Lee Edwards joined Culture Editor Emily Jashinsky and Senior Editor Christopher Bedford to compare the modern upheaval of the far left to that of the 1960s. Edwards is a Distinguished Fellow in Conservative Thought at The Heritage Foundation and has been involved in center right politics since the 1960s since he co-founded the Young Americans for Freedom Foundation. He also served as the communications director for Barry Goldwater, has authored dozens of books, and has been called the “voice of the silent majority” by The New York Times.
Edwards said the behavioral differences are that the far left protesters in the late 1960s aimed to work within the constitutional order. Their legal goals were achieved through debate and discussion rather than an uncompromising, unproductive destruction of founding principles and physical representations of those principles.
Shelby Steele joined host Ben Domenech to discuss the state of the nation and the underlying historical causes into modern tensions. Steele is a renowned author, expert, and Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution specializing in the study of race relations, multiculturalism, and affirmative action.
Steele argued that today’s racial tensions are caused by an outgrowth of a change in racial understanding from the 1960s. The ’60s, he said, produced a “redemptive liberalism” in an effort to rid America of past experiences of racism, particularly on the left. The recent trend of corporations publicly declaring their support of Black Lives Matter, which reveals the incessant desire to be innocent of the past.
Amity Shlaes discusses the economic history of the 1960s and the efforts of Presidents Johnson and Nixon to eradicate poverty—the subjects of her just-published book, Great Society: A New History.
The 1960s were a momentous period, from the Civil Rights Movement to the Vietnam War, but Shlaes’s book focuses on the incredibly ambitious government programs of the era, which expanded the social safety net beyond anything contemplated before. Overall, the Great Society programs, Shlaes writes, came “close enough to socialism to cause economic tragedy.” Great Society is a powerful follow-up to her earlier book, The Forgotten Man, about the Great Depression and the 1930s.
Men and Women: Together in Perfect Harmony?
I first heard “Suzanne” on Judy Collins’ 1972 compilation album, Colors of the Day. In my youth, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, I was especially captured by the beauty of the voices of some songstresses. I remember getting to Judy Collins’ Fifth Album by way of Bob Dylan, whose songs and, shall we say vocal stylings, I appreciated.
[Fair warning, we have a few great recordings to work through here, any one of which may lead you down a rabbit hole. No, hopefully not that one! So, if you are too busy midweek, bookmark this post for your end-of-week wind-down.]
