How Revolt Ricocheted to the Right

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By ALAN WOLFE

It is 40 years since the events of 1968. As each month goes by, another anniversary prompts reflection: the Tet offensive, which started at the end of January; the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination, in April; the Paris uprising, in May; and the fatal shooting of Robert F. Kennedy, in June. And we have more anniversaries to anticipate before 2008 winds down: the uproarious Democratic convention, in August; the black-power salutes at the Mexico City Olympics, in October; and the election of Richard Nixon, in November. So much happening in one year. So much to remember 40 years later.

Because 1968 was a year of protest, we naturally look for its legacies on the left. Yet, in considerable ways, the events of 1968 played themselves out on the right. Whether they recognize the fact or not, many of the most conservative figures in American public life today owe their success to the events of that year. Three in particular are worth emphasizing: Without the clashes at Grant Park, Karl Rove's political success could not have happened; without the counterculture, Pat Robertson would very likely be a more obscure preacher than he has become; and without the antiwar movement, the ability of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney to have led the country to war in Iraq is difficult to imagine.

Grant Park is that public space in the Chicago Loop where protesters gathered to denounce the inevitable selection of Hubert Humphrey as the Democratic nominee for president. Humphrey, the vice president, had not entered a single primary in 1968. But after Robert Kennedy's assassination, just after he won the primary in California, state party organizations swung delegates away from antiwar Sen. Eugene McCarthy. Humphrey himself had once been something of a maverick, but his willingness to defend the Vietnam War had proved his reliability to such politicos as Chicago's mayor, Richard J. Daley. The party wanted a candidate who respected authority, not an insurgent bent on challenging it.

Humphrey went on to lose to Nixon in the general election. Even though he came closer than many Democrats unhappy with his nomination thought he would, the party, in the wake of his defeat, decided to revise its rules for nominating candidates for the presidency. First Sen. George McGovern and then Rep. Donald Fraser chaired a commission that made back-room choices more difficult, and, perhaps not surprisingly, the party turned to McGovern as its candidate in 1972. From that campaign until the present one, in which Sens. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton subjected themselves to the will of the voters in 50-plus primaries and caucuses, the voice of the people has counted for more in the party than has the choice of the bosses — even if, because the 2008 race was so tight, the final choice lay with unelected superdelegates. The events of 1968 opened up institutions of all sorts that had once been more exclusive, including colleges and country clubs. It cannot be surprising that the Democratic Party was among them.

Less noticed at the time, the Republican Party, too, opened itself up to its grass roots. The Republicans had fewer noted political bosses in the style of Daley, but they did have an East Coast establishment. Throughout the first half of the 20th century, those patrician WASPs dominated their party's presidential choices. But matters became more complicated as the century wore on. As early as 1952, Ohio Sen. Robert A. Taft ("Mr. Republican," as he was frequently called), although favored by some of the party leaders, tried to tap emerging conservative sentiment to help defeat the far-more-establishment candidate Dwight D. Eisenhower, as nonpartisan and politically centrist a Republican as one could find. Eisenhower's victory over the conservative insurgents suggested that the Republican establishment still controlled the party.

But the conservative mavericks were not to be denied, and the next few years gave them the chance they needed. In 1964 conservatives engineered the nomination of Sen. Barry Goldwater, but that was an election they had little chance of winning against an incumbent, Lyndon B. Johnson, who had become president when John F. Kennedy was assassinated. Far more important was the fact that in 1968, Nixon was able to put down a challenge from the über-establishment candidate Nelson A. Rockefeller, governor of New York. Nixon's nomination could not have happened without support from the South and West, areas that shared little of the pragmatic managerialism characteristic of the East Coast Republican establishment. Because of the turmoil of 1968, then, insurgency came to the conservative party as well as the liberal one.

