In addition to its general coarsening effect on cultural life, this triumph of vulgarity has helped to pave the way for the success of the twin banes of political correctness and radical multiculturalism. The abandonment of intrinsic standards of achievement creates (in Hermann Broch’s phrase) a “value vacuum” in which everything is sucked through the sieve of politics and the ideology of victim-hood. ¹ Thus it is that vanguard opinion champions the idea of “art” as a realm of morally unassailable privilege even as it undermines the realities that make artistic achievement possible: technique, a commitment to beauty, a grounding in tradition. Art retains its status as a source of spiritual uplift, however dubious, yet it also functions as an exercise of politics by other means. Hence Robert Mapplethorpe’s brutal and disgusting photographs of the sado-masochistic sexual underground are beyond criticism because they are “art,” while at the same time they are held up as important “challenges” to the repressive, bourgeois regime of “mandatory heterosexuality” and the like.

From confrontation to insinuation

Today’s college students were barely ten years old when the Berlin Wall was dismantled; they had not yet been born when Saigon fell. To the present generation, the Sixties and all it represented seem like nostalgic snapshots from a bygone era, an era that is presented as The Last Good Time. Yet despite the placidity of our own prosperous times, the radical, emancipationist assaults of the Sixties are not confined to the past. Indeed, the effects of those assaults are in evidence throughout the culture. If, as Francis Fukuyama and others argue, some social indicators—falling crime rates and welfare rolls, arrested divorce rates—are encouraging, there is much else about contemporary life that must continue to alarm us.

Robert Bork’s description of our situation as a “slouching towards Gomorrah” is melodramatic but not, I think, inaccurate. “The Sixties,” Judge Bork wrote,

may be seen in the universities as a mini-French Revolution that seemed to fail but did not. The radicals were not defeated by a conservative or traditionally liberal opposition but by their own graduation from the universities. And theirs was merely a temporary defeat. They and their ideology are all around us now.

That ideology has insinuated itself, disastrously, into the curricula of our schools and colleges; it has significantly altered the texture of sexual relations and family life; it has played havoc with the authority of churches and other repositories of moral wisdom; it has undermined the claims of civic virtue and our national self-understanding; it has degraded the media, the entertainment industry, and popular culture; it has helped to subvert museums and other institutions entrusted with preserving and transmitting high culture. It has even, most poignantly, addled our hearts and innermost assumptions about what counts as the good life: it has perverted our dreams as much as it has prevented us from attaining them.

In the Sixties and Seventies, after fantasies of overt political revolution faded, many student radicals urged their followers to undertake the “long march through the institutions.” The phrase, popularized by the German New Leftist Rudi Dutschke, is often attributed to the Italian Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci—an unimpeachable authority for countercultural standard-bearers. But of course the phrase also carries the aura of an even higher authority: that of Mao Tse-tung and his long march and cultural revolution.

In the context of Western societies, “the long march through the institutions” signified—in the words of Herbert Marcuse—“working against the established institutions while working in them.” It was primarily by this means—by insinuation and infiltration rather than confrontation—that the countercultural dreams of radicals like Marcuse have triumphed. Bellbottoms, long hair, and incense were dispensable props; crucial was the hedonistic antinomianism they symbolized. In this sense, countercultural radicalism has come more and more to define the dominant culture even as the memory of student strikes and demonstrations fades under the distorting glaze of nostalgia. For examples, you need look no further than the curriculum of your local school or college, at what is on offer at the nearest museum or so-called “public” radio station: indeed, you need look no further than your workplace, your church (if you still go to church), or your family to see evidence of the damage wrought by the long march of the counterculture. The radical ethos of the Sixties can be felt throughout public and private life, from the most ordinary domestic situations all the way up to the Presidency of the United States. (The Clinton presidency, a monument to sordidness, has also been a drama depicting how one representative figure succeeded in his long march through the institutions.) Writing recently about “the nasty things that were done in the late Sixties and transmitted to us,” the political philosopher Harvey Mansfield noted that

today they are neither so outrageous nor so violent as at first. The poison has worked its way into our souls, the effects becoming less visible to us as they become more ordinary. Even those who reject the Sixties unconsciously concede more than they know to the vicious principle of liberation that once was shouted into the street microphone.

