Tell me what you think of [the 1960s], and I’ll tell you what your politics are,” once said Joseph Epstein, the editor of the American Scholar. Of course, you might make much the same point about the 1980s or the 1950s, but the 1960s stand out as a decade of particularly intense cultural and political convulsions.

The American liberalism shaped by Roosevelt and Truman, which was anchored in blue-collar precincts, and which gave us the welfare state, internationalism, and civil rights laws, was killed off in the 1960s. This set the stage for decades of battles between the new liberalism of McGovern, Carter, and Clinton and the new conservatism of Reagan and Gingrich. As for the cultural legacy, hemlines have dropped back from the record heights they reached in the 60s, but the rates of illegitimacy, divorce, and recreational drug use have just kept climbing. The Republican congressional revolution may again reshape American politics, but for the last 25 years we have been living in the shadow of the 1960s.