Os Guinness - The Dust of Death: The Sixties Counterculture and How It Changed America Forever

I am deeply honored, though somewhat surprised, at the republication of The Dust of Death: The Sixties Counterculture and How It Changed America Forever. It was my first attempt at writing. To many people today, the 1960s are ancient history, and neither history nor the past registers strongly with the present-obsessed myopia of our time. Yet the past is always the key to the present, and the truth is that no one can understand the present crisis in the United States and the West without understanding the sixties. Paradoxically, it is even said now that the further we get from the sixties, the larger we can see that their cultural influence looms.

Western civilization is in decline, and its lead society, the American republic, is as deeply divided as at any time since just before the Civil War. But why? Is it simply a clash between the coastals (New York and California) and the heartlanders (the Midwest and the South), or between the nationalists and populists (President Trumps forgotten people) and the globalists (of the George Soros-like Western elites)? There are multiple causes of the deep and bitter polarization, but the deepest of all has been almost completely overlooked, and the sixties provided a massive thrust forward in its development. The ultimate source of the current divisions in America is between those who understand the Republic, and above all freedom, from the perspective of the American Revolution and those who understand the Republic and freedom from the perspective of the French Revolution and its heirs and their ideas.

Stop to reflect on ideas such as progressivism, postmodernism, political correctness, identity and tribal politics, multiculturalism, social constructionism, the sexual revolution, the recent rage for socialism, or the leftward drift of the Democrat party and many in the media. It quickly becomes clear that these ideas have little or nothing to do with 1776 and the American Revolution and its views of freedom. Rather, they are rooted in ideas that come directly or indirectly from 1789 and the French Revolution, and behind it the French Enlightenment and its later heirs such as Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, Antonio Gramsci, Wilhelm Reich, Herbert Marcuse, Saul Alinsky and Michel Foucault.

Hence the significance of the 1960s and its expression of the revolutionary faith that has flowed down from the French Enlightenment and the French Revolution. The seismic sixties, with their youthquake (Christopher Booker), the making of a counter culture (Theodore Roszak) and the greening of America (Charles Reich), was the decade when the radical ideas first broke through into mainstream American thinking and life. Even more importantly, the sixties were the years when many of the seeds of todays most radical ideas were sown, only to flower more recently in their most destructive forms.