How the 1960s Turbulence, Free Love, Drugs, and Rock & Roll Is Related To The Guillotining French Revolution.
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The French Revolution ended in death and destruction, then decades of on and off authoritarian monarchs, emperors, and others, oh my! The 1960s slid into Tricky Dick’s downfall, Swans Singing for Vietnam debacle, Disco, Ronnie Reagan, mass incarceration, welfare deformation, W’s Iraq War, and finally Traitor Donnie Trump, a boar bore. Of course, conservatives like to blame the 1960s on other occurrences and changes in society over the last five decades. That said, if we compare what the baby boomers did to what inspired the French Revolution, we can see both clearer.
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Obviously, guillotines were never employed during the mid 20th century in the United States. Yet, there was a national, and more intensely, racially construed and pursued, law and order clamp down, during and after the riots in Watts, around passage of the civil rights acts, due to Martin Luther King’s murder, and protests up until the war ended. At least some of it instigated by F.B.I. Director, J. Edgar Hoover, our mini-Robespierre. On the other hand, the French had a clear shift in their governance, and as unethical and ruthless as Nixon was to portions of his fellow citizens, he was no Napoleon, who left a half million of his soldiers to die of dysentery, and other diseases. Yet the French Revolution, and the disruptions of 1960s’ America had some similar attributes including ideas percolating over time, and creating an immense build up of pressure, that were not being considered or resolved fully, and most or many generally ignored by the powers-that-be.
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Two Tracks, And Triple Restraints…
Both societies became volatile, pushing to relax social restrictions, and conventions, protested in verbal and physical ways, argued about important topics, sought to change their world in a dramatic manner, and yes each perpetrated violence. The French had civil war with vengeful slaughter, and America had civil disobedience with minor violent outbursts, comparatively.
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The reason it may be difficult for some to see the similarities is two-fold. First, the timelines were much longer for the French overall, and Americans were on a two-track timeline. The other is that the French Revolution was an explosion, and implosion, verses our democratically controlled-burn.
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The two tracks for Americans were civil rights, and changing times. The fight for civil rights in America had been going on for over a hundred years, whereas the hippie boomers were a product of the economic boom, our new global perspective after WWII, and the Vietnam war, which would restrain, reduce, or rip up boomer futures. Actually, there were also triple restraints in play, and in place. Black and White youth were both restrained by the new war. Young Whites went from the restrained and boring 1950s, and even more restraint due to the war in the 1960s. Young Blacks restrained by Jim Crow and redlined ghettos in the 1950s, were beginning to experience more freedom due to their parents protests, and boycotts, which was helped by recent Supreme Court rulings, via supportive national press coverage, and by a relatively larger number of White Americans getting involved. That being said, real change could not happen fast enough for young Blacks. So the pressure built up to a greater extent for them.
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The Vietnam War was the deadly straw avalanche that shattered the backs of an entire camel herd. Yet, it was likely the catalyst for the worst and the best of results in the era. While the war may have been too late in the game to keep the pressure down on civil rights, it probably united White youth in direct, and tangential ways to what Blacks wanted to accomplish. Seeing their future being fatally disrupted does help a person focus harder and deeper into many things. Conversely, I can’t be sure that young White Americans would have gotten as energetically involved in politics, and help dismantle a portion of our racist structures, without Vietnam being pushed front and center into their lives, i.e. a white boomer wakeup call.
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NOTE: When I mention the value of White Americans to the civil rights movement, I am not giving it any specific value, in most every case it had little effect without Black civil rights participants leading the charge. Even LBJ’s actions would not have occurred without pressure from Black Americans in general putting their lives on the line, and civil rights leaders specifically.
Additionally, LBJ was a “transitional” Democrat. He sided with racist Democrats in the 1950s and before, only coming around with his connection to JFK, interactions with civil rights leaders, and seeing the politics changing. He merely followed JFK’s lead on Vietnam, and had not the international experience, dexterity, or desire to take on the war’s complexities as he did internal issues.
In the 1960s, directly instigated actions by Whites of all ages is lower than the nominal public opinion swaying of the national perspective. White student participation in civil rights, with or without Vietnam, may have never risen very high since nearly 80% of their parents were not on board, and 60% thought the March on Washington was a bad idea. Either due to parental pressure, or attitude similarities, the youth participation had to be low, especially if compared to an overall white population more amenable today to antiracism, that is much larger, but still not enormous.
