Essay Example on 60s/70s US Domestic Politics: Protests, Activism, New Imagination

The 60s and 70s influenced major transitions in domestic politics in the United States. Towards the end of the 60s, the American culture that was mainly white and male-dominated disintegrated in different subcultures based on class, race, and gender. 1968 symbolized a process marked by protests and revolts, intense activism, demonstrations, and movements; a year that seemed to condense the unleashing of a different and radical imagination that set a new course for society as a whole (Locke and Wright; Lucks).

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The period was built by various nutrients and, as such, in its various structural processes and cultural projects, it was shared by the global collective imagination, which established the demand and the need for change, of new social actors. Within American liberalism, there was a shift in ideologies as the majority of the liberals forsake working-class politics. The trace left by the community of ideas that was consolidated in that process is still evident to this day, with different degrees of awareness and sense of its impact. The counterculture and the emergence of contending and avant-garde ways of making society, as well as the criticism of the dominant regimes in all political spectrums, are part of a huge tapestry, sometimes uniform and sometimes heterogeneous, that shapes and makes sense of the way as we translate this iconic moment into memory (Summer).

The 60s and 70s symbolize a new generation that emerges as a leading social actor, with its young people and new cultural codes, that while defining and confronting what existed as an exhausted option, they disputed and summoned the historical actor of change defined by socialist and Marxist thought: the proletarian class. Student movements become a constituent part of the new social movements, precisely on the threshold of the very breakdown of classical Marxist approaches to collective action. The questioning of the insufficiencies of economic reductionism that led to rejecting or neglecting other forms of social protest.

Search for other logics of action in the political, ideological, and cultural spheres that recognize the roots of individual and collective action and broad sources of identity, such as age status, ethnicity, and gender were also witnessed. Thus, the period was a stage in which new forms of symbolic action and new proposals of meaning for civil society unfolded, which gained strength along with other dimensions of instrumental action in the political arena (Aaron).

Works Cited

Anderson, Terry, and Joe P. Dunn. "The movement and the sixties: Protest in America from Greensboro to Wounded Knee." History: Reviews of New Books 24.1 (1995): 15-15.

Bonilla-Silva, Eduardo. White supremacy and racism in the post-civil rights era. Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2001.

Cherland, Summer. "The Romance and Tragedy of American History: Analyzing Narrative from Day One." The History Teacher 52.4 (2019).

Locke, Joseph L., and Ben Wright, eds. The American Yawp: A Massively Collaborative Open US History Textbook, Vol. 2: Since 1877. Stanford University Press, 2019.

Lucks, Daniel S. Selma to Saigon: The Civil Rights Movement and the Vietnam War. University Press of Kentucky, 2014.

Walk, Aaron. "History 105 History of the United States from 1877 to the Present Syllabus Spring 2019." (2019).