Will the 2020s Recapitulate the 1960s?

The attempted assassination of Donald Trump has brought to mind a number of parallels between the 2020s and the 1960s that are worth considering, contextualizing the turbulent time our country now finds itself in.

The foremost examples, of course, in light of the July 13 shooting at a Trump rally in Pennsylvania, are the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy, his brother (and presidential candidate) Robert Kennedy, and Martin Luther King, Jr.

A related parallel is the rapid (in JFK’s case) and almost instantaneous (in that of Trump) rise of “deniers.” Following the immediate arrest of Kennedy assassin Lee Harvey Oswald (who was in turn killed by Jack Ruby two days later), a vocal minority insisted that Oswald couldn’t have done the job alone but had to have one or more accomplices shooting at the President from a hill overlooking the Kennedy cavalcade route (the famous “grassy knoll”).

Although the Warren Commission report confirming that Oswald was the sole assassin contained some lacunae, noted by the respected journalist Edward Jay Epstein in his book Inquest, no persuasive evidence was ever brought forward refuting its chief finding.

Thanks to social media, it took only moments for conspiracy theories to begin circulating on the internet after Trump was shot. Some on the left immediately claimed that the attempt to kill the candidate was a phony event set up to make the 45th President look like a hero. In reality, they baselessly argued, the shooter (soon dispatched by the Secret Service so he couldn’t be interrogated) had been hired to generate a near-miss that would just strike the candidate’s ear. (Had Trump and his advisers really been willing to stake his life on the confidence that an amateur marksman could be relied on to strike his ear rather than entering his brain, they would have merited institutionalization even more than the conspiracy theorists.)

In both the Kennedy and Trump denials, a partisan motivation is clearly at work. In Kennedy’s case, the rise of some radical right-wing activists and the abuse heaped on U.N. representative Adlai Stevenson on a previous visit to Texas had predisposed many Americans, including members of the mass media, to assume that an attack on the President must have come from the right.

Once it emerged that Oswald was a Communist who had recently spent time in Moscow, however, any political explanation of his act was immediately downplayed, and he was dismissed as an apolitical kook, or else a tool of a larger, perhaps “conservative,” conspiracy. (An excellent study of how members of the mainstream American left used the assassination to turn JFK into a liberal icon and ostensible “martyr for civil rights” while also promoting further exercises in conspiratorial thinking is James Piereson’s 2013 book Camelot and the Cultural Revolution.)

In Trump’s case, the deniers quickly resorted to outright lies. For instance, as the Associated Press reported on July 16, one X post the previous night used a photo of Trump from a September 17, 2022, rally showing no injury to his ear to “prove” that he had never been shot on July 13. As of the following day, the post had already received some 40,000 likes and 13,200 shares. Even when Trump made his triumphant appearance at the Republican National Convention on July 15, some bitter opponents claimed that the bandage on his ear was a fake.

But there are other significant parallels between the 1960s and the present decade as well. Both eras were characterized by violent protests, some ostensibly in the name of the rights of black people and others protesting a war (Vietnam in the 1960s, Israel’s response to Hamas’s terror attack today.)

It remains to be seen whether the riots that took place in Chicago’s Grant Park during the Democratic convention of 1968 will be mirrored when the Democrats meet in the same city next month. Nor can it be known whether an elderly and obviously worn-out President Joe Biden will finally be persuaded to emulate the course honorably taken by his predecessor Lyndon Johnson and back out of seeking re-election. Johnson, of course, was a much younger man in 1968 than Biden is now, but felt himself unable to endure mounting opposition over the war from within his party any longer. While possessed of a considerable ego, LBJ was less determined than Biden to hold on to his office regardless of the cost to his party or his country.

I would suggest, however, that the connections between the turmoils of the 1960s and the present are not entirely accidental. Relevant evidence is contained in two books authored by the distinguished Heritage Foundation scholar Mike Gonzalez: The Plot to Change America: How Identity Politics Is Dividing the Land of the Free (2020) and NextGen Marxism (2024).

