Editor’s Note: This is the third in a series by Speaker Gingrich on American despotism. Listen to The American Spectator’s exclusive interview with the speaker here. Read the first in the series here and the second here.

When then-Gov. Ronald Reagan spoke on April 17, 1970, to an agricultural group about the radical movement and riots at the University of California, Berkeley, he bluntly said: “If it takes a bloodbath, let’s get it over with. No more appeasement.”

We had just lived through the relative calm of the Eisenhower years — along with TV shows such as Father Knows Best and Gunsmoke (in which the good guys always won). So, what do you think led former romantic comedy movie star Ronald Reagan to say a bloodbath may be necessary?

Reagan was responding to the cultural war that exploded throughout the 1960s and continued into the first years of the 1970s. Understanding the depths and passion of today’s culture wars requires going back to the 1960s. The forces that came together then shook America so deeply that their momentum has grown for six decades.

The 1960s’ Waves of Change

Beginning in the 1960s, there was a wave of left-wing protests that evolved over time into powerful forces seeking to impose values on the entire country. The left-wing radicals grew from being the oppressed into being the oppressors. The 1960s represented an upsurge of energy, anger, confrontation, and real desire for radical change. It was led by militant, mostly younger Americans who sought to replace the American system.

Part of the energy and drive was simply demographic. In 1960, more than one-third of Americans were under 18. The World War II generation simply did not want to impose discipline and order on its children. All too many sought to be their children’s friends rather than their parents. Indulgence led to excess — which then led to radical and, at times, revolutionary behavior.

The early 1960s’ movements sought to improve America. This was a spirit still echoed by Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in his “I Have a Dream” speech in August 1963. King was calling for us to implement the promises of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution — not to repudiate them.

But by the end of the decade, Stokely Carmichael — one of the most famous Black activists of his generation — was telling college students in Nashville, Tennessee, “If a white man tries to walk over you, kill him.” Carmichael wanted his followers to become urban guerillas fighting to “smash everything Western civilization has created.”

The violence of the period was symbolized by the fact that the 1960s were the only decade in which three American leaders were assassinated: President John F. Kennedy on Nov. 22, 1963; Rev. King, on April 4, 1968; and Sen. Bobby Kennedy on June 6, 1968.

The sense of upheaval was captured at the end of the decade with Alvin and Heidi Toffler’s best-selling book Future Shock. The Tofflers emphasized that the scale and speed of change in that era was creating a shock for individuals, and for American society as a whole. In fact, multiple waves of change were coming together in the 1960s. So many of them now seem normal that it is easy to forget what a shock they were at the time.

The sheer number of young people was compounded in its impact by the rise of a commercial youth culture (new styles of music, movies about youthful rebellion, new clothing styles). The approval of the birth control pill liberated women and began a sexual revolution. The 1963 publication of Betty’s Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique gave voice to a women’s liberation movement that transformed the roles and relationships between men and women. A year earlier, Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring had launched an environmental movement that grew into one of the dominant critiques of modern industrial prosperity.

These changes were dwarfed by the three great movements of the 1960s: that against the Vietnam War, the civil rights struggle, and the free speech–political change movement. 

The Rise of Anti-War Activists

The Vietnam War grew into an enormously divisive issue. In some ways, the turning point came on Aug. 7, 1964, when Congress passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. The North Vietnamese had attacked two American destroyers, and the Johnson administration took that event as an opportunity to get Congress to adopt a resolution that was stunningly wide. 

It said: 

That the Congress approves and supports the determination of the President, as Commander in Chief, to take all necessary measures to repel any armed attack against the forces of the United States and to prevent further aggression.

Section 2. The United States regards as vital to its national interest and to world peace the maintenance of international peace and security in southeast Asia. Consonant with the Constitution of the United States and the Charter of the United Nations and in accordance with its obligations under the Southeast Asia Collective Defense Treaty, the United States is, therefore, prepared, as the President determines, to take all necessary steps, including the use of armed force, to assist any member or protocol state of the Southeast Asia Collective Defense Treaty requesting assistance in defense of its freedom.

In effect, the United States was now potentially committed to a full-scale war to stop communist aggression in South Vietnam. We had begun to Americanize the war. Ultimately, the war in Vietnam would overwhelm the Johnson administration, deeply divide Americans, and foment fear and anger, leading to a larger anti-war movement. Many of the anti-war activists would go on to become the college professors, lawyers, and reporters seeking to change America.

By April 17, 1965, less than a year after the Tonkin resolution was passed, the first Students for a Democratic Society march on Washington drew at least 15,000 people. It was the largest anti-war demonstration in American history up to that time. It also illustrated the growing coalition of the left as the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and Women Strike for Peace groups joined in the march. A month later, there were 10,000 people marching at Berkeley against the war. By late 1967, the anti-war sentiment led Sen. Eugene McCarthy to challenge incumbent President Lyndon B. Johnson in the Democratic primary in New Hampshire.

