In an essay in First Things titled The Sixties Again and Again George Weigel points to six events or "moments" which occurred in that lamentable decade which forever changed this nation and its people:
Taken together, these six moments suggest that something of enduring consequence happened to liberal politics, and thus to American political culture, during the Sixties. A politics of reason gave way to a politics of emotion and flirted with the politics of irrationality; the claims of moral reason were displaced by moralism; the notion that all men and women were called to live lives of responsibility was displaced by the notion that some people were, by reason of birth, victims; patriotism became suspect, to be replaced by a vague internationalism; democratic persuasion was displaced by judicial activism. Each of these consequences is much with us today. What one thinks about them defines the substratum of the politics of 2008, the issues-beneath-the-issues.
You'll have to read Weigel's essay to find out what those six moments were.
If reading about the sixties is more than you can think you can bear, take heart, it could be worse. The article could have been about the seventies. Perhaps the only decade in America's history more nightmarish than the sixties was the one which came immediately after it.
Roe v. Wade, forced busing, Watergate, mile long lines at the pumps, the explosive growth of crime, government entitlements and divorce, My Lai and our ignominious retreat from southeast Asia, the string of court decisions which made many of our schools all but ungovernable, and on and on. For a good synopsis of this miserable but strangely fascinating period in our nation's history see David Frum's How We Got Here.
RLC