That does get the 60s all wrong. But the idea that Boomers have encouraged a legacy of violent protest is the myth. Weeks ago, 5 million people hit the streets in protest. Where was this so-called Boomer encouragement of violence? There was no violence. The premise of the article is flawed even if the point of the article is valid.
"But the idea that Boomers have encouraged a legacy of violent protest is the myth."
This is a good point, Greg. I was so pleased by his division of the '60s into a violent and non-violent period that I failed to mention this point, but you're mostly quite correct. The only Boomers that ARE encouraging violent protest are doing so surreptitiously, indirectly. These are the Boomers that slowly began to fill the halls of academia in the '70s, and are largely now retired, but their legacy of protest lives on in their students who replaced them.
But the average Boomer, such as myself, who is not an academician, is railing against these masked thugs. I have spoken out against masking at protests every chance I get, because no one at Selma needed a mask (well, maybe the sheriff's deputies could have benefited from one).
I'm not a boomer, but I can't help but agree. I just don't see boomers advocating violence in the way the author describes. And when I do see calls for violence today, they seem less like a generational trait and more like part of the long history of social movements—not something unique to boomers or their supposed misreading of the Civil Rights Movement.
Violence has been part of nearly every major struggle for social change—from the Boston Massacre (where protesters hurled projectiles at British troops) to John Brown, Haymarket, the WTO protests, and yes... even aspects of the Civil Rights Movement. The author is right that the movement’s success owed much to its commitment to nonviolence—not violence—but that doesn't mean violence, or rhetoric in support of it, was entirely absent.
While the mainstream Civil Rights Movement was rooted in nonviolence, especially under leaders like Martin Luther King Jr., more militant threads ran alongside it. In the Deep South, where white supremacist violence was constant and state protection nonexistent, many Black activists embraced armed self-defense—notably Robert F. Williams in North Carolina and the Deacons for Defense and Justice in Louisiana, who protected communities and civil rights workers with rifles in hand. Some within SNCC quietly carried weapons despite their public commitment to nonviolence, and Malcolm X openly rejected pacifism, insisting on resistance “by any means necessary.” In the North, uprisings like those in Harlem and Philadelphia in 1964 erupted in response to police killings, while even earlier, Black labor organizers had fought back against racist terror. Nonviolence may have been the movement’s moral and strategic centerpiece, but the reality on the ground was more complex.
I agree with the rehistoricized story of civil rights legislation as well as the critique of violent protest as not only failing to accomplish change, but as sparking backlash. I think it is appropriate to link that to the New Left and point to its failures.
I think the focus on "Boomers," though, is a little weaseling in that it makes the same myth-making mistake as originally criticized. The notion of 20-year generational spans lumps together too many folks without reference to what those people are experiencing at key formative moments of their lives. The oldest among the Boomers might have attended the MLK speech as teens. Their little siblings were young kids in 1964 and were still kids in 1968. The youngest Boomers voted by a large margin for Reagan in one of their first elections. That's why the "OK, Boomer" effect obscures as much as it reveals.
What, to me, is more interesting is the ongoing conversation on the Left, including the New Left (and now including the MAGA Right), about social change and violence. That should also include the Labor Movement over time, the Women's Movement, the Temperance Movement, and even Right-wing movements like Stop the Steal, which had its own set of issues about violence.
I was born in 1954 and I was in not in college until I971. The terrible assassinations of the Kennedys and MLK were obviously a shock but as an adolescent I didn’t feel the full horror that I would have if I was an early boomer. Most of the New Left was too radical and I feel that the first left wing ideas that influenced me were environmentalism and feminism. Not exactly all that violent! But the point is that we should look at the non violent activists of the civil rights movement as role models.Not antifa or other activists who adopt violence. And we had the no kings demonstrations that were a non violent success!
My first thought was that this had to be written by an Ivy-League graduate or student. Only a properly cloistered person could conflate the handful of people who occupied university offices, protested at political conventions, or joined communist/anarchist groups with millions of ordinary citizens. I suspect that more American boomers died in Vietnam, many of them drafted, than participated in violent protests.