The Long March is in part a reckoning of those concessions. It is also an effort to show why Mansfield was right to speak of the “vicious” principle of liberation. The principle of liberation is vicious when it is a blind for servitude. The grisly political history of this century has reminded us of the extent to which the totalitarian impulse appeals to liberation in its effort to expunge genuine liberty. Again and again we have seen the promise of liberation dissolve into outright tyranny. The totalitarian impulse occupies a prominent place in most revolutionary movements, cultural as well as political. America’s war of independence from Britain, again, is unique, or near enough, in consistently eschewing the totalitarian option. From the very beginning, the Founding Fathers understood, as John Adams put it, that “neither morals, nor riches, nor discipline of armies, nor all these together will do without a constitution.” How different this was from the Marxist-inspired tyranny visited upon Russia in 1917 or the megalomaniacal Rousseauvian variety that tore France apart in 1789. Indeed, the political fantasies of Jean-Jacques Rousseau have a great deal to answer for. For two centuries, his sentimentalizing utopian rhetoric has provided despots of all description with a means of pursuing conformity while praising freedom.

It is a neat trick. Words like “freedom” and “virtue” were ever on Rousseau’s lips. But freedom for him was a chilly abstraction; it applied to mankind as an idea, not to individual men. “I think I know man,” Rousseau sadly observed near the end of his life, “but as for men, I know them not.” In the Confessions, he claimed to be “drunk on virtue.” And indeed, it turned out that “virtue” for Rousseau had nothing to do with acting or behaving in a certain way toward others. On the contrary, the criterion of virtue was his subjective feeling of goodness. For Rousseau, as for the countercultural radicals who followed him, “feeling good about yourself” was synonymous with moral rectitude. Actually behaving well was irrelevant if not, indeed, a sign of “inauthenticity” because it suggested a concern for conventional approval. Virtue in this Rousseauvian sense is scarcely distinguishable from moral intoxication.

The antinomian temptation

Translated into the political sphere, Rousseau’s ideas about freedom and virtue are a recipe for totalitarianism. “Those who dare to undertake the institution of a people,” Rousseau wrote in the Social Contract, “must feel themselves capable, as it were, of changing human nature, ... of altering the constitution of man for the purpose of strengthening it.” As the philosopher Roger Scruton observed in an essay on the French Revolution, “the revolutionary consciousness lives by abstract ideas, and regards people as the material upon which to conduct its intellectual experiments.” Man is “born free,” Rousseau famously wrote, but is “everywhere in chains.” Alas, most men did not, according to him, truly understand the nature or extent of their servitude. It was his job to enlighten them—to force them, as he put it in one chilling epithet, to be free. Such “freedom” is accomplished, Rousseau thought, by bringing individual wills into conformity with what he called the “general will”—surely one of the most tyrannical political principles ever enunciated. “If you would have the general will accomplished,” he wrote, “bring all the particular wills into conformity with it; in other words, as virtue is nothing more than this conformity of the particular wills, establish the reign of virtue.”

Establishing the reign of virtue is no easy task, as Rousseau’s avid disciple Maximilien Robespierre discovered to his chagrin. All those “particular wills”—i.e., individual men and women with their diverse aims and desires—are so recalcitrant and so ungrateful for one’s efforts to make them virtuous. Still, one does what one can to convince them to conform. And the guillotine, of course, is a great expedient. Robespierre was no political philosopher. But he understood the nature of Rousseau’s idea of virtue with startling clarity, as he showed when he spoke of “virtue and its emanation, terror.” It is a remark worthy of Lenin, and a grim foreshadowing of the Marxist-Leninist rhetoric that informed a great deal of Sixties radicalism.

