The ideals first fought for in the 1960s are under siege: Is it time to take to the streets?

It was not one revolution, but many simultaneous ones. The 1960s were a turning point — a generational rupture, the birth of something new. There was the explosion of pop culture and counterculture, the protests of a well-educated post-war youth looking for its place in society, the Vietnam War, the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, the missile crisis, the trip to the Moon, the Stonewall riots, the birth control pill and sexual liberation.

It was a time of activism: pacifism, feminism, the struggle against racial segregation, coming out, and anti-nuclear environmentalism. And there was May 1968, which resonated from Prague to Mexico, but had its epicenter in Paris. The ultra-conservative backlash that the planet is experiencing today, with its fury against the concepts of equality and inclusion, its new imperialism and its focus on dismantling the state, seems to be a defeat of all that 1968 represented, the pinnacle of a revolutionary decade. But the changes that 1968 set in motion will not be easily erased.

To understand what happened then, the prolific British director Lyndy Saville, who specializes in history and pop culture, brought out two documentaries, available on Amazon Prime and on YouTube. They are called 1967: The Summer of Love and 1968: A Year of War, Turmoil and Beyond. She made them in 2017 and 2018, the 50th anniversary of the events chronicled, combining archival footage with commentary by mostly British experts who lived through those years.

Watching the two together makes it possible to observe the leap that a single generation made from hippy idealism to barricades and protests in a matter of months. Parallels are drawn between cultural, social and political movements, and the footage dwells on the fashion, cinema, television and advertising that reflected the spirit of the times.

1967 focuses on that explosion of flower power, psychedelic drugs and hedonism experienced among the young people of San Francisco and London, seasoned with good music in a glorious year for rock. In 1968, activism gathered momentum, targeting multiple issues including the war, capitalism, institutional racism, and the political classes. The Vietnam War and the assassinations of left-wing leaders lit the fuse. A generation gap became ever more glaring: parents could not stand to see their sons take on certain female aesthetic roles or their daughters feeling liberated. Many adults at the time feared their way of life would be destroyed.

More ambitious and in the same vein is the series produced by Tom Hanks for CNN in 2013 called The Sixties. The story starts out fast-paced, but then slows to give us time to digest what we’ve seen. If Saville’s two documentaries tend to look at the world from the perspective of London, The Sixties focuses on the U.S.

The seventh of the 10 episodes explains how the hippy movement came out of the beatniks and the Greenwich Village folk scene, through the crazy summer of 1967 in Haight-Ashbury, to the onset of decadence shortly after Woodstock. The eighth episode focuses on 1968, but has a narrow perspective: it is more focused on politics, on a turbulent and bloody election year in the U.S. than on what was happening on the streets, with no mention of what was going on anywhere except in Chicago (which was host to the tumultuous Democratic National Convention), let alone in other countries.

It is worth remembering that 1968 was a difficult year. It was certainly a political failure, not only for its extremists. What followed was a reestablishment of the conservative order, with leaders like Nixon in the U.S. and Pompidou in France appealing to “the silent majority.” Then came the oil crisis, and later another right-wing wave — that of Reagan and Thatcher. So, the hippie ideal has experienced various crises, starting in 1969, when Charles Manson and his followers murdered Sharon Tate, when Hells Angels rained violence on the Altamont festival and Brian Jones, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin and Jim Morrison, all aged 27, died due to the excesses of the times. “The dream is over,” sang John Lennon in God (1970).

But despite all the setbacks, the revolutions of the 1960s seemed to have shifted the cultural war — the questionable term used to describe the ideological battle over social values — in their favor. They introduced secularization, the end of racial segregation, the emancipation of women, the right to divorce and abortion, respect for freedom and sexual diversity, the construction of one’s own image and identity, inclusion — all the things that are now under siege from the far right. Currently, we are witnessing solidarity and egalitarian values being demonized by the major powers, and the so-called strong men are back.

In reality, the culture wars have their roots much further back than the 1960s. Otherwise, feudalism and slavery would never have been abolished, nor would the suffragettes have won women’s right to vote. Perhaps it has always been a case of light against darkness, the Enlightenment and the Counter-Enlightenment. The question is whether we will need to take to the streets again.

Sign up for our weekly newsletter to get more English-language news coverage from EL PAÍS USA Edition