The Other Side of the Sixties: Young Americans for Freedom and the Rise of Conservative Politics. - book reviews

Reason, Feb, 1998 by John A. Andrew, III

It's a curious fact of contemporary politics that conservatives have emerged as keepers of the 1960s flame. Although the '60s - that great blob of a decade most expansively defined as beginning with Kennedy's inauguration and ending with Nixon hopping a helicopter to San Clemente - were arguably the high-watermark of liberalism, contemporary liberals seem content to skip over the period. The tendency is understandable: Though the decade started out well enough for them, it ended badly. The era's legacy of failed social programs, foreign-policy blunders, and righteous skepticism toward ruling authorities undermined enthusiasm for all sorts of centralized planning, thereby laying the groundwork for the end of the era of big government. As liberal historian David Burner wrote in the bitter but engaging Making Peace with the 60s, "An era promising in its beginnings and heroic in its ambitions ended by programming liberalism into a long decline." (See "Peace Corpse," May 1997.)

If liberals are wont to ignore the decade (adding an ironic twist to the old joke that if you can remember the '60s, you weren't there), conservatives hope to keep the memories burning brightly - though controllably - in the nation's collective memory. Conservatives gain a sense of self, mission, and momentum by defining themselves against the '60s: As they see it, they share none of the blame but deserve all the credit for delivering us all from a Day-Glo social and political Apocalypse Then. Hence, Newt Gingrich's condemnations of leftoid "McGovernik[s]" and his contention that the country "went off on the wrong track" starting "with the Great Society and the counterculture"; House Majority Leader Dick Armey's belief that "all the problems began in the Sixties"; conservative historian Harvey C. Mansfield's gloss that the "late sixties were a comprehensive disaster for America"; and a recent issue of The American Enterprise dedicated to exploring the '60s as "days of confusion" and a "national nervous breakdown." Unsurprisingly, much of the conservatives' wrath is directed at the baby-boomer counterculture, that "age cohort" which turned "to dreams of revolution and the destruction of institutions," to quote from Slouching Toward Gomorrah, Robert Bork's etiology of"American decline" that opens with two chapters devoted to '60s-era "revolutionary nihilism."

In this context, John A. Andrew III's The Other Side of the Sixties: Young Americans for Freedom and the Rise of Conservative Politics is a particularly interesting act of historical recovery. Not only does Andrew, a liberal historian at Franklin & Marshall College, document just what young conservatives were up to in the '60s (activity largely ignored by previous historians), his identification of YAF as one of the era's three major student groups (along with Students for a Democratic Society and the Student Non-Violence Coordinating Committee) suggests a reading of the decade that provocatively complicates conservative castigations of student "radicals." Like SDS and SNCC, writes Andrew, YAF "challenged the status quo...and...believed that the path of change lay through grass-roots organization and activism....All three criticized ruling elites, and combined ideology with activism, principles with politics." Also like SDS and SNCC - albeit from a right-wing perspective - YAF "emerged to offer an ideological and structural critique of the reigning liberalism. They sought to reject, not reform, the consensus liberalism."

Contrary to conservative bromides, then, it was not only left-wingers who dreamed of revolution during the '60s. Indeed, as time passes, it is becoming more apparent that the '60s were a radical decade, irrespective of ideological orientation. At various moments, fringe groups such as the John Birch Society and the Black Panthers enjoyed considerable influence within mainstream politics, which itself tended to extremes. Even as liberals shifted to the left, embracing bold plans to remake American society from top to bottom, conservatives - and especially YAF - rallied around Barry Goldwater, who cast his contempt for liberalism and Rockefeller Republicanism alike in characteristically extreme terms. "Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice!" Goldwater famously thundered in his speech accepting the 1964 Republican presidential nomination. "Moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue!" (Andrew recounts an early '60s New Yorker cartoon with the punchline, "And then we have another son - a radical - who's joined Barry Goldwater's conservatives.") And as Tom Hayden, of all people, wrote in 1961, "What is new about the new conservatives is their militant mood, their appearance on picket lines." In summarily dismissing the '60s, contemporary conservatives make two mistakes: They ignore their own past and forget where their oxymoronic rhetoric of a conservative "revolution" comes from.

The brainchild of William F. Buckley Jr. and a few other prominent conservatives (including then - National Review Publisher William Rusher, conservative journalist M. Stanton Evans, and Republican fund-raiser Marvin Leibman), YAF was designed to combat the bland, centrist "modern Republicanism" that Dwight Eisenhower, Nelson Rockefeller, and even Richard Nixon had brought to the GOP. Specifically, Andrew writes, it "sought to place conservatives in control of the Republican Party, and to inject conservative politics into the mainstream of American political life." The group officially came into existence in late 1960, after Buckley and his colleagues invited more than 100 young people they considered "outstanding youth leaders" and "active and influential conservatives" to a confab at Buckley's estate in Sharon, Connecticut (an odd setting, perhaps, to protest Rockefeller Republicanism).