I recently finished a so-called Plato course on a seminal period in American history … the period from 1960 to 1975. I might note that Plato courses are designed for adults from the Madison Wisconsin community who wish to pursue topics of interest to them. They are taught by knowledgeable volunteers with expertise in that substantive area. This particular course was led by an engaging octogenerian who taught at the university level throughout his career. Virtually all the students were old enough to have experienced the 1960s up close and personal.

No question. This tutorial of sorts was a personal tour through the most significant period of my life. Similarly, it appeared to be seminal to most course participants who are approaching (or have reached) their dotage. By the end of our tour through the past, the intimate and personal impact of those years became clearer to all of us.

In 1960, I was 16 years old. America was a largely conservative and settled society marked by homogeneous beliefs and an abiding  faith in government and in our essential institutions. In that year, I pretty much was an unthinking Catholic, working class kid who embraced the conventional beliefs of my religion, my class, and its associated (if suffocating) culture. At that time, some 75 to 77 percent of survey responders expressed  confidence in our elected leaders. We believed that government institutions could be trusted to do the right thing. 

I was different back then. For example, I seriously considered leaving my studies for the Priesthood to join the military during the height of the Cuban Missile crisis. I was, by any measure, a patriot. By 1975, all that had changed radically both at the societal and on a personal level. By then, the proportion of Americans expressing trust in our government had fallen to about 35 percent. Over the intervening decades, this erosion of faith has worsened. In recent years, the level of trust has bottomed out … to slightly over one-in-five Americans.

What happened during that period from 1960 to 1975? Why such a galactic shift in public confidence and personal dispositions? Perhaps the more cogent question is what didn’t happen? Below is a brief rundown of key events:

Key political assassinations. There were a few assassinations that we all remember well… John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King. They shocked our senses and disrupted our complacency. Other tragedies sometimes intruded on our peaceful outlook. Civil rights activists Medgar Evers and Malcom X, the three civil rights workers in Mississippi, and President Diem (our Authoritarian ally) in Vietnam come to mind.

The Violent End of Legal Apartheid. Though slavery had ended formally in a violent civil conflict that cost over 600,000 American lives, the legal oppression of Blacks continued for another century. The civil rights to enslaved African-Americans granted through the 13th amendment to the constitution (ratified in 1865) were soon thwarted by intimidation, violence, and segregation enforced by Jim Crow laws. Between 1960 and 1965, a series of blows against racial oppression finally erupted, often punctuated by outbursts of horrific resistance to integration by intransigent whites. The scars from this social turmoil would remain, never to be  completely erased from the country’s soul.

An Ill-considered Foreign War that We Lost. Our national obsession with Communism led the country to replace France’s role in southeast Asia after Ho Chi Min and the Vietnam nationalists successfully expelled their former colonial oppressors by the early to mid 1950s. Though a series of miscalculations and deceptions, the U.S. turned that civil conflict in SE Asia into America’s war premised on irrational fears about the inexorable march of the Red Menace. That insanity resulted in 2 to 3 million Vietnamese deaths, the killing fields of Cambodia, and some 58,000 American deaths. In the end, what likely would have happened at the beginning came to pass. The country was reunited in 1975 as US forces beat an embarrassing and humiliating retreat. More scars remained on the American soul.

An Explosion of Additional ‘Rights’ Movements. The racial civil rights movement was replicated by several other similar revolutions over the succeeding decades or so. Gay rights, LGBT rights, women’s rights, Native American rights, disability rights were just a few to explode on the scene. Each social revolution challenged the existing social order, leaving a detritus of anger and uncertainty to be dealt with in the future. As a background to these challenges to conventional norms, the counter-cultural movement explicitly mocked middle-class norms and values. A deep generational divide emerged.

Violence at the Community Level. The 60s started peacefully enough but was marked by rising community violence. Who can forget the beating of civil rights marchers at the Edmund Pettis bridge, the fire hoses and snarling police dogs attacking Blacks trying to register to vote in Alabama. Who could ignore the burning of dozens of Black churches and later, the emotional bursts of rage in Watts, Detroit, and scores of other cities after MLK had been gunned down. And who, during those years, can forget the rage expressed in reaction to this inexplicable war halfway around the globe that dragged on and on while consuming so many lives. I was in Wisconsin when the UW Physics building on campus was blown up one night. The widow of a researcher killed in that terrorist attack later worked at my research unit on campus. We forget now, but bombings, riots, and assassinations were commonplace during these tempestuous years.

A Restructuring of Our Political Landscape. Another monumental political shift took place during this era. The South had been rabidly Democratic since our Civil War. After all, it was the Republican Party of Abraham Lincoln that ended slavery through military power and then attempted to integrate southern society through federal force in the immediate post-civil war period. Even as the Democratic Party shifted to the left during the New Deal of the 1930s, southern conservatives hung in with the party that had rationalized slavery in the past, though the cracks in that devotion began to show by the 1948 presidential election. When Lyndon Johnson signed the 1964 and 1965 Civil Rights Bills, the old emotional political ties were shattered. Former southern Democrats and racially motivated conservatives flocked to an increasingly hard-right Republican Party. While bipartisanship had permitted (in fact, proved indispensable) to passage of the civil rights and anti-poverty measures of the Great Society, the two parties were soon organized around radically different normative dispositions and national visions. The cultural divisions at the basis of our sectional discord increasingly were embedded in our political apparati. The era of hyper- polarization had begun and, decades later, would get much worse. Remember Richard Nixon’s southern strategy?