How about the following for something more accurate “some privileged baby boomers tell their equally privileged children how important they were to the civil-rights movement.” The vast majority just tried to get by, as with all people.
Excellent article. Nearly all tangible and lasting gains in civil rights of the 60s came from the non-violent movement. Carmichael and Hoffman accomplished practically nothing - and provided a clear permission structure for reaction. Indeed the nation is lucky Nixon was elected rather than a more strident backlash candidate like Wallace!
Great points . And I wish the DEI obsessed left would remember Martin Luther Kings beautiful "I Have a Dream" speech. The whole is worth reading frequently, but this quote is very different from today's DEI ideology:
"“I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”
German has a great word, "Quatsch," pronounced "kvatsch." It means "nonsense" or "rubbish" and is said with all the irritation, impatience, and dismissal the consonants allow. Even though this article contains some accurate information about the Civil Rights movement and the New Left, that information is limited and selective, rendering the basic claim invalid—overgeneralized, inaccurate, and insulting. Others have pointed out some of the problems with the author's characterization of "boomers." I want to raise a wider issue: the problem with any pretense of preaching about persuasion while indulging in cheap rhetoric and defamatory claims. "Lied"? Really? Quatsch.
The new left had its excesses but it was also not technically a boomer movement. Abbie Hoffman who epitomized the turn toward violence was born in 1936..not exactly a boomer! And Nixon won campaigning against acid,amnesty and abortion so I think voters were already tired of violence in the streets. Hey there was enough violence in fricking Vietnam! And Reagan won on frustration with inflation and increasing dependence on foreign oil. Remember that Carter was a very unpopular president but the economy would have tanked any democrat at that time . Again the New Left is not a scapegoat for Reagan’s victory… at all 😎
Wow, very well said. I might emphasize a little more the "understandable reasons" for resisting the Vietnam War. If we've learned "the lesson of Vietnam," part of that learning is probably the widespread resistance to the draft. Still, yes, the non-violent, come proper and correct, make the other guy look crazy approach of MLK's civil rights movement -- one that appealed to shared values rather than made it a constant practice to challenge them -- is by far the better model for how to make change from the ground up.
A valuable retrospective, though the argument that Boomers crafted a myth is a bit forced.
By way of a footnote: The draft did end earlier than the war itself, and student protests rapidly dwindled from that moment. The protesters had what mattered most to them, whether their own actions brought it about or not.
"It isn’t just a problem of the progressive left, although it’s endemic there. There’s a right-coded version too, with tricorn hats in place of balaclavas."
The artificial moral equivalency attempt (I am guessing to mitigate the offense that might be felt by those on the left) destroys the meaning and impact of the piece.
When there is a 90% vs 10% difference, there is no equivalency.
For the last ten years except for one Jan-6 event where a few protestors lost their minds over all the previous Democrat power abuse and the indication at the time that Democrats had stolen the election... and got violent, the right had only attended peaceful Trump rallies (where the thugs on the left arrived with violence.) Meanwhile during this time, we had episode over episode of violent protests and riots all done in support of leftism and Democrat political interests.
There will be no remedy to a problem if the problem is not honestly and accurately defined. The problem is leftist protesting... it has gotten out of hand.
Wow! I'm a boomer, and I thought this was a great analysis. The framing of the '60s as being demarcated by the Civil Rights Act of 1964 made very clear the divide between two eras (though I would have thought you'd have used the Voting Rights Act of 1965, but that's splitting hairs). I no longer teach American history, but I always tried to make clear that "the" Civil Rights Movement was a product of the '50s, not the '60s, even though its climax came early in LBJ's presidency.
One reason I think people miss out on your second '60s as lasting into the '70s is because a traditional line of demarcation is the shooting at Kent State in the Spring of 1970. But you're right that the Leftist movement of the late 1960s did indeed carry into the '70s, and arguably even the '80s, when their control over the universities was largely secured.