I mention Rousseau here because, acknowledged or not, he is an important intellectual and moral grandfather of so much that happened in the cultural revolution of the 1960S. (Important “fathers” include Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud.) Rousseau’s narcissism and megalomania, his paranoia, his fantastic political ideas and sense of absolute entitlement, his sentimentalizing nature-worship, even his twisted, hypertrophied eroticism: all reappeared updated in the tumult of the 1960S. And so did the underlying totalitarian impulse that informs Rousseau’s notion of freedom.

In “Dreams of Plenitude, Nightmares of Scarcity” (1969), the sociologist Edward Shils summarized the chief components of the revolution he saw unfolding around him in the universities and elsewhere in American life. “The moral revolution,” Shils wrote,

consists in a demand for a total transformation—a transformation from a totality of undifferentiated evil to a totality of undifferentiated perfection. Evil consists in the deadening of sentiment through institutions and more particularly through the exercise of and subordination to authority. Perfection consists in the freedom of feeling and the fulfillment of desires.... A good community is like Rousseau’s; the common will harmonizes individual wills. ... The common will is not the resultant of the rationally arrived at assent of its members; it is not actually a shared decision making.... It is the transformation of sentiment and desire into reality in a community in which all realize their wills simultaneously. Anything less is repressive.

Two decades later, in “Totalitarians and Antinomians,” Shils elaborated on the theme of absolute fulfillment in his description of the “antinomian temptation.” At the center of that temptation was the fantasy of absolute freedom, unfettered by law, custom, or the promptings of morality.

The highest ideal of antinomianism is a life of complete self-determination, free of the burden of tradition and conventions, free of the constraints imposed by institutional rules and laws and of the stipulations of authority operating within the setting of institutions.

“Free,”in other words, from the very things that underwrite freedom, that give it content, that prevent it from collapsing into that merely rhetorical freedom that always turns out to be another name for servitude.

The glorification of such spurious freedom is closely connected with another misuse of language—one of the most destructive: the description of irresponsible political naïveté as a form of “idealism.” Nor is it only naïveté that gets the extenuating absolution of “idealism.” So do all manner of crimes, blunders, and instances of brutality: all can be morally sanitized by the simple expedient of being rebaptized as examples of (perhaps misguided) “idealism.” The one essential qualification is that the perpetrator be identified with the political Left. In her book On Revolution , Hannah Arendt—who was certainly no enemy of the Left herself—cannily observed that

one has often been struck by the peculiar selflessness of the revolutionists, which should not be confused with “idealism” or heroism. Virtue has indeed been equated with selflessness ever since Robespierre preached a virtue that was borrowed from Rousseau, and it is the equation which has put, as it were, its indelible stamp upon the revolutionary man and his innermost conviction that the value of a policy may be gauged by the extent to which it will contradict all particular interests, and that the value of a man may be judged by the extent to which he acts against his own interest and against his own will.

In fact, the “peculiar selflessness” that Arendt describes often turns out to be little more than an abdication of individual responsibility abetted by utter self-absorption. It is a phenomenon that, among other things, helps to explain the queasy-making spectacle of left-wing Western intellectuals falling over themselves in a vain effort to excuse, mitigate, or sometimes simply deny the crimes of the Soviet Union and other murderous left-wing regimes throughout the Cold War and beyond. Perhaps we can admit that Stalin (or Mao or Pol Pot or Fidel or whoever) was repressive (or maybe that is just an ugly rumor propagated by the United States); perhaps he “went too far”; maybe some measures were “extreme”; this or that policy was “misjudged”; ... but omelettes require breaking a few eggs, ... and besides what glorious ideas are equality, community, the brotherhood of man... going beyond capitalistic greed, mere selfish individualism, repressive patriarchal society based on inequitable division of labor, etc., etc. The odor of piety that attends these rituals of exculpation is almost as disagreeable as the aura of grotesque unreality that emanates from them.

One sees the same thing in another key in the left-liberal response to America’s cultural revolution. Whatever criticisms might be made of the counterculture, they are quickly neutralized by invoking the totem of “idealism.” For example, one is regularly told that youth in the 1960s and 1970s, whatever its extravagances and sillinesses, had a “passionate belief” (the beliefs of radicals are never less than “passionate”) in a “better world,” in a “more humane society,” in “equality.” The guiding assumption is that “passion” redeems moral vacuity, rendering it noble or at least exempting it from censure. This assumption, which is part of the Romantic background of the counterculture, is profoundly mistaken and destructive.

