The Sixties Are Finally Over

Back in March, in a post entitled "The Ghosts That Haunt Us (Richard Nixon Lives)", we mused about the ebb and flow of revolutionary and counter-revolutionary movements, specifically in the context of the French Revolution and the tumultuous American 1960s. At the time, we talked about the current Bush II government having its roots in the Nixon administration, and drew some analogies to the French Revolution, in the wake of Barack Obama's presidential victory last night, we'd like to extend that idea, suggesting that now, finally, the United States can begin to move past the divisions that erupted during the 1960s. No longer will they haunt every political argument. Sure, the short-term  will probably see a lot more talk about the 1960s, but a post-Obama U.S. will be one that faces new problems, instead of rehashing old ones. A post-Obama U.S. will finally admit, the Sixties are over.

Back in March we talked briefly about the reign of Louis Phillipe, the last King of France, and so-called Citizen King after his liberal tendencies. Louis Phillipe came of age during the French Revolution, that starting date of which most historians point to 1789. That his coronation came in 1830 does not lessen the claim that Louis Phillipe was a child of the Revolution. Despite ten years of Revolutionary government, followed by reign of Napoleon, who pronounced the Revolution officially over, the return of the Bourbon monarchy after a twenty-five year absence saw an effort to unwind many of the changes made during the Revolution. After the death of Louis XVIII in 1824, matters only escalated under Charles X, creating support for the liberal backlash that enabled Louis Phillipe to assume the thrown in 1830.

Part of what happened in the years after Napoleon was the aging of the Revolutionary generation. The men of 1789, who might have been in their thirties and forties at the time, were by 1815 in their sixties and seventies, and by 1830, in all likelihood, dead. The generation that had to live during the transition from Napoleon to the Bourbons did much to give rough shape to what the legacy of the Revolution would be, and it was their children that grew up to support Louis Philipe in 1830.

We have often referred to the 1960s as a failed revolution, but this assumes that all revolutions have as their aim a political regime change. As a social revolution, the 1960s have left the United States a vastly different place than where it was in 1959. Watch AMC's Mad Men and you get to see some of those differences, but there are all sorts of formalities, traditions, and rituals that did not survive the 1960s. The back and forth between Republican and Democratic presidents can be seen as part of an on-going debate over which aspects of the 1960s should be allowed to endure, which carried forward, and which overturned. 

Just as Louis-Phillipe absorbed the lessons of the Revolution in his youth and they provided a context for society under his reign, Obama is literally a child of the sixties (born 1961), and they provide part of the framework for his vision of the United States in a way that George W. Bush (born 1946), Hillary Clinton (born 1947), and John McCain (born 1936) cannot match. For Obama, the sixties were a reality to be lived, not argued over. 

The sixties are over. The future is now.