DAVID SIDORSKY
253
the sake of equality in the labor force. The latent consequences of the
changes in women's status as matriarchs may yet involve deleterious
consequences for the social order.
Minogue's extreme conjecture is that the feminization of the culture
may emasculate male creativity to such a degree that it will have a neg–
ative impact on the capacity of Western civilization to maintain the
progress in the sciences that is necessary for its survival. Yet predictions
of the future are not entailed by any post-mortem, no matter how
severe, of the decade of the 1960s. This is evident in the historical record
of the past three decades. And there is no evidence, despite Minogue's
conjecture on the implications of radical feminism, that there has been
a weakening of the institutional capacity for scientific and technological
innovation in Western civilization since the 1960s.
Similarly, foreign policy supported by radical political movements of
the 1960s did not seem to affect subsequent U.S. foreign policy. Reagan's
policy in the 1980s of strengthened confrontation against Soviet power,
including the rhetoric of "the evil empire," does not on ly mark a reversal
of Sixtyism, but may have contributed successfully to the co llapse of the
Soviet Union in ways which were more effective than the extension of
Eisenhower's containment strategy of the J950S or the Nixonian detente.
The collapse of the Soviet Union has had dramatic consequences for the
dominance of free market economics.
It
is not only the post-sixties shift
from Socialism to free markets in countries as diverse as China, Vietnam,
Tanzania, Indonesia, or Chile. Even when leaders of European Socialist
parties affirm rhetorical policies that are continuous with the ideals of the
Left in the 1960s, their practice tends toward a quest for capital invest–
ment and the global expansion of free trade. The dominance of free mar–
kets is a reversal of economic theory, ideology, and practice in the 1960s.
FUKUYAMA
co
TENDS
that the depletion of social capital that took place
in the 1960s will be reversed, while Kimball's portraits of the decline of
the academy and of literary standards during that decade suggest a con–
tinuity of further decline. Yet both Fukuyama and Kimball recognize
that analytical post-mortems of a past decade do not bring with them the
gift of prophecy. The unpredictability of the American future, however,
does not negate the ways in which these have contributed to the under–
standing of all future historians of the American past.
The most dramatically unpredicted event of recent American history
was the act of terrorism carried out in New York, Washington, and
Pennsylvania on September
L L.
This inevitably raises the question of the
correctness of Fukuyama's or Kimball's cultural and societal prognoses.