A Presidential Scandal of the Highest Magnitude. Unless you are in the flower of youth or were living under a rock in the early 70s, you must remember the Watergate scandal. Minions working to reelect Richard Nixon broke into the Democratic National Committee offices located in the Watergate office building in D.C. They were looking for political dirt on Nixon’s likely political opponents. Unfortunately, for them, they got caught while trying to bug the Dem’s national offices. In retrospect, this seemed like the theater of the absurd since the leading Dem candidate, George McGovern, had no chance of unseating the incumbent. (In the 1970s, I worked with one of George’s daughters … Susan).

The evolving drama slowly unwound as two low-level reporters from the Washington Post never let up on the story, eventually tracking the bread crumbs directly to the heart of the White House and the President. Nixon did himself in by trying to cover up the nefarious deeds of his rabid followers. Back then, however, there remained standards in the Republican Party. Nixon had to resign when his impeachment became a virtual certainty.

Today, we look back on those times with a sense of disbelief, if not shock. Sometimes, our national agony appeared unreal in retrospect. I was in rural India  from 1967 to 69. In that era, without internet and cell phones, I might as well have been on the other side of the moon. The news that reached us isolated Peace Corps volunteers seemed unreal at the time, like the police riots at the 1968 Democratic presidential convention in Chicago. I can recall talking with my fellow volunteers as we wondered if the country was falling apart, literally disintegrating. What would be left upon our return?

In 1975, I would be starting my career at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. I was nothing like the young man who got on a Greyhound bus in 1962 to enter the Maryknoll Semimary in Glen Ellyn Illinois. In those dozen or so years, I had evolved from an unquestioning believer in America and her moral superiority to being an unapologetic liberal, if not an outright leftist. I even joined the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) while in college (before those idealistic kids  descended into nihilistic insanity). I also formed and led the student group in college that opposed the Vietnam War. We called ourselves the Student Action Committee (SAC). That cleverly was like the Strategic Air Command (SAC) … those guys who flew 24-7 to respond to any Russkie attack on us.

All this led to one of my more humorous early experiences. The draft caught up with me in the early 1970s when I was required to take my physical exam in Milwaukee. During that fun day, I encountered a question on some paperwork that asked if I had ever belonged to an organization that advocated the overthrow of the American government. I asked the sergeant overseeing this part of the process if SDS qualified as such a nefarious group. ‘You bet your ass it does,’ was his reply. So, I put YES in response to that query.

That got me grilled for several hours by three uniformed guys from military intelligence. In my view, this entire drama was hysterical. At one point, I recall one asking if I would fight any and all enemies of the United States. I gazed at the ceiling (as if I were taking this nonsense seriously) before suggesting the following in return … first, I believe we should define what we mean by the term ‘enemy.’ Alas, I’ve always been a bit of a wise ass but, all in all, it proved to be a most enjoyable afternoon.

How did this dramatic personal metamorphosis in perspective come about in the first instance? In part, it emerged via endless conversations with my fellow students along with voracious readings to satisfy my inquisitive mind. Beyond those analytical dissections of the world about us, I was consumed with an insatiable curiosity about things. I realized I needed to figure things out for myself. Merely absorbing input and beliefs absent rigorous inquiry seemed insufficient, if not lazy. I could no longer simply accept the givens of my youth.

I don’t recall any authority figures (professors) attempting to influence my thinking. Certainly, no one brainwashed me. When I was on the other side of the podium as a university academic, I recall trying to be rigorously fair. I wanted to refine my student’s ability to think critically, not shape how or what they thought about things. That is precisely why MAGA types hate our research universities so much. They help our youth to think for themselves.

During my critical college tears, I recall learning facts that shook my naivete to the core. I learned that our leaders overthrew elected regines elsewhere merely because we found them inconvenient (like the government in Iran in 1953). In my head, our government slowly lost its innocent glow as I read about the authoritarian dictators we supported simply because they were on our side. Slowly, then with a rush, the patina of unquestioning devotion to what had become a tarnished set of ideals fell away. The answer to my military intelligence inquisitors during my draft physical was clear. No, I would not fight any and all so-called enemies. I first would decide for myself who the enemy was. My wise-ass response to their query turned out, indeed, to be a heartfelt conviction.

On a macro scale, a similar process was happening across the land. Slowly, more people realized that we were dragged into a horrific conflict in Vietnam based on distortions and fabrications by our leaders in Washington. People could see that we paid homage to high ideals like equality and opportunity for all while, at the same time, beating and lynching minorities for simply trying to vote. People came to realize that even the highest officials in the land, those in the Oval Office, betrayed the public trust merely to secure and maintain power. These were devastating epiphanies to so many raised in the penumbra of patriotic illusions during the years after WWII. These indeed were painful realizations. For many in my generation, for me personally, it was as if a band aide had been ripped off, leaving behind a deep and ugly scar.

Today, so many decades later, we all have retreated to our own truths. We absorb what we believe from our own boutique information sources that comport  closely to our normative priors. There is little to unify us in a common culture or set of beliefs … should I say illusions? In the end, I’m not totally certain if this new world is better or worse than the vanilla, illusory world of my youth. All I can say is that the process of getting here was, indeed, painful. Still, I am desperately glad I had the ability and opportunity to make that journey. It was worth it.