The year 1968 is pregnant with genuinely political meaning for both the French and the Czechs. But for the Americans, 1968 seems, in retrospect, much more simply strange and accidental. The year was full of televised violence—the Tet Offensive in Vietnam, the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert Kennedy, riots in the cities and outside the Democratic National Convention—that seemed to discredit the various causes of the 1960s: the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War and the antiwar movement, and the movement of the young called the New Left. The year culminated with the election of a president, Richard Nixon, who in effect promised to bring all the violence, and all the causes that inspired it, to an end. And Nixon did so, mainly by ending the military draft. After 1968, the “revolution” in America was safely contained to college campuses.

In Europe, they speak not of “the Sixties” but of “Sixty-Eight,” the year of the May events in Paris. In the American context, however, looking at 1968 in isolation makes the American 1960s seem nothing but a pageant of absurdity and destruction. But that is hardly a fair perspective. I have no choice, then, but to turn from an analysis of the year to an analysis of the decade to give a fair and balanced account of what was going on in our country forty years ago. Whit Stillman’s insightful character Jimmy Steinway (in his novel, The Last Days of Disco, With Cocktails at Petrossian Afterwards [2000])reminds us that reviewing human life in terms of decades results in “trashing” certain decades “for no very good reason.” Those who wax nostalgic about the 1960s almost always trash the 1950s and the 1980s. But there is, Jimmy notices, “actually a bit of decade scarcity in life, and so it’s better to find something good in each of the few decades that make up your life.” The 1980s, for example, might have been somewhat greedy, but Jimmy prefers to remember them “as years of hard work and maximum productivity.” From the 1980s perspective, the 1960s were actually greedier, because young people wanted to live well without working hard.

Before we praise or blame the 1960s too much, we have to remember that its liberationist excesses were an understandable episode of democracy in America. The decade actually seemed to prove Marx wrong; we capitalists were not, after all, sowing the seeds of our own destruction. The 1960s may, instead, have sowed the seeds of the destruction of communist totalitarianism. The Prague Spring, the attempt to construct “socialism with a human face”—which took place in 1968, and was inspired in part by the American 1960s—was violently crushed by a Soviet invasion. That was the end of the illusion that socialism within the Soviet empire could ever be reformed in accord with the spirit of liberty. Nothing that happened in America, or even France, came close to matching the genuinely revolutionary moment of 1968, which belongs to the Czechs.

If memory serves, the only genuinely political issue that inspired passion in the early 1960s was civil rights—meaning desegregation. The only political event I remember attending in that time (with my parents) was a very classy picnic at the Alexandria, Virginia, estate of a devout Episcopalian gentleman-lawyer from an old Southern family. That man, Armistead Boothe, was widely admired as the heroic leader of those who opposed “massive resistance” to desegregation in the Virginia legislature. He was running for lieutenant governor and was narrowly defeated by the candidate of the “Byrd Machine.” To us, the Byrd Machine seemed to be a corrupt alliance of business interests and segregationist fanatics. Opposition to it seemed noble, even aristocratic, a cause worthy of a dignified Christian gentleman. If Virginia didn’t slowly desegregate on its own, Boothe warned, the national government would eventually make them do it in a ham-fisted way. The 1960s’ “second Reconstruction” of the South was, in fact, caused by a Southern failure of self-government. It could have been avoided had astute gentleman like Boothe prevailed over demagogic populists like George Wallace.

Maybe the worst feature of the decade as a whole was the pointless violence. One piece of evidence for the basic health of American society, even during the 1960s, is that violence always aroused the politically effective anger of a silent majority. That was true of what happened on our campuses, in our cities, and at the 1968 Democratic National Convention. But it was first true about the segregationist violence in the South, especially in 1963. Until that year, the nonviolent “direct action” of the civil rights movement had not had much effect. But by mid-1964, tutored by the television nightly news, Americans were convinced that something had to be done to end Southern lawlessness. That was the year that Congress finally passed civil rights legislation with real teeth, and the Democratic president who pushed the Civil Rights Act through won a huge victory over the Republican candidate who opposed it. One original intention of our Constitution and Declaration was fully achieved politically in our country in 1964 and 1965. All Americans were finally recognized as free, equal, dignified, and politically participating citizens.

The second Reconstruction was not only good for justice in the South; it was also good for prosperity. Air-conditioning and integration combined to produce the Sunbelt—the most “livable,” entrepreneurial, Christian, and Republican part of our country. The 1960s’ transformation of the South was, like almost all social change, both good and bad. What was left of agrarianism and localism and the distinctively Southern or aristocratic criticism of the excesses of American commercialism atrophied, and men like Boothe are now virtually extinct. Justice and prosperity took priority over personal love, communal tradition, and enduring personal significance. There are certainly good reasons to be repulsed by the wasteland of McMansions, megachurches, and big box stores that flourishes better in Southern suburbs than anywhere else. Megachurches, however, are really churches, and they are both a product of and a rebellion against the 1960s.

The civil rights movement set the precedent for subsequent forms of 1960s liberation. It seemed that people needed to be liberated from all repressive classes and categories. But both sexual liberation and women’s liberation proved more controversial and less effective than desegregation. Women, I hope, cannot help but notice that the movement for sexual liberation came first, and it was mostly led by men, allegedly on behalf of love. The Summer of Love (1967) was surely distinguished by a lot of casual sex, with bourgeois hang-ups like jealousy put on hold. But the cost of disconnecting sex from love was the trivializing of both. “All you need is love” might even be true, but love isn’t much if it has nothing to do with what free beings do with their bodies.