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Counterfactual Conceptual Constructs.
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Looking at a counterfactual history may help in teasing out the restraint and pressure issues. Imagine that Vietnam was never a thing. This turns all the angst some White Americans were having in the 1950s, into more kids just acting out in the 1960s. There would have been almost no reason for White kids to group into thousands protesting across the country. The 1960s doubtless would have had larger disruptions than the previous decades, but only individual and separate occurrences. Some very deep emotional connective thread across the country is required to create what happened on college campuses, especially without Twitter and text messaging.
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Yes, there would have been as many or more Woodstocks, drug usage, a Haight-Ashbury or so, nearly as much free love, maybe a few more hippie communes, and such, just not a national or coordinated connection of any significant kind. I am not forgetting the civil rights movement, but I want to separate out the two, then link both in a third counterfactual premise. That means I look next at civil rights without an intervening with the White hippie, angst generation.
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Aside: Clearly, there were connective influences between the angst culture, and the civil rights movement. Some middle and upper class Blacks may have joined in the hippie culture, and had little to do with civil rights. Some of the white youth may have played a role in the civil rights movement, but were oblivious to, disdainful of, or otherwise as to, the hippie motif. Lastly, though I must avoid generalizing inappropriately, I want to impart this thought experiment portion as efficiently as possible.
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The civil rights movement definitely would have happened without a war. However, there are two scenarios that could have played out, if there was no external foe to deal with. The foe is not the Vietnamese; it is the military draft, and its implication for Black American men. Anger fulminated due to the civil government’s actions and inaction, and at the military. If there was only one anger element to deal with, Black youth may have been demoralized by the slowness of change their parents had attained, rather than when forced into defending themselves against two foes.
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Demoralization could have led to increased rioting in urban areas, and even more estrangement from coordination and collaboration with White youth, via post high school connections, especially on college campuses. In contrast, another path may have been a greater separation of the Black middle and upper classes from Blacks who were struggling month to month, or worse. Taking whatever gains were achieved and running with them, unless of course, LBJ was reelected, and-or MLK was not assassinated. Their impact would have had enough steam, particularly without Vietnam dragging them and the country down, to attain more for the poor, both Whites and Blacks.
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The Civil and Voting Rights Acts were both signed about the time Vietnam became a national focal point. The other major legislative action in 1968 was the Fair Housing Act, signed a week after MLK was murdered. Because these major acts were mostly in the works before the war was in full national shame mode, it shows that there were other forces at work in Black youth culture, separate from their war restraint pressures. In hindsight, we can also see, by comparing the 1960s with my list in the essay’s introductory paragraph, that the decade was the high point for civil rights legislation. And the bar was not raised very high, which was likely understood, or at least intuited, by Black youth at the time.
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The third counterfactual considers the 1960s without a war, and reviews the Black youth, civil rights movement, and potential connections to the White youth, angst culture. We know there was a seamless connection between older generations of Blacks during the real 1960s. However, to make my point here clearer, I will bypass the connections with the Black parental generation. Unfortunately, I do not see much connection occurring in a non-war, counterfactual universe. Except for television, and news mostly, there was not much connecting with Black and White youth or students going on in the nation in any positive way on a large scale.
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The positive national occurrences between Blacks and Whites were few and far between, young or old. The major unitingelements were the violent attacks on Blacks that TV news agreed to broadcast. Of course, those were only positive in a sadistic way. Whites had to see Blacks harmed or dealt with harshly before waking up from their Snow White sleep of ignorance, and denial. Television programming without Vietnam may have been even more milquetoast from a social change stand point. Ozzy And Harriet II: Raising the Smothers Brothers. Lots More White Guys in Space. Lenny Bruce Meets Big Bird. White Americans would have gotten tired earlier of racial conflict in the news because it was the only thing disturbing their TV lives. They needed to be pulled in more globally; Black civil rights would have been periphery for Whites at the time. But Vietnam popped their everything-is-right-in-the-world white, exceptionalism bubble.
