Reassessing the Sixties: Debating the Political and Cultural Legacy.

by Stephen Macedo WW Norton & Co., $25

THIS BOOK CONTAINS A NUMBER of somewhat disparate but stimulating insights into the '60s. It also reveals, unintentionally, the fickleness of the current political zeitgeist, for the context in which the '60s are reassessed here is clearly that of the recent rise of the fight. But though the essays by a variety of authors on both the left and right appear to have been written as recently as possible given publishing schedules, they are already out of sync with the times in subtle ways. Harvey Mansfield, Burke scholar and neo-conservative guru, ordinarily writes in a sober style. But here the cresting of the right beneath him has intoxicated him. He sets out to level all the tenets of liberal and radical reform with the grandiose glibness of one who knows his opponents are in a desperately weakened state. Giddy with ascendancy; he fails to censor a regrettable penchant, hitherto undetected, for bizarre little Buckley-esque affections--conveying that, with the wind at his back, he knows he can get away with anything. But the wind isn't at his back any more, at least not in the way it was, and his giddiness consequently appears to be just that. In contrast, Martha Nussbaum, erstwhile student of Mansfield, now on the faculty of the University of Chicago Law school, builds a case for sixties feminism with a care so extreme, arguing for the liberal essence of the movement so thoroughly, that by the end we also have a strong sense of the big bad wolf--Mansfield, perhaps--that she expects is going to come and try to blow her house down. But that big bad wolf isn't around anymore, at least not in the triumphant, untrammeled form that her defensiveness projects. Times have changed, we see, reading these essays. It's a pleasant effect. We may not be in a golden era of social idealism, but the time when belief in liberal values was as blood to sharks has passed.

Otherwise, this collection of essays pro and con the left-wing movement of the '60s is disparate, and, generally of an academic bent that does not make for easy reading. The declared ambition to make connections between the two points of view is not fulfilled. Only Todd Gitlin's final essay works assiduously to find relationships. The gist of his attempt is to find general connections between the '60s left and present right such as the similarity of rightwing fear and loathing of Clinton to the leftwing feelings about Johnson, or the way "the self-righteousness of feminists is surely not greater than the self-righteousness of antifeminists." Gitlin does good work in teasing apart the contradictory ideals of personal freedom and social justice that makes the "movement" confusing even in retrospect. He identifies suspicion of state power as one of the legacies of that time. And he wishes that the movement had not been driven to extreme alienation by the escalation of war: had it not been, he speculates, it could have matured slowly into a form that would have ultimately aided the liberal imperative rather than undermining it, helping to create a "soft landing into a Newer Deal?'

Sheldon Wolin gives us a difficult but stimulating essay on "The Destructive Sixties and Post Modern Conservativism" He identifies the great flaw in the movement: the rejection of technological progress, the kind of progress that creates the expansive economic environment in which the reforms espoused in the '60s can be implemented. He also writes about the ways in which a market economy automatically destroys, pointing up the great contradiction in present-day conservativism.

Most of the right-wing contributions here strike me as predictable screeds on how the '60s were bad. As George Will points out, "Politically the decade invigorated the right, not the left" but the triumphant conservatives "seem aggrieved because politics seems peripheral to, and largely impotent against, cultural forces and institutions permeated with what conservatives consider the '60s sensibilities." In his regrettably short foreword, Will identifies a sense of limitlessness as characteristic of both the '60s establishment and its challengers: the idea that "The United States could fight a war, and engage in 'nation building' in the nation where the war was being fought, and build a Great Society at home, simultaneously" while the counterculture sought to confront, transcend, and abolish all social restrictions. Will is the most interesting writer on the right in this collection because he is able to acknowledge the positive aspects of the other side. "By acts of bravery and skill and perseverance, acts that have not lost their power to take one's breath away, the legal edifice of racial injustice was dismantled. Whatever one thinks of the other consequences of the decade, the decade is redeemed by what was done in bus terminals, at lunch counters, in voter registration drives on ramshackle porches along dangerous back roads..."

SUZANNAH LESSARD is a contributing editor of the Washington Monthly.