BrinkLindsey.com – The Age of Abundance

In a recent issue of Rolling Stone, Princeton historian Sean Wilentz assesses “The Legacy of 1967″ — with striking parallels to my own look back at the Summer of Love (excerpted from my book) in the current issue of Reason. Both of us stress the dualistic nature of developments that year, as tumultuous changes in American society gave birth to new formulations of both left and right.

For my part, I start off in April of that year, with the announcement in San Francisco of the Summer of Love and, that same week, the formal dedication ceremonies for Oral Roberts University in Tulsa. Wilentz, in similar style, starts at the beginning of 1967, as Country Joe and the Fish ushered in the new year at the Avalon Ballroom in San Francisco while 24 hours later, up in Sacramento, Ronald Reagan was sworn in as governor of California at the stroke of midnight.

The tone of the two articles, though, is quite different. I try to describe that watershed year and the decades that followed from a perspective that transcends the left-right dualities of the era. Wilentz, however, remains stuck solidly within them. He writes as a committed partisan of the left, still fighting the good fight. Check out this paragraph near the conclusion of Wilentz’s piece:

A few years ago, Bill Clinton offered an astute assessment of the decade that shaped the politics of his generation. “If you look back on the Sixties and on balance you think there was more good than harm in it, you’re probably a Democrat,” Clinton observed. “If you think that there was more harm than good, then you’re probably a Republican.” That polarization is the real legacy of the Summer of Love. On a cultural level, our daily lives – the music we listen to, the air we breathe, the rights we are afforded – remain shaped, in large measure, by the progressive movements of that era and the victories they achieved. But on a political level, the social and religious forces who are determined to roll back those victories are still in charge.

For Wilentz, the story of 1967 and its aftermath is basically a simple morality play of good vs. evil. The left is the party of progress; the right, the party of reaction. And while the left’s remaking of the culture is a liberation to be celebrated, the right’s capture of political power is a terrible wrong still to be righted.

I don’t see it that way. Rather than white hats vs. black hats, I see a more complicated picture. On the left I see liberation mixed with destructive nihilism; on the right, hidebound reaction with a saving conservatism:

The events in San Francisco and Tulsa that spring revealed an America in the throes of cultural and spiritual upheaval. The postwar liberal consensus had shattered. Vying to take its place were two sides of an enormous false dichotomy, both animated by outbursts of spiritual energy. Those two eruptions of millenarian enthusiasm, the hippies and the evangelical revival, would inspire a left/right division that persists to this day.

That split pits one set of half-truths against another. On the left gathered those who were most alive to the new possibilities created by the unprecedented mass affluence of the postwar years but at the same time were hostile to the social institutions—namely, the market and the middle-class work ethic—that created those possibilities. On the right rallied those who staunchly supported the institutions that created prosperity but who shrank from the social dynamism they were unleashing. One side denounced capitalism but gobbled its fruits; the other cursed the fruits while defending the system that bore them. Both causes were quixotic, and consequently neither fully realized its ambitions. But out of their messy dialectic, the logic of abundance would eventually fashion, if not a reworked consensus, then at least a new modus vivendi.

Which version rings truer to you? Who was more successful in stepping outside the viewpoints of the drama’s participants and attaining a truly historical perspective?