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In addition, the news would not have been much more engaging on campus. While universities were the most likely place to develop interracial relationships, groups, and coordinated campaigns and protests, most Whites would have had little experience collaborating with any people of color until that point. The South, North, and West may have had different ways they interacted with other races, yet overall the 1960s was not likely the time increased interaction would have happened without Vietnam. The war had the terribly ironic, though ultimately tenuous, benefit of pushing the races together, each race having a personal reason to ramp up their anger level.
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There are other ways the — 1960s without Vietnam — counterfactual could be presented, but my take shows many areas where the decade could have gone somewhat better, or further awry. My overall impression at this point is that the Vietnam War was a catalyst that likely further destroyed our future, and pulled us back into the 1950s, as much as it pushed civil rights forward faster, or in a better form.
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The Real Revisited with Enlightenment Reexplained.
My conclusive paragraph above may seem anticlimactic, but another way to look at it is that what happened is what was going to happen. The groundwork had been laid by previous administrations, from what they did, and did not do. Their inability to honestly assess what was going on in their own country, and within their own and past administrations led them down the path we experienced as a nation, and as individuals.
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JFK should have been aware of his predecessor’s Bay of Pigs problematic strategies. LBJ and JFK should have been more cognizant of the problems that getting into Vietnam would create, and discussed them more honestly. LBJ assassinated his second full term, by leaving the nation open to anger and violent disruption due to Vietnam, which allowed Nixon to walk in. After he was handed the woebegone Vietnam baton from LBJ, Nixon lied more about the war, and many other things, as he bombed, and killed a million plus more people in southeast Asia. He also allowed Hoover to continue his Robespierre-esque work, increasing another notch the level of nationwide racist law and order bullshit. No presidential administration from 1919 to 1972 can be unlinked from Hoover’s devastating homophobic, sexist, and racist deeds.
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Then the denial of Nixon’s underhandedness set the Republicans on the road to full denial of reality as Obama’s tenure ended, making way for Trump. The 1960s enlightenment was doused by our failure to realize the benefits of the civil rights movement, and the Vietnam debacle. The only reason we did not have active guillotines in the streets, likely was our civil war slaughtering experience one hundred years before. And shortly after 1865, another Johnson, Andrew, purposely dug us into a hole of insanity that lasted at least until 1965.
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The U.S. has recreated the French Revolution three times over. Though how it played out each time was different, with lagging influences and effects in various directions, compared to the French. Our Revolutionary War should have brought enlightenment, but we doubled down on slavery with liberty as a partner in our hypocritical parallel world. It is hard to call our nation enlightened at the time when slavery was sanctified in our constitution. That is what a christian nation got us, I guess.
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Our Civil War gave us the opportunity to do Enlightenment better the second time. Unfortunately, the christian South had to reclaim its institution of the horrific sect. The Republican North failed to live up to its liberty and freedom goals, allowing the South to plunge us into lightless days again. That brought us to our third chance for much fuller racial enlightenment in the 1960s. This time the Republicans were bent on putting the kibosh to any further enlightenment ideals. Fifty years later, so much is left to do, and some of it also purposely undone including resegregation, wealth destruction, allowing voter suppression by stripping the Voting Rights Act, and Jim Crow II, a.k.a. disparity in enforcing the law, and mass incarceration.
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A French Enlightenment/Revolution Review.
The philosophes who contributed to French Enlightenment date back to the early to mid 1600s, and until the late 1700s, starting with Descartes (died 1650) then Montesquieu (1755), Bernard de Fontenelle (1757), Claude Helvétius (1771), Voltaire (1778), Condillac (1780), d’Alembert (1783), Diderot (1784), d’Holbach (1789), and one of the last is Condorcet (1794). Plus major non-French influencers: Bacon, Locke, Hobbes, Hume, Kant, Spinoza, Rousseau, Mary Wollstonecraft, Burke, Mendelssohn, Bayle, Leibniz, Priestley, Hutcheson, Smith, and Paine.
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Over a century and a half these famous writers, thought leaders, and philosophers spread various new ideas about freedom and liberty, as well as economic and social changes. Monarchies were getting raked over the coals. As people saw and heard about more options, they were attracted to the ideas surrounding The Enlightenment. Not all their ideas were brand new, many were a variation of Greek, and Roman ideas, and a few from ancient theologians. Yet the new, and the old ideas got stirred up and dispensed a significant level, greatly due to printing technology, which became cheap enough, so in widespread usage by the mid 1600s. Descartes and Voltaire, the other French thinkers, their friends in England, and the rest of Europe, exorcised a lot of shibboleths, hammered at problematic government structures, undercut the belief in monarchical government, upset average people as to their faith, made the powerful worry about losing their power, and destroyed many millennia old myths.
