Still Marching

The great contribution of Roger Kimball’s important new book, The Long March: How the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s Changed America, will be to remind a generation of Americans who would not know Beat poet Allen Ginsberg from Monica Lewinsky’s lawyer William Ginsburg, or Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver from Leave It to Beaver’s Wally Cleaver, or orgasmprophet Wilhelm Reich from former Clinton adviser Robert Reich, that their lives have been indelibly marked by these long since forgotten countercultural icons — and not for the better. Kimball is perhaps most widely known for his earlier book Tenured Radicals, a broadside against the radical Left for hijacking the nation’s universities. But readers of the New Criterion, of which he is managing editor, know him best for his always intelligent and elegantly crafted essays on the arts, culture, and philosophy.

The “long march” of Kimball’s title refers to the radical Left’s takeover of the most important institutions in American society over the last half century. If it had been a political revolution, the young radicals would have stormed the gates, sharpened the guillotine, and built wholly new institutions. But, as Kimball explains, in the cultural revolution America experienced in the 1960s, the radicals worked principally from within.

The universities, the media, the churches, the courts — the hated “Establishment” — were turned into a Countercultural Establishment. As Beat poet Ginsberg predicted, the revolution worked through the children. The effect is all the more insidious and complete because it is unseen and leaves few traces. There are no burned capital buildings to give witness to the revolution that took place. Many on the left even deny that such a revolution in mores and values occurred, accusing conservatives of making up the “culture wars” for partisan advantage.

Kimball sets the record straight, however, reconstructing the goals and methods of the first generation of culture warriors. He includes chapters on the Beats (including Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs), Norman Mailer, Susan Sontag, Herbert Marcuse, and others, along with insightful discussions of some of the formative events of the 1960s, such as Woodstock, the student rebellions at Cornell and Yale, the Vietnam War, and the founding of the New York Review of Books. It’s not a comprehensive history of the 1960s but, as he puts it, a tour of “the founding documents and personalities of America’s cultural revolution.”

Since these founders took the first steps in the long march that was to follow, they were necessarily bolder in their statements and more self-conscious about what needed to be done. For them, unlike the unknowing generations to follow, there really was an establishment to be destroyed. And thus, Kimball implies, it is only by returning to their pronouncements and the sensibility they sought to inculcate that we can understand our benighted present.

And what a twisted sensibility it was! The bulk of Kimball’s book is devoted to documenting, in explicit detail, what the radicals said and did. There was the revered Burroughs on sex: “A horde of lust-mad American women rush in. Dripping c — ts. . . . They scream and yipe and howl, leap on the guests like bitch dogs in heat with rabies.” There was Sontag on America — “a criminal, sinister country” — and Jerry Rubin on the finer points of America’s foreign policy: “Puritanism leads us to Vietnam. Sexual insecurity results in a supermasculinity trip called imperialism.”

There was Cleaver’s celebration of rape as “an insurrectionary act” and Andrew Kopkind’s sacralization of revolutionary violence: “Morality, like politics, starts at the barrel of a gun.” There was Charles Reich on the coming utopia — “It promises a higher reason, a more human community, and a new and liberated individual” — and, of course, Timothy Leary’s “Turn on, tune in, drop out.”

There is a tendency, no doubt, to dismiss the sentiments and arguments and antics of the counterculture as having nothing to do with us today. Kimball is aware of the danger of forgetfulness and denial. He frequently warns the reader not to think of the 1960s as some “bygone era” and its Founding Fathers as mere museum pieces, cranks, or period figures.

The ideology of the 1960s, Kimball contends,

has insinuated itself, disastrously, into the curricula of our schools and colleges; it has significantly altered the texture of sexual relations and family life; it has played havoc with the authority of churches and other repositories of moral wisdom; it has undermined the claims of civic virtue and our national self-understanding; it has degraded the media, the entertainment industry, and popular culture; it has helped to subvert museums and other institutions entrusted with preserving and transmitting high culture. It has even, most poignantly, addled our hearts and innermost assumptions about what counts as the good life: It has perverted our dreams as much as it has prevented us from attaining them.

Faced by this calamity, what is a conservative to do? In Kimball’s view, the task is not to understand why the 1960s struck. He has little patience with arguments about causes, which he believes are endless and, worse, a distraction. According to Kimball, “the real task for a cultural critic is not etiological . . . but diagnostic and, ultimately, therapeutic.”

Though Kimball does not define what he means by therapy (usually frowned on by conservatives), I believe his book is itself intended as a sort of therapy. Or really shock therapy. Kimball perhaps wants to shake us out of our complacency and universal tolerance by confronting us with what he takes to be the “real origins” of the 1960s — its early “prophets of Dionysian excess.” He wishes us to see ourselves in the mad ravings of Sontag, Cleaver, and Burroughs.

It is here that I think Kimball-as-therapist falters. Kimball chooses to emphasize the cranks like Mailer and Ginsberg rather than what he acknowledges to be the true grandfathers and fathers of the 1960s: Rousseau, Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud. But it is only by considering these thinkers (especially the former two) that one can begin to grasp the genuine shortcomings of bourgeois societies and their vulnerabilities to cultural revolution.

It is not a point, I believe, Kimball would object to. As he repeatedly notes, the Beats, Mailer, and the rest were second- and third-rate artists at best. None were serious thinkers. It is in truth hard to credit any of them as the “real origins” of the 1960s. Indeed, though Kimball eschews discussions of root causes, he notes, in passing, that the professoriat gave in to the student radicals in the 1960s not simply because of a failure of nerve. Their moral and intellectual collapse “bespoke an essential weakness in liberal ideology.”

In other words, though Kimball writes that the America of the late 1940s and early 1950s “was vibrantly alive,” not all could have been well in paradise. (That “the Establishment” gave in so readily to the counterculture would seem to confirm this suspicion.) And if the cause of our troubles is in fact quite deep, therapy — even shock therapy — might not be the answer.

Irving Kristol has noted that American students in the 1960s underwent “an existential spiritual crisis,” one brought about in large part by inherent weaknesses in the liberal humanistic order, an order that had long since cut itself off from any sense of transcendence. The cultural revolution of the 1960s did not solve this spiritual crisis. Students today are every bit as likely to experience the sense of alienation that their parents did — as evidenced in skyrocketing use of drugs like Prozac and sexual liberation’s end run known as the “hook up.”

Whether religion is the only answer to liberalism’s spiritual crisis remains to be seen. What is clear is this: As long as secular liberalism shuts itself off from and denies people’s deepest spiritual needs, cultural revolutions will remain ever present possibilities. Thanks to Kimball we have been reminded of their destructive power.

Adam Wolfson is executive editor of the Public Interest.