What happened to the 68ers?

In Commentary, Sohrab Ahmari takes a look at how the 1968 radicals became today's technocrats.

...Though they imagine themselves forever locked in combat with authority, the 68ers have, in fact, wielded authority over Western culture for half a century. In that time, everything from advertising to family and sexual life to school discipline to even Christian theology has reflected 68er impulses, which have hardened into institutional orthodoxies.

The orthodoxies were, paradoxically, anti-tradition and anti-authority. But in practice, the 68ers were far more ruthless than the supposedly “authoritarian” generations they overthrew. One need only look to the transformation of the university during their reign to see that they viewed academe not as a refuge from conformity, but as the space where they could most fully enforce their own brand of conformity. The 68ers knew how to discipline and punish: not with tear gas and the cane, but with the administrative hearing and the speech code.

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