As T. S. Eliot observed in 1934, the belief that there is “something admirable in violent emotion for its own sake, whatever the emotion or whatever the object,” is “a cardinal point of faith in a romantic age.” It is also, he noted, “a symptom of decadence.” For it is “by no means self-evident,” Eliot wrote,

that human beings are most real when they are most violently excited; violent physical passions do not in themselves differentiate men from each other, but rather tend to reduce them to the same state; and the passion has significance only in relation to the character and behavior of the man at other moments of his life and in other contexts. Furthermore, strong passion is only interesting or significant in strong men, those who abandon themselves without resistance to excitements which tend to deprive them of reason, become merely instruments of feeling and lose their humanity; and unless there is moral resistance and conflict there is no meaning.

“Passion,” like “idealism,” is a nostrum that the Left prescribes in order to relieve itself from the burdens of moral accountability.

Virtue gone mad

G. K. Chesterton once observed that in the modern world “the virtues have gone mad because they have been isolated from each other and are wandering alone. Thus some scientists care for truth; and their truth is pitiless. Thus some humanitarians only care for pity; and their pity... is often untruthful.” Something similar can be said about the virtues of freedom and idealism. Freedom is an important virtue. But it is not the only virtue. And apart from other virtues—apart from prudence, say, and duty and responsibility, all of which define and limit freedom—freedom becomes a parody of itself. It becomes, in a word, unfree. And so it is with idealism. Idealism remains a virtue only to the extent that the causes to which it devotes itself are worthy of the devotion they attract. The more abstract the cause, the more vacuous the idealism.

In a subtle essay called “Countercultures,”first published in 1994, the political commentator Irving Kristol noted that the counterculture of the 1960s was in part a reaction against a society that had become increasingly secular, routinized, and crassly materialistic. In this respect, too, the counterculture can be understood as part of our Romantic inheritance, a plea for freedom and transcendence in a society increasingly dominated by the secular forces of Enlightenment rationality. Indeed, revolts of this tenor have been a staple of Romanticism since the nineteenth century: Dostoevski’s “underground man” who seeks refuge from the imperatives of reason in willful arbitrariness, is only one example (a rather grim one) among countless others.

The danger, Kristol notes, is that the counterculture, in its attack on secular materialism, “will bring down—will discredit—human things that are of permanent importance. A spiritual rebellion against the constrictions of secular humanism could end up ... in a celebration of irrationalism and a derogation of reason itself.” At a time when the radical tenets of the counterculture have become so thoroughly established and institutionalized in cultural life—when they have, in fact, come more and more to define the tastes, habits, and attitudes of the dominant culture—unmasking illegitimate claims to “liberation” and bogus feats of idealism emerges as a prime critical task.

For over two hundred years, the Left has had an effective but unearned monopoly on the rhetoric of virtue. The Long March scrutinizes that unearned monopoly and attempts to expose the spuriousness of radical claims to liberation. As with most revolutions, the counterculture’s call for total freedom quickly turned into a demand for total control. The phenomenon of “political correctness,” with its speech codes and other efforts to enforce ideological conformity, was one predictable result of this transformation. What began at the University of California at Berkeley with the Free Speech Movement (called by some the “Filthy Speech Movement”) soon degenerated into an effort to abridge freedom by dictating what could and could not be said about any number of politically sensitive issues.

Books and other commentary about the 1960S and the “culture wars” have been appearing almost as fast as one can turn their pages. Many have been critical. Some are encomia. Thus we find the celebrated Marxist professor Fredric Jameson evoking the “widely shared feeling that in the 60S, for a time, everything was possible; that this period, in other words, was a moment of universal liberation, a global unbinding of energies.” If that feeling has faded, it was, Jameson said in good Marxist fashion, because of “the world wide economic crisis” which has led to “powerful restorations of the social order and a renewal of the repressive power of the various state apparatuses.” If you have the temerity to ask “What economic crisis? What repressive power?” then it just shows that you do not have sufficient contempt for reality to make a good academic Marxist.