In both well-documented studies (the latter co-authored by Katherine Cornell Gorka), Gonzalez explains how the seeds of the far-left movements that are tearing America apart today – “identity politics” (promoting the advancement of the interests of rival ethnic and racial groups, generating group conflict rather than civic harmony) and the quest to achieve a Marxist utopia designed to appeal to “idealistic” but undereducated college youth – were planted in the 1960s. Among the chief villains in the former project were officials of wealthy “philanthropies” like the Ford Foundation – joined most notoriously today by billionaire George Soros, the largest financier of the violent Hamas protests.

But above all, the 1960s were the era in which far-left academics like Herbert Marcuse, a former member of Germany’s Marxist Frankfurt School, and numerous others trained college students who would undertake what German activist Rudi Dutschke termed a “long march through the institutions,” guiding subsequent generations who, through their positions in academia, foundations, and government, would in turn train ever-more radicalized generations so as to undermine America’s most fundamental political, economic, and social systems.

While abandoning the Marxist project of inciting a violent revolution by the “oppressed” proletariat (who turned out to be far too contented with the liberty, security, prosperity, and opportunities for advancement America offered to give them up), the “NextGen Marxists” shared with Marx the vision of a totally reconstituted human nature. As with Marx, this would entail overthrowing representative, constitutional government; economic freedom; religion; the family; and the objective pursuit of knowledge. And as Marcuse made clear, the authoritarian means espoused by Marx in order to achieve the Communist paradise might well be required, withdrawing “tolerance” from opposed views. (Here, we note a clear anticipation of today’s “cancel culture.”)

But while the 1960s “radicals” scorned the culturally backward workers, they didn’t renounce violence: the late years of that decade saw the birth of the murderous Weathermen, who killed a number of victims and were prevented from killing a lot more when a bomb they were preparing in a New York townhouse blew up in their faces.

Interestingly, two prominent leaders of the Weathermen (or “Weather Underground”) were Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn. On September 11, 2001, of all days, the New York Times published an interview with Ayerson, his newly published autobiography, in which he expressed no regret for the bombings, but wished he’d committed more. Of all things, Ayers (who trained a young Barack Obama in “community organizing,” though the future President tried to obscure that connection during his 2008 campaign) wound up as a professor of education at the University of Illinois, with his wife a law professor.

Furthering the connection between the 1960s and today, Ayers and Dohrn reared Chesa Boudin (named after Joanne Chesimard, the cop murderer who had fled to Castro’s Cuba) after his parents were sentenced to lengthy jail terms for the 1981 Brink’s robbery in Rockland County, New York, in which a guard and two policemen were murdered. (The robbery was a joint operation between ex-Weatherpersons and the so-called Black Liberation Army.) Chesa went on to attend Yale Law School and get himself elected district attorney in San Francisco on a “progressive” platform of eliminating cash bail, reducing the jail population, and “holding police to account.”

So terrible were the consequences of Boudin’s policies – rampant looting of stores (with the looters going unpunished), filth-ridden homeless encampments, widespread public drug use – that “liberal” San Franciscans removed him from office after 2-1/2 years through a 2022 recall.

In one of Marx’s silliest but most widely quoted, aphorisms, he observed that “history repeats itself, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.” Truer to the mark was the observation attributed to Mark Twain that while history doesn’t repeat itself, it often “rhymes.” Today, amidst family breakdown, educational decay, mandatory “DEI” commitments as a condition of employment, indoctrinating schoolkids to question and possibly remake their “assigned genders,” a weakening of both patriotism and religion, ostensibly democratic attacks by prominent academics on our Constitutional system, and increasingly violent rhetoric on all sides of the political spectrum, we are hearing a loud rhyme of the 1960s, as well as the intellectual precursors of that decade’s radicals.

Let us pray that it isn’t too late to alter the rhyme. If even the San Franciscans can cry out, with Elvis, “Too Much!,” surely the rest of us can.

David Lewis Schaefer is a Professor Emeritus of Political Science at College of the Holy Cross.