1968

Paris, Prague, Mexico City, Chicago — a generation tried, in different idioms, to refuse its inheritance.

The brief

1968 was the year history seemed to be running on a tight schedule. The Tet Offensive in January suggested the United States was losing in Vietnam even as its generals claimed victory. Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy were assassinated within two months. Paris erupted in May as students at the Sorbonne and ten million striking workers nearly toppled the de Gaulle government. Soviet tanks crushed the Prague Spring in August. Mexican soldiers massacred student protesters at Tlatelolco ten days before the Olympics opened. American police clubbed demonstrators in the streets outside the Democratic Convention in Chicago. In a single calendar year, on four continents, a generation tried to refuse its inheritance.

The events of that year were not a coordinated revolution; they were a family resemblance of revolts against postwar settlements that had stopped delivering. A major precondition was demographic and institutional — huge youth cohorts entering rapidly expanded but still authoritarian universities, with television beaming each revolt into the next country's living rooms. In the West, the targets were Vietnam, the consumer society, sexual repression, and the patriarchal authoritarianism of the universities. In the East, the target was Stalinist sclerosis — Alexander Dubček's 'socialism with a human face' before the Warsaw Pact invasion in August ended it. In the Global South, the target was authoritarian modernization. The protesters mostly lost in the short run: de Gaulle won a landslide in June, Nixon won the presidency in November on a 'law and order' backlash that the chaos itself had fed, the Soviets entrenched in Czechoslovakia for two more decades under the Brezhnev Doctrine, and Mexico's PRI ruled for another thirty years. But the cultural consequences were enormous: feminism, environmentalism, gay liberation, identity politics, and the reflexive suspicion of authority that became the default register of late-twentieth-century intellectual life. The institutions of the postwar era survived, but their moral confidence did not. By the time the dust settled, backlash had strengthened the electoral right across much of the West even as the left's language and personnel moved through universities and cultural institutions — an asymmetry that has shaped Western political culture ever since, and whose resentments still drive the populist revolt against the 'long march through the institutions' associated with 1968.

Why nowEvery contemporary protest cycle — Occupy, Black Lives Matter, the Hong Kong demonstrations, Iran's Mahsa Amini protests — gets compared to 1968. The comparison usually flatters 1968: it remembers that cohort's theories and forgets its fragmentation, while reducing later movements to grievances and hashtags. Whether the next political earthquake produces a coherent successor doctrine or merely another expressive cycle remains open — and the social media that now organizes protest at speed seems, so far, better at convening crowds than at building the institutions that outlast them.