DAVID SIDORSKY
Post-Mortems of the Sixties:
Deep Structure Specters and Walking Zombies
I
nterpretation of the 1960s has become a primary instrument of polit–
ical self-definition by both Liberals and Conservatives. The differing
perspectives of that decade have taken on a function analogous to
the decisive role played by the French Revolution in determining the
identity of the Left and Right in nineteenth-century politics and the way
in which support for the Russian Revolution became the dividing line
between radical political culture and its critics throughout most of the
twentieth century. There are three major views of what the 1960s have
wrought, each representing an interpretation of the past which can be
used to criticize or to defend current political and cultural values.
The historical memory of Liberalism, shared in part by the Left, has
idealized the decade as a version of "Camelot." ror Liberals, it was the
last great period of American progressive vision and pragmatic energy,
symbolized by the aura of a vigorous Jack Kennedy and characterized
by the civil rights movement and the Great Society legislation, before
the reversal represented by the Nixon and Reagan presidencies. (The
Republican party seemed to partly adopt this version when it advanced
the youthful, handsome, and liberal New York mayor, John Lindsay. )
After the sixties, Watergate may have served as an emotional resuscita–
tion for politically disappointed Liberals. Yet neither the Carter nor the
Clinton presidencies have restored the lost promise. The Liberal politi–
cal vision that was pursued during the [960s continues to be enshrined
and defended, even as the agenda of Liberalism within the Democratic
Party has receded over the past decades.
For the Left, the] 960s was a period of transformative activism. A
New Left considered itse lf to have revitalized the tired and rigid ideolo–
gies of the Old Left, even while accepting its basic tenets. It felt itself
to
be moving toward a genuine revolution, or at least an apocalypse. Fred–
eric Jameson, the Marxist literary critic, has recalled the widely shared
belief in the imminent coming of "universal liberation."
In
the formed
historical memory of the Left, this revolutionary enthusiasm was smoth–
ered by the established institutions of corporate and consumerist society.