To move a little closer to planet earth, The New York Times, in December 1994, published an editorial called “In Praise of the Counterculture.” Obviously chastened by the Republican sweep in the 1994 Congressional race—how long ago that seems now!—the Times set out to challenge the “pejorative” use of the term “counterculture.” It was Newt Gingrich, then the Republican Speaker of the House, who really set the Times off. In a phrase that was quickly taken up by the press, Gingrich described Bill and Hillary Clinton as “counterculture McGoverniks.” The editorialist for the Times seized on the term and castigated “puritans” like Gingrich who dared to criticize the “summery, hedonistic ethos” of the 1960S.

Connoisseurs of cant will find much to savor in the Times’s brief document, beginning with the common but misleading use of the epithet “puritan” as a synonym for “priggish.” As the novelist and essayist Marilynne Robinson astutely noted, “the way we think of the Puritans seems... a serviceable model for important aspects of the phenomenon we call Puritanism.” In other words, castigating someone as a “puritan” is a “great example of our collective eagerness to disparage without knowledge or information about the thing disparaged, when the reward is the pleasure of sharing an attitude one knows is socially approved.” Then, too, there was the proposition that the 1960s “produced a renewal of the Thoreauvian ideal of the clear, defiant voice of the dissenting citizen.” What the Times’s editorialist didn’t say, of course, is that “the clear, defiant voice of the dissenting citizen” is to be applauded only when it conforms to the left-liberal orthodoxy as understood by The New York Times. “Only a few periods in American history,” the Times informed its readers,

have seen such a rich fulfillment of the informing ideals of personal freedom and creativity that lie at the heart of the American intellectual tradition.... The 60’s spawned a new morality-based politics that emphasized the individual’s responsibility to speak out against injustice and corruption.

In the following chapters, I discuss some of the chief works, personalities, and events that constituted this so-called “rich fulfillment of the informing ideals of personal freedom and creativity,” these supposed triumphs of “individual responsibility” and a “new morality-based politics.” At the moment, it is enough to note the tenor of the Times’s encomium, its invocation of liberation, its assumption of a superior virtue that is barely distinguishable from a knowing if “summery” hedonism.

Critics of the counterculture have not been slow to attack the phenomena that the Times extolled. Many palpable hits have been scored, and by now there exists a rich literature enumerating the excesses and absurdities of 1960s radicalism. Useful though much of that literature is, however, there has been no attempt to trace the overall course of America’s cultural revolution. Because America’s cultural revolution cannot be understood apart from the seductive personalities that articulated its goals, The Long March contains, in addition to historical narrative and analysis, several biographical sketches of influential figures whose lives and work helped to advance the agenda of the counterculture. The questions with which Tocqueville began his book about the ancien régime and the French Revolution are also the questions that guide my inquiry: “What was its true significance, its real nature, and what were the permanent effects of this strange and terrifying revolution? What exactly did it destroy, and what did it create?”

The aim of The Long March is to show how many of the ideals of the counterculture have quietly triumphed in the afterlife of the Sixties and what that triumph has meant for America’s cultural and intellectual life.

Mainstreaming radicalism

One part of this story has already been told in my book Tenured Radicals: How Politics Has Corrupted Our Higher Education.² In The Long March I attempt a more encompassing and far-reaching inquiry. It is possible to trace the origins of certain aspects of the counterculture back to the late nineteenth century and figures like Marx and Nietzsche, or to locate its origins in the upheavals of the Jazz Age of the 1920s. But those periods, important though they have been historically, furnish antecedents rather than the real origins of the cultural revolution of the 1960s and 1970s. The distinctive energies and origins of that revolution, though doubtless fed by countless additional influences, lie in the 1950s and the emergence of the Beats. Accordingly, I begin my story then, focusing in particular on such representative figures as the poet Allen Ginsberg and the novelist William S. Burroughs. The Beats are crucial to an understanding of America’s cultural revolution not least because in their lives, their proclamations, and (for lack of a more accurate term) their “work” they anticipated so many of the pathologies of the Sixties and Seventies. Their programmatic anti-Americanism, their avid celebration of drug abuse, their squalid, promiscuous sex lives, their pseudospirituality, their attack on rationality and their degradation of intellectual standards, their aggressive narcissism and juvenile political posturing: in all this and more, the Beats were every bit as “advanced” as any Sixties radical.

