ABE GREENWALD: A Counterculture Without a Culture.

The left-wing counterculture of the 1960s was violent and reckless, and we’re still trying to contain its residual damage. There was no reason to believe that a right-wing version would be any more restrained. The inexorable aim of a counterculture is provocation, which is also a common hallmark of young minds and anyone who loses himself in a collective frenzy.

Nonetheless, many things pointed in this direction. The left had taken over as the country’s insufferable scolds and prudes. It was the right (including many youths) that took the lead in challenging establishment narratives around Covid. High-school-age kids were not only locked down and isolated for no reason. They were harangued by the woke establishment for being racist and privileged. And the boys were lectured on the toxicity of their sex. At the same time, young right-wing influencers were growing their audiences, and there was a newly defined class of young men, the involuntarily celibate (incels), to be hoovered up.

These incel gamers moldering away in their parents’ basements “turned on” their screens and   “dropped out” of society every bit as much as the acid-eating hippies had a half-century earlier. And they “tuned in” to an endless array of angry, populist right-wing streamers from their own generation.

As long as America remains a free country, its youth will look to transgress. And all told, it was now the right that offered the most welcoming avenue for transgression. Right-wing influencers used and promoted language proscribed by the left. The right counselled against trusting adults, revered institutions, and their account of how the world works.

Earlier: The Making of the Counter Culture. 

Beginning, of course, with the moon landing, expect retrospectives devoted to the Manson murders, Woodstock, the Chicago 7 trial, and even Altamont, representing both the apogee and perigee of Aquarian salad days. But the 50-year milestone with arguably the most enduring impact is likely to pass unacknowledged: publication that fall of Theodore Roszak’s landmark book The Making of a Counter Culture.

In an accident of timing that is every author’s dream, Doubleday released it soon after that standard bearer of mainstream culture, the New York Times, said that Woodstock “had little more sanity than the impulses that drove the lemmings to march to their deaths in the sea.” And also asked, “What kind of culture is it that can produce so colossal a mess?”

Roszak fortuitously had the answer: a counter culture. His book received serious attention from reviewers, was a topic for talk-show hosts such as Dick Cavett, found itself on university syllabi, and became a National Book Award finalist. It was a publishing sensation.

And yet, I suspect you’ve never read it. And almost certainly never even heard of it.

Why? There’s a good reason. Uniquely in history, it wasn’t the book’s content that left a permanent footprint. It was the title. Seriously. Those two words, “counter culture,” which we now write as counterculture, were Roszak’s original coinage. And yet their instantly idiomatic quality made it seem as though they’d always existed side by side. Plus, they sounded sublime in a way that “hippies” no longer did.

Which explains why, in an era when going viral meant you were contagious, the self-flattering neologism was adopted overnight by millions of boomers, from Berkeley to Cambridge and all points north and south, to describe their brave stand against the “Establishment.”

There is a poetic irony to the boomers. They were the first generation to watch itself grow up on TV. They were the primary target audience of most popular entertainments during their youth. In adulthood, they quickly seized control of mass media, journalism, Hollywood, and academia. And yet, to this day, boomers harbor a vestigial sense of belonging to a “counterculture” rather than being the dominant culture.

And have been for almost a century now, if one combines FDR’s era “old left” along with the “new left” that usurped it in the 1960s, and then made the next decade such a frenzy:

Though he writes from the perspective of a conservative (actually, given [David] Frum’s Canadian origins, one might more precisely call him a Tory, albeit a very “dry” one) and his work is an analysis of a decade in which liberalism ran rampant, Frum does not revisit the 1970s to bury them. Far from it. He makes the bold claim that the painful lessons America learned in the 1970s helped teach us how to find renewed purpose and vigor in the two decades that followed:

America won the cold war, pioneered the computer revolution, squelched inflation, and suppressed crime, yes, but only because it first underwent a decade and a half of suffering and humiliation. Those years were daunting and frightening because habits and institutions that had worked brilliantly for half a century suddenly sputtered. . . . Then [Americans] recouped. They rethought. They reinvented. They rediscovered in their own past the governing principles of their future. Out of the failure and trauma of the 1970s they emerged stronger, richer and—if it is not overdramatic to say so—greater than ever.

The most obvious change wrought by the 1970s was the libertinism that rose in conjunction with the liberation of sex from the shackles of law and tradition. After a precis of the court decisions that effectively ended two centuries of the legislation of sexual morality, Frum sums up: “Every era tacitly places one liberty ahead of all others; one that must always prevail when values conflict. For late 18th-century Americans, that liberty was freedom of religion. For late 19th-century Americans, it was the right to own and dispose of property. For late 20th-century Americans, it is sexual freedom.” One of the many unintended consequences was the devastation done to marriage: As the 1970s progressed, Frum writes, “a once-universal institution was dwindling into a middle-class idiosyncrasy, like bottled water or cotton shirts.”

And then #metoo and the left’s concurrent freakout of Brett Kavanaugh happened, transforming them into “The New Prudes.”