5 Feet of Fury

‘1969: The Death of Modernism’ (video)

Be sure to watch Ed Driscoll’s excellent new Silicon Grafitti video:

The 1960s began with a presidential election between conservative cold warrior Richard Nixon…and the surprisingly conservative cold warrior John F. Kennedy. In terms of the similarity between the two candidates, and the public they represented, this was a high point in national unity.

The assassination of JFK began a process that ultimately shattered that unity. During the course of the 1960s, Americans witnessed the split between the liberalism of FDR, Harry Truman, JFK and LBJ, and the rise of the  punitive New Left that emerged in the wake of President Kennedy’s assassination.

As we explore in the latest edition of Silicon Graffiti, the alpha and the omega of those two forms of American liberalism came less than a month apart, in the summer of 1969…

RELATED:

“The Great Relearning” and the return to romantic primitivism, embodied by Woodstock