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Not everyone was ready for the disruption. Some never wanted any kind of disruption, whether they were poor or the rich nobility. The problem is it was coming. It was always coming. Like in tornado alley, or along a hurricane coast, these disruptions will come. Those who are not ready for them, or who deny their own vulnerability and mortality, can get caught up in the nightmare. Our civil war, while extremely difficult to untangle from the grip our economy had on slavery, was preventable. Yet we waited too long to make the changes required. Our first four presidents knew slavery was terribly wrong, and they allowed it to dig its claws in deeper replicating the French monarchs in their unpreparedness.
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The French monarchy was able to hear what the people were saying, the philosophes giving them huge hints, yet they ignored the change coming. Their control had been so absolute, how could it ever be different? The monarchs knew the people had the power to overthrow them, and end their comfortable existence, once the citizens believed it was possible. That said, the monarchy also had the power to quell things including by making sure the people had the basics, and generally satisfied. However, the food supply in France was curtailed significantly, nearing famine proportions, around 1788, a year before the revolution.
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France also went broke in 1789, the year of revolution. Yet even their lack of funds was preventable, but again, the monarchs had overspent, or had waited too long to make corrections. It is very likely no revolution would have occurred without the food crisis. The monarchs knew not how to prepare for new ideas, problems, peoples, etc. just like we were unprepared politically, historically, and psychologically for the 1960s.
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Therefore, The Enlightenment thinkers were not the problem. The French monarchy was. The philosophers were in a large capacity, merely providing information in the event of change. Almost none were direct instigators. The people revolting occurs when a crisis of some kind arises. The French needed to change its governmental structure, but doing it during a crisis is very improbable, especially if a large percentage of citizens are starving, or are collectively threatened with harm in some manner. The wealthy can pay for a coup; the poor on the other hand will not rise up merely for ideas. Even the American Revolution required some common, real grievances, and economic incentives to spread enough to light a fire. I guess you could call our war violence against Britain, a coup, and a revolt since our founders were not poor peasants. A more responsive governmental structure is the only way to prevent such revolts, or a coup.
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The Way Out of Regular Recurrence of Revolts.
The American founders were influenced by The Enlightenment in various ways, but their revolt was based on a governmental structure from the get-go. France was creating their new government on the fly, during a food and bankruptcy crises. Even the smartest minds cannot participate in a poorly managed revolt, and effectively consider how things will go when it is over. The founders did not need to make many changes from their current state of things to have a fairly stable society. The constitution concept was not even a spark in many heads until after our Revolutionary War. They had been working on their basic political structures, and practiced self-government in America as colonists for over a century.
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The taking of the Bastille became a mob action because the French “revolution” was a jumble of powerful forces clashing together all at once. The same mob could have taken out Robespierre, the day after he took the reins of power, and was meting out punishments, rather than allowing him to continue the slaughter for nine months. His power over life and death god-status was not preordained, or that unexpected, from our hindsight knowledge of how such a coup happens in a power vacuum. We must remember that implementing ethical and moral ideals in anything like a democratic process, involving the people, is only possible in a non-compulsory yet controlled, and calm setting. The French lost control of the anger, fear, and hopelessness of the citizenry. Once the bully sees that no one is taking the reins, he, in Robespierre’s case, moves in for the spoils.
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When a large percentage of the citizenry are in blind lockstep, or are unwilling to recognize the problems minority groups are having within the society, and no widespread crisis is occurring, the process can continue even with substantial blowback from small groups who lack the political power to change society. The Chinese have deployed this shutting down process over and over again; Tiananmen Square is a perfect example. Of course, this dynamic can flip around if that small group consists of the very wealthy. That being said, the 1960s emerged in a time with a robustly working, and fairly secure democracy.
