In an excellent column on the legacy of the year 1968, in today’s National Review Online, Thomas Sowell observes that aging hippies and would-be hippies and their cultural descendants will spend this year commemorating all the great things that happened in 1968, but that the cultural revolution that supposedly happened at that time in fact deserves condemnation, not admiration.

He’s right. The radicals’ activities of the time did immense damage to the nation, which has lasted for decades, Sowell notes:

"The events of 1968 have continuing implications for our times but not the implications drawn by those with romantic myths about 1968 and about themselves."

He gives several vivid examples. Regarding the riots in American cities after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Sowell notes, 

These orgies of mass destruction, vandalism, looting, and deaths have likewise been seen nostalgically as mass “uprisings” against “the system.”

But “the system” did not kill Martin Luther King. An assassin did. And the biggest losers from the 1968 riots were the black communities in which they occurred.

Many of those communities have never recovered to this day from the massive loss of businesses and jobs. 

Similarly damaging sources of disastrous long-term consequences were the campus insanities of the time: 

Dispersed among these national shocks were various local and regional shocks, as colleges and universities across the country were hit by student disruptions and violence of one sort or another over one issue or another.

Like the ghetto riots, campus riots flourished where the authorities failed to use their authority to preserve order. Instead, academics sought to cleverly finesse the issues with negotiations, concessions and mealy-mouthed expressions of “understanding” of the concerns raised by campus rioters.

Many academics congratulated themselves on the eventual restoration of calm to campuses in the 1970s. But it was the calm of surrender. The terms of surrender included creation of whole departments devoted to ideological indoctrination.

Members of such departments spearheaded the campus lynch mob atmosphere during the Duke University “rape” case, as they have poisoned other campuses in other ways, all across the country.

To Sowell’s observations I would add the important point that the great majority of the U.S. population had little to no sympathy for the radicals. The influence of the latter knuckleheads was entirely a creation of the media, brought on by fawning press coverage. The great majority of Americans voted for Nixon and George Wallace during the 1968 presidential elections, and a majority of the 18-21 year olds who voted for the first time in 1972 actually voted for Nixon, not McGovern.