The Transition

The Great Awokening and the end of the cultural revolution

Imagine a society where morality enforcers patrol what publishers allow to be printed. Where risqué comedians have their venues cancelled. A society in which a religious magisterium ruins the lives of people with heretical views. Where satirists studiously avoid offending the powers that be and stay clear of issues of public morality. Where gender non-conforming children are forced to live as the opposite sex because of society’s rigid view about masculine and feminine behaviour. A society where racial segregation is permitted, even celebrated, if it is for the benefit of the favoured group. Where offensive and blasphemous views might even land you in jail.

This described much of the English-speaking world before the social revolution of the 1960s changed everything. Following the huge moral upheaval of the early 21st century, it also describes the English-speaking world of the 2020s. After decades of transition, we’ve settled seamlessly into a new age of rigid morality and censorship, much of it patrolled by the same sort of moralisers who once prevented teenagers going to the dance or listening to music with risqué lyrics. The cultural revolution of the 1960s, the movement that promised sexual, political and intellectual freedom, has transformed into something that is much more conservative. That revolution is now over, and as with most revolutions, the immediate period of liberty has given way as the former radicals have come to police moral norms and suppress controversial ideas.

In many ways the American-led Anglophone culture of the 2020s has more in common with the 1950s than it did with the 1990s and 2000s, a period that now appears outrageously provocative and transgressive. Numerous television shows, comedies and films that could only have been made after 1970 are now once again impossible, at least without heavy editing, just as they were before censorship rules were abandoned.

In a similar way, many practises from before the sexual revolution have now returned in new guises. Censorship boards are back in publishing, six decades after the Lady Chatterley trial, in the form of sensitivity readers. Comedians are banned from playing in small towns for fear that their acts will offend. Other signs of a new conformism have arisen, including the expectation that people should conform with the ‘values’ of their employers, and the support of younger voters when corporations sack deviant thinkers.

The 21st century has seen growing intolerance towards people with dissenting views, as well as support for the idea that they should not be allowed to voice them. This represents a generational shift, with younger people – especially in the US – far less tolerant than their elders, especially compared to parents who identified as political liberals.

There has also been political transition between left and right, so that today, Americans identifying as liberal are more opposed to free speech than Americans who see themselves as conservative, a total historic anomaly.

We have got used to ‘free speech’ being a Right-wing talking point without dwelling on how strange that actually is. Freedom of speech is historically a liberal cause, set against conservative authorities who feared that it would encourage morally deviant behaviour, or help spread dangerous and subversive ideas. It has only now become the preserve of the Right because the revolution of the 1960s has ended, with progressives now fully in charge of most institutions - and people who come to power tend to want to hold on by suppressing dissent.

The 2010s was a transformative decade, a period known as the Great Awokening, during which upper-middle-class American views shifted drastically to the Left. It reflected, in some ways, the Left’s victory in the culture wars which had begun in the 1960s and became articulated in the 1990s. One direct cause of the Awokening was the exodus of conservatives from many professions from the 1990s, most particularly in academia. They Left had, to use a word very popular in academic circles, achieved hegemony, so that many of the hot-button moral issues had been settled to many people.

Their forebears, the radicals of 1968, saw themselves as being in opposition to bourgeois society and the establishment; they were rule-breakers who were sticking it to the man. Yet the patterns of revolution continues to repeat itself, and once in power, those same radicals and rule-breakers begin to behave like those in authority always have. Revolutionaries come to fill the prisons they once emptied, and invariably more than the old regime managed. It is the insecure nature of revolutionary regimes that ensures they must do.

They also come to ape the behaviour and style of the old regime in other ways, and attract members of the ruling class drawn to power, whatever its form. Just as the Red Army came to be filled with former tsarist officers who swore allegiance to the Bolshevik regime, so it is that British public schools and elite US colleges have become the most overtly progressive today, denouncing their ancestors and promoting the sexual ethics of the post-Christian order. When the upper class adopt a radical idea, it is usually because it has gained total dominance, and with that hegemony comes the end of the transitional, free-wheeling stage of the revolution.

When the young people of the satire boom, the Paris student protests and Woodstock threw off the shackles of social constraint, they created a revolutionary social atmosphere that ended in a predictably authoritarian way. They rebelled against a stultifying conformism and blew it apart, before a new stultifying conformism took hold. It is forbidden to forbid, as the 68er slogan had it – but not in a way they might have imagined. What we’re experiencing today, in the 2020s, is merely the end of the transition.