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Since the citizenry of the United States was much more white in the 1960s than it is today, and white Americans followed mostly in blind lockstep, splinter organizations and other racial groups were easily sidelined. It just depended on how much racist law and order the dominant white culture was willing to employ to keep hiding their sins. Fortunately, the legal system was improving in various ways during the 1960s, seeing more of the reality that racial injustice caused in America. This quelled much of the anger that would have made it more likely an armed revolt rather than generally non-violent civil disobedience. Unfortunately, we would reverse direction in later decades with increasingly negative societal consequences, via several tangents including the drug war, mass incarceration, and stripping of voting rights protections.
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Revolts and disruptions like the French in 1789, and America in the 1960s are not preordained. These events are derived from discontent, or government somehow ignoring the plight of a portion of its people, which is a pattern Americans keep repeating. It can be a hunger for food, respect, liberty, freedom, or equality, or all of them. Inequality actually contains all of those in many directions. This is not about everyone making the same amount of money, and having the same amount of wealth.
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When I have no food, and you have all you will ever need, my respect, liberty, freedom, and equality are all extremely diminished. As my food reserves are filled up, our hunger differentiation levels off becoming non-existent, way before I reach your overabundance quotient. I can no longer treat my situation as worse than yours because hunger, in health terms, ends before overabundance.
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Equality, freedom, liberty, and respect also have similar leveling-off points. Respect does not need to become subservience. Freedom to do as you please ends at least before physically harming others to benefit you economically, or emotionally. Many of your liberties can end, for a short time, or forever, if you are convicted of a crime. Extreme inequality comes in various forms but educational, housing, health, wages, and wealth, are the most prevalent. There is a point where each one of these inequalities levels off, but America has been denying there is such a thing as harmful inequality for much longer than a century. Nonetheless it harms our society, and the people in it by the tens of millions; voluminous proof is available, and massively better than a few anecdotes. Republicans explain it away using economic dogma, hard-heartedly, and clumsily dismissing workers and citizens as lazy or socialist.
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The leveling of inequality is not an exact, equal cut of everything. These are fears ginned up by those who want to restrain us in their 1950s, communist takeover, McCarthyism frame of mind. Rather it is complete nourishment of the basics, whatever that means in the current society. For example, having a place to live, an equal educational experience, good health care insurance, and a smartphone to navigate life today, or a century and a half ago, having at least forty acres and a mule.
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The 1960s were a time of inequality in similar, and different ways than today, some were much deeper, wider, and from another more vicious angle. We had failed to make the necessary changes during two previous enlightenment eras, after ending slavery and during development of our Constitution. For Black Americans, the 1960s’ civil disobedience, and riotous violence were preordained, because again, not enough White Americans stepped up to the plate. We refused to fully see, societally internalize, and forever pursue eradication of the underlying forms of racial inequality, and economic inequality for Blacks as well as poor Whites, and other people of color. After the Radical Republicans pushed through as much as they could in the 1860s into the 1870s, and Andrew Johnson trashed the Reconstruction era as much as he could, energies for continuing the process dissipated, and as in the 1880s, nearly everything was reversed including back to slavery, (merely) by another name.
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The same thing happened after LBJ left office, and the Vietnam war ended, the energies of the White youth, overall White society, and the political forces left the field. Again, Whites tired of the change, and in the 1980s, ironically, one hundred years after Reconstruction failed, Ronald “Dutch Crow” Reagan took the stage; he then reversed many policies that were thwarting some of our Jim Crow era, racist practices, and ended or greatly curtailed LBJ’s programs to reduce extreme economic inequality. Reagan’s actions, and those by future Congresses and administrations, have sent us back to the previous stone age, a.k.a. pre-1929 economically, and racially pre-the 1960s housing, civil rights, and voting acts. He repeated a similar pattern as his predecessor Andrew Johnson did, just over a hundred years before, who returned the South to nearly pre-Lincoln times. Reagan tried to reverse many gains LBJ made in civil rights and reducing poverty.
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Tiananmen Square, and the disruptions of the 1960s were preventable, and not preordained for the powers-that-be. Those who fully dominate a society will often choose to use their powers selectively in a negative sense. Freedom and liberty in the United States began with slavery. That is how we selectively used our power, to corrupt the language so we could justify hurting people. A good society in 1989 China was everyone complied to the government’s specific demands, or they died. The late 1700s and the last fifty years may seem different, and our nation somehow wholly superior now, and much better than China ever, but those times are not that different, and we are not much better. We have always formed our White brains to believe in whatever we wanted to believe was right or wrong, and only continue at a slightly better level today, but in a similarly corrupted vein. That is why something like systemic racism can continue, while we simultaneously think things have improved beyond it.