If the Beats differed from their successors (or became their successors: those Beat figures who survived long enough—Ginsberg above all, but also Burroughs—may be said to have outlived their former selves to become prominent countercultural idols), it had to do less with their attitudes and behavior than with the attitudes and behavior of the culture at large. As the Sixties unfolded, attitudes that had characterized a tiny minority on the fringes of culture were more and more accepted into the mainstream. By the early 1970s, they had become the mainstream.

In this process of spiritual colonization, the Beats were aided by a number of intellectual fellow travelers, many of whom, though not Beats themselves, eagerly championed the Beat sensibility and, throughout the 1950s, provided the moral alibis with which the excesses of the Beats were explained and justified. In various ways, establishment writers like Norman O. Brown (Life Against Death), C. Wright Mills (White Collar, The Power Elite), John Kenneth Galbraith (The Affluent Society), Paul Goodman (Growing Up Absurd), Michael Harrington (The Other America), Herbert Marcuse (One-Dimensional Man, Eros and Civilization), and William Whyte, Jr. (The Organization Man) “softened up” the culture at large, preparing it to assimilate—in many respects, to emulate—the Beats, their attitudes toward life, art, and above all toward the United States.

Every revolution has its myths. One of the myths dearest to the counterculture is that America in the 1950s was a sterile, soulless society, obsessed with money, stunted emotionally, negligible culturally and intellectually, brutal and hamfisted in its politics and social policy. Never mind that, when it came to cultural and intellectual achievement, America in the 1950s looks like fifth-century Athens in comparison with what came afterward. The idea of America as a materialistic wasteland, barren of cultural achievement, was central to the cosmology of the Beats and, in differing ways, it was an image these writers and intellectuals strenuously reinforced. It will be instructive to sample some of these writings: Goodman’s lugubrious Growing Up Absurd, for example, whose image of America as an evil, soul-destroying “Organized System” had an immense influence when it was first published in 1960, and Brown’s Life Against Death (1959), whose toxic cocktail of Freud and Marx inebriated many influential figures and so helped pave the way for the legitimization of hedonism that swept through the country in the years ahead.

As the 1950s wore on, anti-Americanism became a necessary badge of authenticity for writers and intellectuals; more and more, the cultural establishment demanded the pose of anti-establishment animus. Among those railing against the evils of America—or “Amerika,” as it was often spelled in the 1960s—the novelist Norman Mailer occupies a special place. Today, Norman Mailer is regarded by many as a grotesque, almost comic figure, alternately repulsive and pathetic. There was a time, however, when Mailer was widely considered to be not only a serious novelist but also a deep thinker. I am assured by an older friend that in the mid-1960s the publication of Mailer’s novels was a celebrated event, awaited with the same sort of breathless anticipation that greeted the installments of Dickens’s novels a century before. My friend, like many intelligent people at the time, stood in line to acquire a copy of An American Dream when it was first published in 1965. Such behavior is not only an object lesson in the myopia of contemporary taste. Mailer was enormously popular because he, like other countercultural spokesmen, touched a nerve. The revolution of which he was a part offered—or seemed to offer-new freedoms and new insights. In their different ways, what Mailer and his countercultural confrères promised was that irresistible “life of complete self-determination, free of the burden of tradition and conventions” that Edward Shils spoke of above. What Shils called the “antinomian temptation” is a hardy perennial. It stands at the heart of the counterculture and helps to explain why it exercised such a mesmerizing influence and found such an eager audience.

