This will be the first time you have ever encountered this idea.
In an earlier blog I pointed out that the peak historic point for Lefty thinking and Lefty projects was 1959. I now want to explain why the Left has been in decline from that point on.
I identify two minor reasons: the beatniks and the Civil rights movement. And the single major reason: the vast hippy generation. Over 20 million young people.
The beatniks were the young generation of the 1950s. What is interesting about them is that they did not borrow the socialist pro-state theology of their predecessors and the dominant view of the world at the time. They created a world of nihilism. It was mostly black, dirty clothing, beards, poetry and perennial wandering. I knew nearly all the prominent beatniks because they stopped at my dormitory in the mid-50s at the University of Chicago.
So here was a new generation that did not accept the previous Lefty ideology.
At the same time, the civil rights movement in the United States was beginning and spreading. It's greatest power came from black churches in the South and Jews in Northern law schools. It was a movement against local government that was unable to get support from any government. It was a non-statist local moral movement. Again it did not draw support from classic Lefty ideology. It had a few Lefty ideologues as hangers-ons. In fact one of its targets were the many Lefty racist labor unions. Nearly all labor unions were segregated, everywhere in the U.S.The greatest shock to the global lefty success of 1959 was the emergence of the hippies in roughly 1965. Here was an entire new generation that numbered in the millions, tens of millions by the 1970s, who were in complete open rebellion against everything their parents stood for. The hippies were for drugs and sex and music. They, we, believed we could create an entirely new society based on honesty, cooperation, new personal visions and pleasure.
That sure as hell had nothing to do with Lefty statist ideology dominant in the world. From that point, 1963, on the Left was doomed.
The hippies were antithetical to the Left because they believed in creating their own new world of new foods, new health, new books, new houses, new schools, a new green lifestyle, new honesty and new personal visions with the help of drugs and music. I was there as you can see from reading many of my hippie blogs. And the Whole Earth Catalog.
The hippies brought a global end to the Lefty vision that began with the French Revolution. The hippies traveled everywhere on the planet and carried an anti-state pro-individual ideology to the ends of the earth. They even had a guidebook: Lonely Planet.
The hippies killed the Left.