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As White Americans have been losing their full domination, too many things were and are looking different. This loss of full power equates quickly to losing everything. Complete domination means complete loss. This is what Reagan believed. It is what Whites in the 1960s believed, especially in the South. Reagan’s ideas about communism, and capitalism were also theories of domination. Yet, he was less of a frontal attack racist than he was in allowing American Exceptionalism to dominate his beliefs. This exceptionalism lens meant he could not recognize racism for what it was, since it would tarnish his pristinely, whitewashed view of our perfect nation.
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A White Youth Revolt.
The White youth who acted out in the 1960s, and were not directly associated with fighting racial inequality, were also preordained to do what they did. From free love to Woodstock to fighting the man, would have happened without the Vietnam War, but it set the entire nation afire. The fight for racial equality gave them another outlet to push back, and mess with the man. The prosperity of post WWII, and the stale lullaby of the 1950s, were going to put White teenagers and young adults into a purgatory of purposelessness. They had everything, but what did they have?
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Mixing in a suppressive and hypocritical societal norm of purity, a senseless, made up, racist war on the other side of the world, and the horrible dissociative perspective and treatment of people of color in America makes for an easy and predictable Molotov cocktail lay up. The second “great” war had barely ended, and now the next generation must also be sent off to a youth meat grinder? These kids had the right to be spoiled, kids of every color, if not merely for their parents’ sake. Yes, there is a small percentage of kids who will want to sign up for every war for personal, discernible reasons, but do we not teach our children to have a freedom of discernment, beyond pure follow the leading zombie, while dragging one foot behind you, marching?
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When a nation cannot solve its own racial divisions, after 200 years, why is that nation sending all races of its population across the world to kill another race of people we don’t trust, mostly because they look different and we can’t speak their language? A nation like that experiences deep psychological dissonance, which will cough up many illogical conspiracies and solutions. Our crazy ideas about dominos falling, our savior by-killing-others complex, our inability to understand other cultures in our own land, let alone across the globe, and misunderstanding our youth of any gender, color of skin, or political beliefs is what creates a 1960s disruption. In such as crazy quilt caldron, who wouldn’t crank up their favorite music while smoking dope, and imbibing in free love, until it all went away?
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Some day maybe the purpose we bestow our children will not include such ignorance, hate, violence, and anger. But when racism is rampant, war is upon us, violence is promoted, ginned up fear invades us our calmness, and hate is generated from ignorance, a 1960s disruption will always be in the cards. I believe that when we eliminate many of these symptoms and causes, or even shave off a few more of the worst layers here, and there, we can discover what our truly greater purposes are, as individuals and a nation.
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Conclusion of The 1960s’ Delusion.
Happening a young teenager after WWII, the 1960s were primed for youth pushback, and various kinds of revolt. Black soldiers and servicewomen returning to civilian life, after defeating the Nazi eugenics’ horde, were not going to settle for business as usual in the United States, supposedly the land of freedom and liberty for all. Even though White teenagers were likely oblivious to the worst of horrors and hardships their fathers and mothers went through, and that we rained upon our foes and innocents as well, most did not want to return to fields of slaughter, or participate in its likelihood.
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No one likes restraints. The Vietnam draft was a terrible restraint; death is an even worse one. Some people even rebel against lifesaving masks. Yet most of us will accept certain restraints if everyone is restrained similarly, and there is a good, societally beneficial reason for it.
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And things were not happening similarly. An egregious example, more Black men were drafted, and were sent to fight in Vietnam, as a percentage, for various systemic racist reasons.
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Obviously, unreasonable restraint is not a liberal or conservative thing. Conversely, and clearly, we have different views on what is reasonable and unreasonable. That said, Blacks and other people of color have always been restrained by American laws and society much more than Whites. Okay, in some ways those restraints had improved between the start of the war, and the 1960s. Yet not one White person, if it had been their situation instead to be a Black person, would have accepted in 1960, in any reality I am aware of, the concept of their lives being improved. That would be another case of double white standard supremacy, hypocrisy.