Anyway, I love this analysis as it does much to show how the Left squandered their well-deserved desserts by changing tactics. And hopefully someone will take this warning to the Left because they appear to be assuming that all they have to do to win is to destroy Trump. But Trump is president today for one reason: Middle of the road Americans who may be sympathetic to the goals of the Left cannot stomach their tactics. (To be sure, MAGAns are also on track to turn off centrist voters with their behavior.)
No, it isn't just the tactics. I find many goals of the left repulsive - wokeness, anti-capitalism, anti-Zionism. Not everyone on the left, but too many.
My first reaction was to say that your comment was not relevant to what I said, but then I re-read mine and realized what you were commenting on. So let me clarify what I meant, and I'll understand if you still disagree.
I also find the three things you mention repulsive. But I don't consider "wokeness", for example, to be a goal. The GOAL which they profess to believe in is a society where people are all treated equally regardless of race, etc. Wokeness is a poorly chosen tactic that hopes to make that goal achievable. The fact that it ironically undoes the success we have achieved is lost on them.
Of course, this brings up another goal that you did not mention which might explain why the Left is so stubborn on the issue of tactics, even when we can see them working against their goals. Some observers believe that the far Left's ultimate goal is merely to possess power. Just as Marx prescribed a Dictatorship of the Proletariat as a necessary interregnum en route to Pure Communism, some on the Left (and not only the most Radical) tell us that we must discriminate today in order to achieve Racial Nirvana.
I do disagree to this extent, many on the left - far too many - do have "wokeness" as a goal. They demand that everything be seen through the lens of oppressed/oppressor and many university students have been indoctrinated by true believer professors. They believe "colorblind" in the sense used by MLK is a dirty word. Trump has knocked this back a good bit, to his credit. Whether you call it tactics, strategy, or goals, by their action you may know them.
Really good article. Non-violence came up in another article I read today, misleadingly entitled "Has Pacifism Doomed Tibet?" by Kapil Komireddi in Unherd. The details in the article showed quite plainly that the Dalai Lama's non-violence was a good choice given the insurmountable force of the Chinese government. I come from a family of protestors- and am a boomer. My parents protested racism, violence, wars. We agreed on all of it basically, but I was never sure if carrying signs actually helped create change. I'm still not. What does? Have the rules changed?
A well thought out argument and the readers comments point out the the fallacies and the strengths of the authors utterances. Martin Luther Kings has already been quoted by a reader and that has to be the cornerstone of the message of the Civil Rights movement without a shadow of a doubt. There is an argument that this Civil Rights Legislation movement was going to happen in America without the peace-march tactics employed by MLK which drew on the peaceful protests of Gandi in India to oust the British. But there is a good argument that both these peaceful protests hastened their objective, rather than being the instigation of such much needed changes to America and the UK colonial possessions. The 1960's saw the dissolution of the British Empire, which was a huge change in the way colonising powers viewed their overseas possessions. In a similar vein the passing of the Civil Rights Act had a sea changing effect on American Society. As the article says, the real problem with the success of The Civil Rights Act legislation, not only in its content that has emboldened the fringe groups Climate Alarmists, BLM and the like - some say heavily financed by those with Leftists beliefs - is to believe that the violence that has from time to time engulfed America from the 1960's onwards, would not just hasten but was absolutely necessary to enable societal change of attitudes. Academia and the elites used another tactic - the blatant attack on "free speech" coupled with the attempt to "cancel" and silence their critics so as to hasten change- the introduction of the resurgence of identity politics and the birth of the Woke ideology, in the wake of the failure of the Affirmative Action dogma, banned in Law by the SCOTUS. This is really the blame that can be firmly laid at the feet of the Leftists and separates leftist, Marxist, Socialistic beliefs from those of the Right, not just in America but through out the Western democracies. Thanks for the article.
That does get the 60s all wrong. But the idea that Boomers have encouraged a legacy of violent protest is the myth. Weeks ago, 5 million people hit the streets in protest. Where was this so-called Boomer encouragement of violence? There was no violence. The premise of the article is flawed even if the point of the article is valid.