Nixon used the energy of conservatives within his party to win the nomination. Many years later, Karl Rove used that same energy to help George W. Bush win two presidential elections. Bush, the son of a patrician Republican, had rebelled against his father's mainline religion, just as so many leftists in his age cohort had rebelled against the political conservatism of their parents. Rove, too, had a rebellious streak: He understood that mobilizing the fervid purists of the Republican base would produce more votes for his client in a general election than would appealing to independents and centrists. The key is that 1968 was an ideological year, and Rove, a true child of that time, was inspired by the passions so visibly on display in that year. The fact that his ideology was right-wing rather than left-wing mattered less than his willingness to break with conventional wisdom. No wonder Bush turned out to be more of a radical president than a conservative one. The process of selecting him — from the mobilization of the ideological base at the beginning of his campaign, to the threats of violent protest during the Florida recount — was radical as well.

In a similar way, the counterculture led to Pat Robertson. One group hanging out on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley, Calif., was composed of the so-called Jesus freaks. Fully conversant with the spiritual longings of the era, those long-haired seekers were turning not to Eastern religion, but to a born-again relationship with Jesus. Hippies in appearance, they were evangelicals by conviction.

Ultimately the Jesus freaks would inspire neo-Pentecostalism, a spirit-based, sometimes speaking-in-tongues form of religious expression represented by such groups as the Vineyard movement and Calvary Chapel. As the University of Southern California's Donald E. Miller observes in Reinventing American Protestantism (University of California Press, 1997), those religious enthusiasts brought a tone to American Protestantism quite distinct from that of most Episcopalians and Methodists, who, for all their political liberalism, were staid and traditional in their worship practices. Indeed, the Jesus freaks were to religion what the Goldwaterites were to politics: a rebellion from the right bent on toppling an establishment viewed as out of touch.

Although theologically conservative, neo-Pentecostalism was culturally radical, rejecting hierarchy, clerical authority, liturgical predictability, and other features of religious life associated with established churches. The historian Grant Wacker, of Duke University, calls Pentecostals "mavericks at heart." One of Pentecostalism's founders was a woman, the Canadian-born Aimee Semple McPherson. Some other early leaders were African-American. Gaining wider international attention in Los Angeles in the first decade of the 20th century, Pentecostalism fit the spirit of rebellious unrest in the 1960s.

Robertson, unlike Jerry Falwell, with whom he is frequently lumped, is a Pentecostal. (The late Falwell was a Baptist.) His brand of religious fervor, frequently called "charismatic," has more in common with the irrationalism and spiritualism of the 1960s than with what postmodern philosophers today denounce as logocentrism. Robertson's religious revivalism rejects reason in favor of the emotions and calls upon its practitioners to experience ecstasy and wholeness. Neither Robertson nor his followers view themselves as countercultural. They stand in opposition to abortion, gay rights, and other cultural practices emphasizing personal freedom; for Pentecostals such as Robertson, the way to personal fulfillment is through faith, not drugs or sex. But they do draw from the same well that nourished the desire to speak to the needs of the self. Without the spirit of individualism emerging from 1968, they might not have succeeded.

I am not the only one to see that connection. Rod Dreher, who is a columnist for The Dallas Morning News and Beliefnet.com and a frequent contributor to National Review, has written a book called Crunchy Cons (Crown, 2006), and the subtitle speaks for itself: How Birkenstocked Burkeans, gun-loving organic gardeners, Evangelical free-range farmers, hip homeschooling mamas, right-wing nature lovers, and their diverse tribe of countercultural conservatives plan to save America (or at least the Republican Party). For Dreher conservatism is not some stuffy respect for authority and tradition so much as it is a Rousseauian worship of the organic and the natural.

One of the groups mentioned by Dreher in his subtitle illustrates the point. Home schooling began with leftist hippie parents who, upon reading such classics as Rousseau's Émile, began to distrust public education because it was presumed to stifle the creative development of their children. Home schooling is now wildly popular among fundamentalist parents who teach religion to their children at home before sending them off to attend Patrick Henry College, in Purcellville, Va., one of Karl Rove's recruiting grounds for White House interns. Home schooling is the most direct link between the 1960s counterculture and today's religious right. For conservative Christians, educating children at home is more about obedience and discipline than cultivating free spirits. But the distrust of institutions upon which home schooling is based reflects the general distrust of all forms of educational institutions associated with more raucous times.

