"More an End Than a Beginning"

"After les évènements in France in May came June's parliamentary elections, sweeping General De Gaulle's rightist party to power in a landslide victory. After the Prague Spring and the promise of 'socialism with a human face,' the tanks of the Soviet-run Warsaw Pact overran Czechoslovakia. In Latin America, the Guevarist guerrilla trend was everywhere repulsed, to the benefit of the right. In the US, the 'silent majority' roared. As the divided Democratic Party lay in ruins, Richard Nixon's Southern strategy turned the Party of Lincoln into the heir to the Confederacy. As the right consolidated around an alliance of Christian evangelicals, racial backlashers, and plutocrats, the left was unable, or unwilling, to fuse its disparate sectors. The left was maladroit at achieving political power; it wasn't even sure that was its goal."

At The New York Review of Books, Todd Gitlin remembers 1968.