"But the idea that Boomers have encouraged a legacy of violent protest is the myth."
This is a good point, Greg. I was so pleased by his division of the '60s into a violent and non-violent period that I failed to mention this point, but you're mostly quite correct. The only Boomers that ARE encouraging violent protest are doing so surreptitiously, indirectly. These are the Boomers that slowly began to fill the halls of academia in the '70s, and are largely now retired, but their legacy of protest lives on in their students who replaced them.
But the average Boomer, such as myself, who is not an academician, is railing against these masked thugs. I have spoken out against masking at protests every chance I get, because no one at Selma needed a mask (well, maybe the sheriff's deputies could have benefited from one).
I'm not a boomer, but I can't help but agree. I just don't see boomers advocating violence in the way the author describes. And when I do see calls for violence today, they seem less like a generational trait and more like part of the long history of social movements—not something unique to boomers or their supposed misreading of the Civil Rights Movement.
Violence has been part of nearly every major struggle for social change—from the Boston Massacre (where protesters hurled projectiles at British troops) to John Brown, Haymarket, the WTO protests, and yes... even aspects of the Civil Rights Movement. The author is right that the movement’s success owed much to its commitment to nonviolence—not violence—but that doesn't mean violence, or rhetoric in support of it, was entirely absent.
While the mainstream Civil Rights Movement was rooted in nonviolence, especially under leaders like Martin Luther King Jr., more militant threads ran alongside it. In the Deep South, where white supremacist violence was constant and state protection nonexistent, many Black activists embraced armed self-defense—notably Robert F. Williams in North Carolina and the Deacons for Defense and Justice in Louisiana, who protected communities and civil rights workers with rifles in hand. Some within SNCC quietly carried weapons despite their public commitment to nonviolence, and Malcolm X openly rejected pacifism, insisting on resistance “by any means necessary.” In the North, uprisings like those in Harlem and Philadelphia in 1964 erupted in response to police killings, while even earlier, Black labor organizers had fought back against racist terror. Nonviolence may have been the movement’s moral and strategic centerpiece, but the reality on the ground was more complex.
I agree with the rehistoricized story of civil rights legislation as well as the critique of violent protest as not only failing to accomplish change, but as sparking backlash. I think it is appropriate to link that to the New Left and point to its failures.
I think the focus on "Boomers," though, is a little weaseling in that it makes the same myth-making mistake as originally criticized. The notion of 20-year generational spans lumps together too many folks without reference to what those people are experiencing at key formative moments of their lives. The oldest among the Boomers might have attended the MLK speech as teens. Their little siblings were young kids in 1964 and were still kids in 1968. The youngest Boomers voted by a large margin for Reagan in one of their first elections. That's why the "OK, Boomer" effect obscures as much as it reveals.
What, to me, is more interesting is the ongoing conversation on the Left, including the New Left (and now including the MAGA Right), about social change and violence. That should also include the Labor Movement over time, the Women's Movement, the Temperance Movement, and even Right-wing movements like Stop the Steal, which had its own set of issues about violence.
I was born in 1954 and I was in not in college until I971. The terrible assassinations of the Kennedys and MLK were obviously a shock but as an adolescent I didn’t feel the full horror that I would have if I was an early boomer. Most of the New Left was too radical and I feel that the first left wing ideas that influenced me were environmentalism and feminism. Not exactly all that violent! But the point is that we should look at the non violent activists of the civil rights movement as role models.Not antifa or other activists who adopt violence. And we had the no kings demonstrations that were a non violent success!
My first thought was that this had to be written by an Ivy-League graduate or student. Only a properly cloistered person could conflate the handful of people who occupied university offices, protested at political conventions, or joined communist/anarchist groups with millions of ordinary citizens. I suspect that more American boomers died in Vietnam, many of them drafted, than participated in violent protests.
How about the following for something more accurate “some privileged baby boomers tell their equally privileged children how important they were to the civil-rights movement.” The vast majority just tried to get by, as with all people.
Where, exactly, does one find tricorn-adorned conservatives burning down cities in "fiery but mostly-peaceful protests"?