Prominent in Mailer’s writings are a fascination with violence and an adolescent obsession with sex. Both feature centrally in his once-notorious essay “The White Negro,” first published in 1957. Fulminating in that essay against “the totalitarian tissues of American society,” Mailer praises the “hipster” as someone who, having “absorbed the existentialist synapses of the Negro,” accepts “the meaningless-ness of life” and deliberately encourages the “psychopath” in himself. Devoted to jazz, drugs, violence, and sex, the hipster would think nothing of “beat[ing] in the brains of a candy-store keeper.” As Mailer explains, “the psychopath murders—if he has the courage—out of the necessity to purge his violence,” a catharsis that for him is inextricably bound up with “apocalyptic” sex.

At bottom, the drama of the psychopath is that he seeks love. Not love as the search for a mate, but love as the search for an orgasm more apocalyptic than the one that preceded it. Orgasm is his therapy—he knows at the seed of his being that good orgasm opens his possibilities and bad orgasm imprisons him.

Looking back on it several years later, Mailer said that he considered “The White Negro” “one of the best things I have ever done.” It is certainly one of his most characteristic productions.

The career of Norman Mailer is one that figures prominently in The Long March; another is that of Susan Sontag. From the moment she burst upon the scene in the early 1960S with her essays “Against Interpretation” and “Notes on ‘Camp,’” “ Sontag has been a model of radical chic. Indeed, from her declaration that ”the white race is the cancer of human history” in the mid-Sixties to her travels to Bosnia to stage an all-female production of Waiting for Godot in the 1990s, Sontag has been a living compendium of radical clichés and stereotypes. In a report from Castro’s Cuba in 1969, for example, she moves from declaring that “America is a cancerous society” to observing that “rock, grass, better orgasms, freaky clothes, grooving on nature—really grooving on anything—unfits, maladapts a person for the American way of life” to assuring her readers that “no Cuban writer has been or is in jail, or is failing to get his work published.” Like Mailer, Sontag may be a preposterous figure at bottom. But, again like Mailer, what prevents her from being simply a source of unintended comedy is the extent to which her aestheticizing political radicalism not only was taken seriously but also came to represent a major current of elite cultural opinion.

No account of America’s cultural revolution would be complete without some discussion of the Vietnam War. More than any other event, it legitimated anti-Americanism and helped insinuate radical feeling into the mainstream of cultural life. The literature on American involvement in Vietnam and the counterculture is enormous, but what is relevant to The Long March is not so much the history of the war itself or even the protest against it as the way the war helped to “normalize” a spectrum of radical sentiments. The early history of The New York Review of Books (which began publishing in 1963) belongs here, in part for its reporting on the Vietnam War, in part for its increasingly enthusiastic embrace of other items on the menu of cultural radicalism. The disastrous effect of the war—or, more precisely, of the protests against the war—on our institutions of higher education also deserves attention. What I am interested in providing here is not a history of student activism against the war: that, too, is an oft-told story. My focus is rather on a handful of exemplary case studies that show how the capitulation of certain key university presidents helped to sanction (and therefore recommend to the society at large) a whole set of radical attitudes, not only about the war and America’s role in it, but also about art, education, and morality.

One prominent part of that radicalism concerns race. The destructive effects of America’s cultural revolution on race relations in this country cannot be overestimated. In the transformation of the civil-rights movement from a non-violent crusade for equal rights into an agitation for black power, we see not only a new segregationism but also a blueprint for the “victim politics” and demands for political correctness that have so disfigured American culture in the 1980s and 1990s. The unhappy metamorphosis of James Baldwin—from a novelist who insisted that he was not “merely a Negro writer” but an American one, to a figure who embraced the racialist politics of the black-power movement—epitomized this trend. I focus below on violent heirs to Baldwin like the Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver, whose assertion in his book Soul on Ice that rape is “an insurrectionary act” “trampling upon the white man’s law” won abject praise from any number of bien pensant white radicals.