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Whites who never even attempt to mentally put themselves in the skin of a Black person, can’t begin to understand how demoralizing it is to have greater restraints on oneself than others do in the dominate culture. The weight of this perversity is disproportionally anger inducing, but the reality of the dominance of the other group also can disportionately defeat and demoralize. American ghettos are produced by White people from their prejudiced perceptions and loyal (to white supremacy) legal structures. Since every prejudiced (cultural norm, religious influence, and government law) element is layered on and partially scraped away, and layered and scraped, constantly over time, the understanding of what is really underneath is hard for whites to see, and therefore easier for white society to obscure.
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Many want to separate out the French Revolution, and some of its philosophic ideas, from the American Revolution, or even negatively compare it to the 1960s liberal boomers, but it is all of the same ilk. The death and destruction such a revolt produces is often no worse or better than the death or destruction caused by the government that it sprung from, and may return to, or become. The British Empire was killing and destroying the futures of many people to bring their form of civilization to our shores and around the world. The Brit’s form of government was produced after centuries of slaughter on their own island. The French monarchy had been doing the same at home, and abroad. Napoleon would continue the slaughter.
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Whether pitchfork and torch, hastily pursued, mob revolt, or formal, gallant warring in perfectly-pressed uniforms, death and destruction is still death and destruction. To determine the better angel in such an effort or event, the moral and ethical character must be deemed more evident in one than the other. While perfection in one or the other is not possible, basic discernments can be rendered to determine the most virtuous.
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The French people were starving. The government was not responsive. A government not able to respond effectively in such an environment has opened itself to revolt. Without a stable government, the hounds of Hades have their chance. Blaming such a revolt on the thinkers trying to determine solutions for the future is ridiculous at best and harmful at worst, particularly when their philosophies were in development over a century before the revolt occurred. Only where all things can be discussed and worked on by the people can there be any further enlightenment. That said, the powers-that-be have an obligation to manage the extremes in their violent actions and methods of intimidation.
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The disturbances of the 1960s, and the revolt to remove racist restraints, had their genesis from government actions and inactions. Segregation in housing, disparate funding for education, racial discrimination in hiring, oppressive white supremacist law enforcement, and a racist legal system encompassed both action and inaction was too much for Blacks students, and their families of course. The 1950s supposed idyllic time, yet actually very suppressed, strained by the Cold War and McCarthyism, and fears generated from nuclear annihilation, as well as the reality of our racist culture, which was harmful to Black Americans, but also an international embarrassment for a nation of free, all brought the level of angst as high as it could go for White teenagers.
The Vietnam War detonated the 1960s, guillotining the breath and life out of almost 60,000 Americans 8,000 miles away, and the minds and limbs of 75,000 others, let alone over 3 million deaths of South East Asians, and sent our nation into a 25-year plus moral, cultural, and ideological tailspin. Conservatives will focus on free love, drugs, and rock and rolling liberals, yet it was the dominos falling flakes, communist fear mongers, and muscle-mouthed war hawks who put and kept us in the Vietnam sinkhole. As I said earlier, there would have been a White angst rebellion without the war, but the cultural effect was more likely to resemble the Roaring Twenties than any type of uprising.
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As of 2021, the Republicans are still injuring the society through their rebellion against required changes, and returning us to more problematic days due to voter suppression, and belligerence in dealing with inequality in almost every area of society, also allowing it to worsen. Their response was again to go to the Bull Connor-George Wallace playbook, making our problems today about the weakening or loss of white supremacy, i.e. allowing their Robespierre send his clown army to storm the Capitol Hill Bastille. Conservatives either realize their critiques about the 1960s were, and are, bullshit, or they are ignorant enough to repeat the same pattern of piling on mistakes as LBJ, other Democrat appeasers, Hoover, Nixon, Reagan, Bush, Trump, Republican Congresses, and The French Monarchies.
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When people are willing to question the status quo and demand truthful answers and sound solutions, there is always pushback, a penchant to ignore those who are hurting the most, and feigning there are insufficient resources to invest in remedies. Only a stable, healthy, fact facing, all the people hearing, science understanding, following through with real solutions democracy, can withstand such disruptions, and renew itself effectively for the long term.
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