Excellent article. Nearly all tangible and lasting gains in civil rights of the 60s came from the non-violent movement. Carmichael and Hoffman accomplished practically nothing - and provided a clear permission structure for reaction. Indeed the nation is lucky Nixon was elected rather than a more strident backlash candidate like Wallace!
Carmichael and Hoffman are also, notably, not boomers. Carmichael was born in 1941 and Hoffman in 1936.
>>Violent protests don’t work in a democracy. They don’t create change. They destroy opportunities to reform America.
How bizarre is it that this needs to be said.
Great points . And I wish the DEI obsessed left would remember Martin Luther Kings beautiful "I Have a Dream" speech. The whole is worth reading frequently, but this quote is very different from today's DEI ideology:
"“I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”
German has a great word, "Quatsch," pronounced "kvatsch." It means "nonsense" or "rubbish" and is said with all the irritation, impatience, and dismissal the consonants allow. Even though this article contains some accurate information about the Civil Rights movement and the New Left, that information is limited and selective, rendering the basic claim invalid—overgeneralized, inaccurate, and insulting. Others have pointed out some of the problems with the author's characterization of "boomers." I want to raise a wider issue: the problem with any pretense of preaching about persuasion while indulging in cheap rhetoric and defamatory claims. "Lied"? Really? Quatsch.
As a baby boomer myself, I have to ask: What have we accomplished beyond making the world safe for hypocrisy?
The new left had its excesses but it was also not technically a boomer movement. Abbie Hoffman who epitomized the turn toward violence was born in 1936..not exactly a boomer! And Nixon won campaigning against acid,amnesty and abortion so I think voters were already tired of violence in the streets. Hey there was enough violence in fricking Vietnam! And Reagan won on frustration with inflation and increasing dependence on foreign oil. Remember that Carter was a very unpopular president but the economy would have tanked any democrat at that time . Again the New Left is not a scapegoat for Reagan’s victory… at all 😎
Wow, very well said. I might emphasize a little more the "understandable reasons" for resisting the Vietnam War. If we've learned "the lesson of Vietnam," part of that learning is probably the widespread resistance to the draft. Still, yes, the non-violent, come proper and correct, make the other guy look crazy approach of MLK's civil rights movement -- one that appealed to shared values rather than made it a constant practice to challenge them -- is by far the better model for how to make change from the ground up.
A valuable retrospective, though the argument that Boomers crafted a myth is a bit forced.
By way of a footnote: The draft did end earlier than the war itself, and student protests rapidly dwindled from that moment. The protesters had what mattered most to them, whether their own actions brought it about or not.
You do a fine job but ruin it with this...
"It isn’t just a problem of the progressive left, although it’s endemic there. There’s a right-coded version too, with tricorn hats in place of balaclavas."
The artificial moral equivalency attempt (I am guessing to mitigate the offense that might be felt by those on the left) destroys the meaning and impact of the piece.
When there is a 90% vs 10% difference, there is no equivalency.
For the last ten years except for one Jan-6 event where a few protestors lost their minds over all the previous Democrat power abuse and the indication at the time that Democrats had stolen the election... and got violent, the right had only attended peaceful Trump rallies (where the thugs on the left arrived with violence.) Meanwhile during this time, we had episode over episode of violent protests and riots all done in support of leftism and Democrat political interests.
There will be no remedy to a problem if the problem is not honestly and accurately defined. The problem is leftist protesting... it has gotten out of hand.
Wow! I'm a boomer, and I thought this was a great analysis. The framing of the '60s as being demarcated by the Civil Rights Act of 1964 made very clear the divide between two eras (though I would have thought you'd have used the Voting Rights Act of 1965, but that's splitting hairs). I no longer teach American history, but I always tried to make clear that "the" Civil Rights Movement was a product of the '50s, not the '60s, even though its climax came early in LBJ's presidency.
One reason I think people miss out on your second '60s as lasting into the '70s is because a traditional line of demarcation is the shooting at Kent State in the Spring of 1970. But you're right that the Leftist movement of the late 1960s did indeed carry into the '70s, and arguably even the '80s, when their control over the universities was largely secured.
