The terrible echo of 1968 America's wound has never healed

Donald Trump and Joe Biden were both in their twenties during the year that “shattered” America. On cable news, RFK Jr shared memories of his father’s assassination only hours after yesterday’s attempt on Trump’s life. We’re at the bookend of the Baby Boom generation.

In 1967, the year before America “shattered”, Joan Didion famously opened “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” with a placid description of the national mood. “It was not a country in open revolution. It was not a country under enemy siege,” she wrote. “It was the United States of America in the year 1967, and the market was steady and the GNP high, and a great many articulate people seemed to have a sense of high social purpose, and it might have been a year of brave hopes and national promise, but it was not, and more and more people had the uneasy apprehension that it was not.”

That apprehension turned out to be well-placed, and we’d be wise to consider the similarities: superficial comforts and cultural unrest. We’re not okay, regardless of the GNP.

More than half a century of high-tech liberalism, with all its idealism and material comforts, has only masked — and sometimes exacerbated — our age-old struggle against human nature. In an instant, personal grievances can become global ones, not merely confined to one community or another. A single evil person in Sandy Hook or Memphis can immediately make their insanity the whole country’s business, thrusting us into bitter debates about cities we’ll never visit with people we’ll never meet.

It’s shocking to see Biden cling to power in the face of his decline. It’s shocking to see Trump, bloodied by a bullet, walk off his sun-soaked stage with a fist in the air. It shocks us because we expect something different.

The year 1968 forged the two Baby Boomers now vying for the Oval Office, as well as the thousands donating to their candidacies and still controlling the C-Suites. On days like this it feels like the wound of that year was bandaged but never healed.

---

Emily Jashinsky is UnHerd‘s Washington D.C. Correspondent.

emilyjashinsky