Instapundit » Blog Archive » WOODSTOCK, 50 YEARS ON: At Power Line, Paul Mirengoff finds PBS “Misrepresenting Woodstock.” Ra…

WOODSTOCK, 50 YEARS ON: At Power Line, Paul Mirengoff finds PBS “Misrepresenting Woodstock.”

Rather than pick apart the content, I’ll just focus on the title. Woodstock did not “define a generation.” Not even close.

The PBS program tied Woodstock to the radical politics of the era. That’s fair. The festival celebrated the “counter-culture,” of which radical leftism was a key element.

But radical leftism did not define “a generation” — at least not the generation of Woodstock. In the first presidential election after the festival, about half the members of that generation voted for Richard Nixon. As the Woodstock generation came into its own, it elected Ronald Reagan twice by landslides, and Reagan’s successor by a comfortable margin.

This was followed by two terms of a center-left president and two terms of a center-right one. Not until 2008, 39 years after Woodstock when that generation was on the wane, did America elect a president as far left as the one who had departed the year of the festival.

If I recall correctly, there was at least one reference to Reagan on the Woodstock stage. He was referred to as Ronald Ray-gun (maybe during Joan Baez’s segment). The Gipper also appears in the PBS retrospective. He is seen denouncing radicals during his time as governor.

So it’s ironic, I guess, that Ronald Reagan, not Woodstock, is the political legacy of the Woodstock generation.

Even at the time of the festival, its politics didn’t reflect the politics of young Americans. I’ve already noted Nixon’s standing in 1972.

In the 1960s, there really was a mainstream culture, and a much smaller counterculture. By the end of the following decade, as David Frum wrote in his history of the 1970s, their New Left worldview made massive inroads into the existing American culture. To the point where, as Nate Hochman write today at NRO, “The revolution of the 1960s isn’t dead; it has been fully realized, to the great confusion of its proponents:”

This is not [concert promoter Michael] Lang’s first attempt at resuscitating the utopian bliss of the original Woodstock. He organized revival concerts in 1994 and 1999, but they were plagued by a host of rape and sexual-assault allegations, violence, looting, fires, and the burning of American flags. In both, the original Woodstock’s atmosphere of rapturous love was replaced with petulant anger — singers such as Joan Baez were exchanged for bands such as Rage Against the Machine — and its communitarian, cost-free idealism was replaced with the corporate cynicism of $150 tickets and $12 pizza slices.

The variety of obstacles that Lang has encountered is hardly symbolic of an energized mass sociopolitical movement like the one that fueled the original Woodstock. Indeed, the collapse of Lang’s vision is not attributable to any one logistical issue, but is rather indicative of the larger corporatization of the ’60s counterculture that Woodstock represented.

How does one restore the revolutionary spirit to a revolution that has already been won? The “New Left” that Woodstock embodied — a coalition of radical cultural and political movements of the time — has ascended from the streets to the universities. Its contemporary proponents are more likely to write for the New York Times than for the hand-printed underground publications of old. Along the way, they have in many cases become parodic antitheses of their former selves, warmly embracing the establishment in opposition to which they once defined themselves.

At the conclusion of a post today titled “America’s Nervous Breakdown,” Rod Dreher writes:

So: what you will never hear our media say is that all these things that the left today promotes — radical individual liberty, sexual autonomy, the deconstruction of family and sex, the exaltation of anti-white, anti-male tribalism, the destruction or denaturing of Christian religion — are driving us very quickly to the brink. They seem to believe the same old discredited Rousseau-ish nonsense that insists that we will be free only when all the chains to the full expression of individual will are cast aside.

Well, guess what: we’ve got that kind of society. Happy now?

Having “gotten back to the [Rousseauian] garden,” as Joni Mitchell’s song about Woodstock went, perhaps the concert documentary that Warner Brothers released in 1970 should have ended with the concluding line of another Warner product two years later, when at the end of The Candidate, the would-be Democratic senator played by Robert Redford wins his first election, and then asks his grizzled political advisor, played by Peter Boyle, “What do we do now?”