Nineteen-sixty eight was the pivotal year of the postwar era. Before 1968, American power in the world was confidently deployed and greatly respected, if not admired. After 1968, America started down the long slope of self-inflicted decadence which even Ronald Reagan’s rhetoric was unable to reverse. Before 1968, Americans, with few exceptions, saw their country moving forward on a broad avenue of social and economic progress toward general affluence and equal opportunity. After 1968, Americans of the political elite began believing in group rights and equality of result. More important, before 1968 Americans believed in containing the Soviet Union and its allies—the forces known by the now-quaint term “world Communism. ”So seriously did they take this struggle that, for example, they built fallout shelters and maintained a system of air defense of the continental United States. After 1968, Americans in significant numbers came to distrust their own polity and culture to such a degree that they could no longer conceive of any external enemy as dangerous or evil as the enemy within. As a consequence, they abandoned the struggle with “world Communism,” which had come to be seen as merely an illusion fostered by the very same domestic enemy. Americans, always uneasy with the vast power their country possessed, began establishing barrier after barrier to the exercise of that power, as though it were the greatest source of evil in the world.

The effects of 1968 do not stop there, however. They extend to the intellectual and academic agenda,