Philip Jenkins, a scholar of religious history at Baylor University and the author of “Decade of Nightmares: The End of the Sixties and the Making of Eighties America,” said he saw a similarity between then and now in the confluence of anti-establishment conspiracy-mongering and a sudden political disaster for the American government. “Anti-government conspiracy theories had flourished from the late 1960s and reached amazing heights in the mid-late 1970s with all the assassination theories,” he said. What Vietnam did, he added, “was to take those ideas and transform them definitively into anti-government and anti-liberal directions.”The collapse of faith in public institutions in the 1970s wasn’t just about Vietnam — Watergate, environmental crises and the general skepticism that the boomer generation held for its elders were all contributing factors. But Vietnam towered above them, not only because it touched so many people, but also because it brought into sharp focus the failure of the American government to do the thing it was supposedly best at: winning wars. Today, of course, we are much more jaded, a fact that Professor Jenkins said might soften the impact of defeat.

Source: International New York Times August 17, 2021 22:18 UTC