Anyway, I love this analysis as it does much to show how the Left squandered their well-deserved desserts by changing tactics. And hopefully someone will take this warning to the Left because they appear to be assuming that all they have to do to win is to destroy Trump. But Trump is president today for one reason: Middle of the road Americans who may be sympathetic to the goals of the Left cannot stomach their tactics. (To be sure, MAGAns are also on track to turn off centrist voters with their behavior.)
No, it isn't just the tactics. I find many goals of the left repulsive - wokeness, anti-capitalism, anti-Zionism. Not everyone on the left, but too many.
My first reaction was to say that your comment was not relevant to what I said, but then I re-read mine and realized what you were commenting on. So let me clarify what I meant, and I'll understand if you still disagree.
I also find the three things you mention repulsive. But I don't consider "wokeness", for example, to be a goal. The GOAL which they profess to believe in is a society where people are all treated equally regardless of race, etc. Wokeness is a poorly chosen tactic that hopes to make that goal achievable. The fact that it ironically undoes the success we have achieved is lost on them.
Of course, this brings up another goal that you did not mention which might explain why the Left is so stubborn on the issue of tactics, even when we can see them working against their goals. Some observers believe that the far Left's ultimate goal is merely to possess power. Just as Marx prescribed a Dictatorship of the Proletariat as a necessary interregnum en route to Pure Communism, some on the Left (and not only the most Radical) tell us that we must discriminate today in order to achieve Racial Nirvana.
I do disagree to this extent, many on the left - far too many - do have "wokeness" as a goal. They demand that everything be seen through the lens of oppressed/oppressor and many university students have been indoctrinated by true believer professors. They believe "colorblind" in the sense used by MLK is a dirty word. Trump has knocked this back a good bit, to his credit. Whether you call it tactics, strategy, or goals, by their action you may know them.
"Whether you call it tactics, strategy, or goals, by their action you may know them."
On that we certainly agree.
Really good article. Non-violence came up in another article I read today, misleadingly entitled "Has Pacifism Doomed Tibet?" by Kapil Komireddi in Unherd. The details in the article showed quite plainly that the Dalai Lama's non-violence was a good choice given the insurmountable force of the Chinese government. I come from a family of protestors- and am a boomer. My parents protested racism, violence, wars. We agreed on all of it basically, but I was never sure if carrying signs actually helped create change. I'm still not. What does? Have the rules changed?
A well thought out argument and the readers comments point out the the fallacies and the strengths of the authors utterances. Martin Luther Kings has already been quoted by a reader and that has to be the cornerstone of the message of the Civil Rights movement without a shadow of a doubt. There is an argument that this Civil Rights Legislation movement was going to happen in America without the peace-march tactics employed by MLK which drew on the peaceful protests of Gandi in India to oust the British. But there is a good argument that both these peaceful protests hastened their objective, rather than being the instigation of such much needed changes to America and the UK colonial possessions. The 1960's saw the dissolution of the British Empire, which was a huge change in the way colonising powers viewed their overseas possessions. In a similar vein the passing of the Civil Rights Act had a sea changing effect on American Society. As the article says, the real problem with the success of The Civil Rights Act legislation, not only in its content that has emboldened the fringe groups Climate Alarmists, BLM and the like - some say heavily financed by those with Leftists beliefs - is to believe that the violence that has from time to time engulfed America from the 1960's onwards, would not just hasten but was absolutely necessary to enable societal change of attitudes. Academia and the elites used another tactic - the blatant attack on "free speech" coupled with the attempt to "cancel" and silence their critics so as to hasten change- the introduction of the resurgence of identity politics and the birth of the Woke ideology, in the wake of the failure of the Affirmative Action dogma, banned in Law by the SCOTUS. This is really the blame that can be firmly laid at the feet of the Leftists and separates leftist, Marxist, Socialistic beliefs from those of the Right, not just in America but through out the Western democracies. Thanks for the article.