It has been in the life of art and the life of the mind, however, that the counterculture has had its most devastating effects. To an extent that would have been difficult to imagine thirty years ago, art and education have become handmaidens of political radicalism. Standards in both have plummeted. The art world has more and more jettisoned any concern with beauty and has become a playground for bogus “transgressive” gestures. Colleges and universities, aping this exhausted radicalism, have given themselves up to an uneasy mixture of politically correct causes and the rebarbative rhetoric of deconstruction, poststructuralism, and “cultural studies.” The story of what has happened to our institutions of high culture since the Sixties is a story of almost uninterrupted degradation and pandering to forces inimical to culture. In the pages that follow, I outline this chronicle of decline, focusing particularly on the destruction of the humanities in higher education and the surrender of art to the perverting imperatives of politics.

Weapons of emotional anarchy

If the politicization of art and education represents one large part of the counterculture’s legacy, the coarsening of feeling and sensibility is another. No phenomenon has done more to advance this coarsening than rock music. It is impossible to exaggerate the importance of rock music to the agenda of the cultural revolution. It is also impossible to overstate its soul-deadening destructiveness. The most reviled part of Allan Bloom’s book The Closing of the American Mind was his chapter criticizing the effects of rock. But Bloom was right in insisting that rock music is a potent weapon in the arsenal of emotional anarchy. The triumph of rock was not only an aesthetic disaster of gigantic proportions: it was also a moral disaster whose effects are nearly impossible to calculate precisely because they are so pervasive.

Writing recently in The Wall Street Journal, Diana West warned about the “the leviathan of popular culture” that was assaulting even the last redoubts of childhood. West described the parties that her six-and-a-half-year-old twin daughters are routinely invited to, events at which they are invited to “jump, jam & party” to the pop music of “Britney Spears and the Backstreet Boys, idols du jour of the lipgloss and lunchbox set.” Although, as West notes, this brand of “hip hop” is “nothing like gangsta rap,” she is right to be worried:

A child weaned on what you might call “pop hop”—with its rudimentary percussive insistence and its keening self-pity —will not emerge unaffected. Such music is inimical to childhood innocence, and it eventually deafens the ear to better melodic forms, from Mozart to Lehár to Gershwin, in which meter is a vehicle for song, not an end in itself. It’s tough enough when your gawky adolescent has the bad taste to ask for the latest pop nightmare, but why introduce it, with the inevitable lexicon of coupling and separation, to an impressionable six-year-old?

Why indeed?

As West realizes, inseparable from the culture of rock music, even in its more sanitized versions, is the celebration of drugs and the demand for sexual liberation. The three go together. They are the counterculture’s primary instruments of ecstasy, its chief weapons against the obligations of traditional culture. It is still not clear which has done the most damage. Although drugs have cut short thousands of lives and permanently maimed countless more, I suspect that the real competition is between rock music and the sexual revolution. Both promised boundless freedom; both involved the entire culture in moral chaos. Figures like Timothy Leary, the prophet of LSD, and Charles Reich, author of The Greening of America, epitomized this side of the counterculture, and I discuss both in detail below.

At the end of Life Against Death, Norman O. Brown assured his readers that “the path of sublimation, which mankind has religiously followed since the foundation of the first cities, is no way out of the human neurosis, but, on the contrary, leads to its aggravation.” According to Brown, what was needed was “a union with others and with the world around us based not on anxiety and aggression but on narcissism and erotic exuberance.” Brown was writing in the late 1950s. The subsequent decades put his thesis to the test. Whether the consequences of embracing such narcissism and exuberance lessened or aggravated “the human neurosis” is an open question, to say the least. But this much is clear: the long march of America’s cultural revolution has everywhere departed from “the path of sublimation.”

Near the beginning of her book On Revolution, Hannah Arendt quotes the conservative thinker Joseph de Maistre who, looking back on the French Revolution in 1796, observed that “La contrerévolution ne sera point une révolution contraire, mais le contraire de la revolution”: “The counterrevolution will not be a revolution in reverse, but the reverse of revolution.” She dismisses this as “an empty witticism.” But is it? Given the spiritual malaise brought on by the long march of America’s cultural revolution, we may conclude that the way forward lies not in any sort of new revolution but, on the contrary, in the patient recovery of lost virtues. As The Long March attempts to show, the antidote to a cultural revolution is not counterrevolution but recuperation.