Arnold Kling: The 1960s were actually the 1970s

Arnold Kling, Were the 1960s the 1970s, actually? In My Tribe, April 18, 2025.

Kling recalls

my memory is that by about 1974 or so, the cultural shift had taken place in the broader population. Campus values had become majority values.

People accepted that Vietnam was, if not a lost cause, a cause not worth the cost. For President Nixon, ending the draft was way more popular than the war.

By the mid-1970s, sex before marriage was viewed as sensible, and women should not be punished for it. I claim that this is what paved the way for the Supreme Court to legalize abortion, because people no longer had the sense that a woman should be forced to have a baby because she had “strayed.”

The best way to see when hippie culture became mass culture is to look at fashions. As of the late 1960s, working-class men still had short haircuts, to show their rejection of the hippies. As of the early 1970s, their hair was as long as any hippie’s. And everyone was wearing bell-bottom blue jeans.

The sexual revolution found many willing adopters. For men, liberating women to have casual sex was a gift. Readers of Albion’s Seed will recall that the Appalachian borderers (Jacksonian America) were never Puritanical about sex in the first place.

The mainstream media, for which there was no alternative at that time, highlighted and celebrated hippie culture. This was bound to have an effect on popular values.

Kling's memory matches mine on this. He ends by asserting that the current campus values, those associated with woke ideology, will not spread into the wider culture, they me even recede on campus. I agree with that, though I would also add that, despite their presence in the news, it's not at all clear to me just how prevalent those values actually are on college campuses.