Henry Kissinger, in his fine book, Leadership: Six Studies in World Strategy, captures the essence of the 1960s cultural and social revolution, not just in France, but in the western world generally:
In May 1968, a student revolt that grew into a general protest-one expression of a Europe-wide movement-consumed much of Paris. Students occupied the Sorbonne, where they festooned windows and columns with Maoist posters. They erected barricades in the Latin Quarter and engaged in street battles with police. Everywhere graffiti proclaimed the protesters’ anarchic sensibilities: “It is forbidden to forbid.”
“It is forbidden to forbid.” This pithy phrase encapsulates the core belief of the culture warriors of the 1960s across the United States as well as Europe. Paradoxically, the phrase combines both utopian and nihilistic visions of some prelapsarian world which, in the addled minds of some, dispense with personal responsibility, family, social bonds and a constrained and tragic view of the human condition. It is this pathological development, and its impact on American society, culture, and politics, even to this day, that is the subject of Timothy S. Goeglein’s compelling book, Stumbling Toward Utopia: How the 1960s Turned Into a National Nightmare and How We Can Revive the American Dream.
Goeglein pinpoints 1968 as the historical moment that brought us to “the beginning of America’s version of the Cold War, in which we could become divided as a nation, ideologically, spiritually, and eventually geographically. In many ways, it has never ended.” Assassinations, the Vietnam War and