Finally, there is a relationship between the Vietnam protesters, whose views did so much to shape the politics of the 1960s, and the decidedly militaristic foreign policies favored by Bush and Cheney 40 years later. Those who hated and protested the war in Vietnam focused on the draft. They called it involuntary slavery. Some tried to stop troop trains filled with draftees. Others went to Canada or found alternatives to service. The idea was a simple one: Wars cannot be fought without troops. Troops cannot exist without a draft. Stop one, and you can stop the other.

The problem, however, is that it is possible to fight a war without the draft, and Bush and Cheney have shown how it can be done. Historians will debate for years how the war in Iraq came about. The neoconservatives will come in for their (rightful, I believe) share of the blame. The incompetence of Donald Rumsfeld will be history's judgment. But to all the reasons has to be added the fact that, had there been a draft, there would also have been protests. One of the great accomplishments of the antiwar movement in the 1960s was to help abolish the draft. But America got a mercenary army instead — one that, to fill its ranks, has to increasingly turn to people with little education and even, at times, to those with criminal records. That may not be the best way to raise an army, but if there is no draft, it may be the only way. That was the best of bargains.

If it sounds odd to view right-wing Republicans as the heirs of the antidraft sentiments of the 1960s, it is even more unusual to note that liberals and Democrats now have more in common with the patriotic sentiments of those who defended the war in Vietnam than they did 40 years ago. That is not only because John Kerry, the former presidential candidate of the Democratic Party, actually served in Vietnam. It is also because some African-American liberal Democrats are calling for a return to a draft. Who ever would have thought that supporting the draft would become the progressive option?

There is one other link worth mentioning here. More than a handful of intellectuals from 1968 wound up supporting the war in Iraq. In the United States, intellectuals like Paul Berman made the case that liberal humanists had an obligation to remove the dictator Saddam Hussein from power. Berman was joined by a significant number of European intellectuals who had been Maoists in the 1960s but have become strong advocates of foreign intervention in more recent times. Such thinkers are not, I hasten to add, in the same camp as 1960s radicals like FrontPage Magazine's David Horowitz, who has shifted far to the right in his political views. These are thinkers who continue to believe that much good emerged from the 1960s, especially a desire to bring justice to the world through intense convictions. They just happen to think that supporting an interventionist foreign policy is the best way to do so.

The radicals of the 1960s wanted a democratic society that would not be run by a self-chosen establishment. Given how much that sentiment has led to the success of so many conservative insurgencies, perhaps having an establishment was not such a bad thing after all. As I look at the anarchy prevalent in the world, including to some degree in my own country, I wonder where the establishment is when we need it. If we only had "wise men" — elder statesmen like those who told Lyndon Johnson that the war in Vietnam had to end — we might not be prolonging the agony in Iraq. Such wise men and women, in the form of the Iraq Study Group, formed in 2006, tried their best. But Bush, a man whose irresponsibility makes the flamboyant leaders of the New Left seem mature by comparison, would not listen. He was a rebel at heart, rebelling in part against the establishment background of his own father. Experience and wisdom meant little to him.

Liberals might also have been better off if an establishment had been better able to impose its will on the Democratic Party in 2008. It is difficult at this point to know whether the prolonged primary campaign between Senators Obama and Clinton will help or hurt Obama's chances in the fall. But had there been more political bosses, or had the superdelegates been more willing to decide the contest earlier, the two candidates would have spent less time attacking each other. I think, on balance, that Obama will be served by the intense competition of 2008. But it is a close call, and bitterness about what was by all means a very democratic way of choosing the nominee may still wind up sending yet another conservative Republican to the White House.

There is little doubt in my mind that the gains in personal freedom and gender and racial equality that we associate with the 1960s are vital; indeed, without them, we would never have had the campaign between an African-American and a woman in the first place. The benefits of the 1960s far outweigh the costs, and if we could relive history, we should never jettison what happened in those years. But it is also wise to be cautious about what you wish for. The radical movements of the 1960s attacked authority in all its forms. Forty years later, as a result, we are a more liberal country culturally, if a more conservative country politically. Legacies can be complicated things. The ones that follow from 1968 certainly are.

Alan Wolfe is director of the Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life and a professor of political science at Boston College.