Politics of Style, Politics as Style

Looking ahead to the following year’s presidential election, Andrew Sullivan declared in the December 2007 Atlantic: “Goodbye to all that.” By “that” Sullivan meant the fault lines opened in U.S. political culture during (some would say by) the 1960s. “If you are an American who yearns to finally get beyond the symbolic battles of the Boomer generation and face today’s actual problems,” Sullivan wrote, “Obama may be your man.” It was ironic that Barack Obama—whose rise was, as the candidate himself often pointed out, only possible in the context of the black freedom struggle, one of the major battles of the Sixties—should come to symbolize the potential to transcend that decade’s debates. But transcend them we have not. Presidential candidates, ordinary Americans, and historians are still grappling with the legacy of a decade that, in spite of efforts to close the book on it, remains contested. Sullivan’s goodbye was entirely premature.

Though historians often trace the origins of the modern conservative movement to Barry Goldwater’s 1964 presidential campaign, conservative commentators have long characterized the decade in which it took place as an unmitigated disaster. The “back” to which conservative voices have often wished to take the nation is an era before the 1960s. The “Greatest Generation” is their counterpoint to the Baby Boomers. Among Boomers on the left, however, the greatest generation is often considered to be their own—whose activism, music, and style loom large in popular culture and cultural memory today. The rise of millennials—with their aesthetic drawn as much from the 1890s as the 1960s—may be evidence of a new generational ambivalence toward the Sixties or of a creeping Boomer fatigue that, like Sullivan’s complaint, stands apart from conservatism’s Boomer demonology.

This spectrum of responses to the Sixties—celebration, condemnation, and ambivalence—is reflected in three recent books addressed to the culture and style of the “long 1960s.” George Cotkin’s Feast of Excess: A Cultural History of the New Sensibility is the most significant volume of the three and the one that exhibits the greatest admiration for its topic. Betty Luther Hillman’s Dressing for the Culture Wars: Style and the Politics of Self-Presentation in the 1960s and 1970s and Randy D. McBee’s Born to Be Wild: The Rise of the American Motorcyclist attend to the resistance aimed at the new cultural scene and the possibility, in the case of McBee’s bikers, that new styles could become wedded to retrograde ideas.

Cotkin, an emeritus professor of history at California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo whose well-regarded Existential America (2003) remains important reading for scholars of mid-century U.S. thought, in many ways picks up where that book ended. In Feast of Excess, Cotkin surveys the period 1952 to 1974 to trace the beginnings, growth, and ultimate establishment of a new cultural sensibility in which manifold artistic outputs revolved around the hot sun of excess. “Pleasure began to challenge the tragic for a central place among the cultural elite”; existentialist America became excessive America (p. 5).

Musicians, poets, painters, writers, actors, photographers, and others in this period celebrated “excess as a style, a way of seeing and presenting the world” that shared “a common core of subjects: violence, liberation (especially sexual), and madness” (p. 5). The New Sensibility—a term rendered in capital letters and traced in part to Morris Dickstein’s The Gates of Eden (1977)—went beyond offending the sensibilities of the squares. Such offense was simply a happy...