“What is it about the decade of the 1960s that makes it age so badly?” wondered Hedy Weiss last Sunday, beginning her Sun-Times review of Sweet Charity, a Broadway hit in 1966 but a dud today. Revivals of Hair don’t work either, even as nostalgia. The 60s are an era Americans haven’t figured out how to remember.
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In awe of this “Great Backlash,” Thomas Frank writes: “It matters not at all that the forces that triggered the original ‘silent majority’ back in Nixon’s day have long since disappeared; the backlash roars on undiminished, its rage carrying easily across the decades. The confident liberals who led America in those days are a dying species. The New Left, with its gleeful obscenities and contempt for the flag, is extinct altogether.”
Frank’s project, he explains, is to examine the astonishing backlash “by focusing on a place where the political shift has been dramatic: my home state of Kansas, a reliable hotbed of leftist reform movements a hundred years ago that today ranks among the nation’s most eager audiences for bearers of backlash buncombe.”
Though none of us knows for sure, we all suspect that Michael Lefkow and Donna Humphrey were murdered by the followers or ideological kin of neo-Nazi Matthew Hale, now awaiting sentencing for ordering a hit on Judge Lefkow. Such killers are comprehensible, if barely, in the America described by Frank. He writes at length about “malign anti-intellectualism,” notes the defeat of a moderate Senate candidate with a famous Kansas name a few years ago after voters began getting mysterious phone calls telling them that “Docking is a Jew,” and nods at the national “God Hates Fags” crusade of the Reverend Fred Phelps of Topeka.
Later I wandered the halls of the Monadnock Building, where Michael Lefkow had hung his shingle. It’s a wonderful building I’ve thought of for a long time as a place the 60s went off to live in. I wrote down some of the names on the doors: Amnesty International USA, the Trust for Public Land, Women in Franchising, the Partnership to End Homelessness, the Coalition of Limited English Speaking Elderly, Chicago Rehab Network, the Wetlands Initiative. This was an attack on the country, I’d told myself at St. Luke’s, but not only because Joan is a federal judge. This was an attack on American decency.
