The ‘60s claimed to be about liberation. In fact, they were much more about the rise of a new ruling class of experts, managers, and media people.

The Irony of ’60s “Liberation”:

 The Age of Aquarius Ushers in a Ruling Class of “Experts”

by James Kalb

It has been half a century since the inauguration of John F. Kennedy and the opening of the Second Vatican Council began the period we call the Sixties. Those were heady times. In America there would be a New Frontier, in the Church a new springtime and even a new Pentecost. The windows of the Church would be opened to let in light and air, and President Kennedy told us there would be a man on the moon before the decade was out.

Man did land on the moon, but otherwise very little worked out as planned. Even the position of minorities, usually considered the great triumph of the period, improved less than it seemed. Equal opportunity legislation provided an initial boost, but in a few years the benefits were increasingly outweighed by other consequences of ‘60s-style liberation. Crime and family breakdown increasingly weighed on the lives of those at the bottom, and by the mid ‘70s the decades-long rise of African Americans out of poverty had come to an end.

The remarkable thing about the ‘60s was the radical opposition between what was expected and what happened. The politics of the New Frontier soon became the politics of utopian fantasy set against a televised backdrop of riots, assassinations, and war. Pope Paul VI was driven to speak of the “smoke of Satan” entering the Church, and her opening to the modern world became less a new Pentecost than absorption by secular, political, and mundane concerns.

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