Were the 1960s the 1970s, actually?

Why history is not repeating today

Ed West writes,

Well into the 1960s, even most young Americans were morally aligned with the old order. In a 1967 poll, 63 per cent agreed that there should be no sex before marriage, the same as the population at large. The vast majority of young people in 1969 had never smoked marijuana, and three-quarters supported the war in Vietnam. Over half of young Americans had voted for Richard Nixon or the pro-segregation George Wallace, and that number was actually higher for those who had attended college. If you remember the Sixties, then you were part of a relatively small minority.

I don’t have data, but my memory is that by about 1974 or so, the cultural shift had taken place in the broader population. Campus values had become majority values.

People accepted that Vietnam was, if not a lost cause, a cause not worth the cost. For President Nixon, ending the draft was way more popular than the war.

By the mid-1970s, sex before marriage was viewed as sensible, and women should not be punished for it. I claim that this is what paved the way for the Supreme Court to legalize abortion, because people no longer had the sense that a woman should be forced to have a baby because she had “strayed.”

The best way to see when hippie culture became mass culture is to look at fashions. As of the late 1960s, working-class men still had short haircuts, to show their rejection of the hippies. As of the early 1970s, their hair was as long as any hippie’s. And everyone was wearing bell-bottom blue jeans.

The sexual revolution found many willing adopters. For men, liberating women to have casual sex was a gift. Readers of Albion’s Seed will recall that the Appalachian borderers (Jacksonian America) were never Puritanical about sex in the first place.

The mainstream media, for which there was no alternative at that time, highlighted and celebrated hippie culture. This was bound to have an effect on popular values.

Beyond that, I think that the biggest factor in cultural change was the demographic weight of the Baby Boom. The generations that were most committed to older cultural norms could not stand up to the new value system, especially as Boomers climbed the status ladders in business, media, and politics.

I don’t think we will see history repeat itself today. I think that the values that emerged on campus in the past decade will mostly stay on campus, and perhaps even recede there. We will not see the whole country share their pronouns in the next decade the way that the whole country adopted blue jeans and long hair in the 1970s. Sex-change surgeries do not have the same potential for mass appeal as permissiveness regarding premarital sex. The racism that was implicit in Woke ideology could not be absorbed by America’s cultural digestive system.

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