high premium on "tolerance". At the same time, they also think that the
counter-culture went too far. Very few people decry the nuclear family
or urge people to tune in, turn on and drop out. 

Society is in a process of repairing itself after the big dislocations
of the 1960s, when rates of crime, pre-marital sex and family breakdown
began to surge. (The annual number of divorces, for example, more than
doubled between the mid-1960s and the mid-1970s.) The figures for
teenage pregnancy and abortion are both declining. Crime is down
(America now has fewer burglaries per head than Canada), and divorce is
beginning to drop, particularly among the college-educated, as the
children of divorced parents re-embrace the nuclear family. Most young
Americans say they believe in God and love their country.

 Mr Dylan remains such an iconic figure not because he embodied the
1960s but because, unlike many of his acolytes, he refused to be
defined by the decade. Mr Scorsese makes great play about the way the
folk protester infuriated his hard-core fans by going electric. But
this was only one of the bard's changes. He distanced himself from his
protest songs. He got God in a big way. And in his recent memoirs he
boasts that his dream was a "nine-to-five existence, a house on a
tree-lined block with a white picket fence, pink roses in the
backyard." That's where the flowers went, Joan.

See this article with graphics and related items at http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=E1_QQGNQVD

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