Events moved with shocking speed early in 1968. On Jan. 30, the North Vietnamese and their Viet Cong allies launched a massive attack across the country. Even though the attack was a military disaster for the communists, it marked an enormous psychological victory. No one thought they could operate across the entire country with such effectiveness. The Americans were winning the battle in Southeast Asia, but they were losing the war back home.

The most trusted newsman in America, Walter Cronkite, visited Vietnam. He reported that he could see no path to victory for America and expected the war to become a long stalemate. As a veteran World War II combat reporter, Cronkite had enormous prestige. That single newscast may have spelled the end of optimism about the war and limited the Johnson administration’s ability to fight effectively.

The 1968 Election and the Democratic Party

On March 12, McCarthy got 40 percent of the vote in the New Hampshire primary (ironically, a majority of his voters wanted the war escalated, and a good number confused him with the anti-communist Sen. Joe McCarthy). Johnson had failed to file for the primary and still won 50 percent of the vote as a write-in candidate. Normally, that would have been a solid performance (he got 20 delegates to McCarthy’s four). But the news media decided it was a victory for McCarthy and gave him good coverage.

McCarthy and his anti-war students (who had “gotten clean for Gene”) had their victory overshadowed when, four days later, Sen. Robert Kennedy announced for president on an anti-war ticket. To compound the chaos in the Democratic Party, on March 31, Johnson announced that he would not run for reelection. The resultant turmoil led to strong emotions. The anti-war movement felt betrayed by Kennedy getting into the race after McCarthy had toiled for months to make the anti-war case. At the same time, Kennedy’s charisma and willingness to appeal to the poor and disposed with bold, sometimes radical, proposals increased the emotions surrounding the race. 

The authority of an incumbent president had collapsed. The most dynamic elements in the Democratic Party and the news media were now anti-war and passionately emotional.

Then, King was tragically assassinated in Memphis on April 4. Two months later, on June 6, Kennedy was assassinated in Los Angeles.

Despite the emotions of the anti-war Left, the machinery of the Democratic Party — and the weight of the incumbent president — proved to be enough to deliver the party’s nomination to Vice President Hubert Humphrey. However, Humphrey found himself trying to lead a party in chaos. He had to defend the Johnson position on the war even though the passions and energy in the party were all on the anti-war side.

At the same time, Johnson distrusted his own vice president so much that he had FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover illegally tap Humphrey’s phones. This tension all came to a head at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. The nationwide student movement against the war focused on pushing the Democrats into adopting an anti-war plank for the party platform.  Johnson had absolute control of the convention and forced Humphrey to come out against the anti-war plan. Even with the president and vice president opposed, the anti-war plank was only defeated by 1,567 to 1,041.

While the anti-war activists were vigorous in the Convention Hall, they were far more engaged in a huge fight against the police along Lake Michigan. Some 10,000 activists, mostly college students, came to Chicago to protest the war. They were met by 11,000 Chicago police and 6,000 Illinois National Guardsmen. In a series of violent confrontations, including the use of tear gas, the police sought to keep the demonstrators away from the convention and under control.

The violence was so shocking that Sen. Abraham Ribicoff, in his speech nominating Sen. George McGovern (who had become the stand-in for the now murdered Kennedy) charged that there were “gestapo tactics in the streets of Chicago.” This led Chicago Mayor Richard Daley to shout vulgarities at him. The confrontations in the street led to 668 arrests. TV stations kept switching back and forth from the convention hall to the riots. Americans were watching their country tear itself apart and the Democratic Party unable to cope with its own bitter divisions.

After the convention, the tensions grew. Gov. George Wallace of Alabama became a third-party candidate. He was a pro-segregation Old South Democrat. Given the energy in the party for the civil rights movement, Wallace may seem like an unimportant sideshow candidate. However, Humphrey recognized that Wallace appealed to pro-segregation southern whites and conservative populist blue-collar workers in the North. Wallace represented one more breakdown in the majority status of the Democratic Party, which had dominated America since 1932. After 36 years, the very fabric of the Democratic Party was being torn apart by anti-war, anti-segregation, and anti-traditional-America movements. Wallace was one of the responses as conservatives began leaving the Democratic Party but not yet becoming Republicans.

Faced with the growing anti-war movement on one side and the conservative exodus from the Democratic Party on the other, Humphrey finally decided that he had to move to the left and openly call for an end to the bombing in Vietnam. After a Sept. 30 speech in Salt Lake City, Utah, Humphrey publicly joined the anti-war side of the debate. Coming out to end the bombing revitalized his campaign and brought him close to victory. Humphrey got 42.7 percent to Richard Nixon’s 43.4 percent in the 1968 presidential election. Wallace received 13.5 percent of the vote. Humphrey’s near win brought together the anti-war activists and drove conservatives (including a lot of Cold War liberals) out of the Democratic Party.

The Roots of the Culture Wars

The degree to which the Left had taken over the Democratic Party would become clear in 1972, when McGovern gave the left-wing activists virtually everything they wanted — while driving away moderates and conservatives on an historic scale. By the 1972 presidential election, Nixon’s 43.4 percent had grown to 60.7 percent (the largest majority since FDR received 60.8 percent in 1936). McGovern had shrunk to 37.5 percent. The pattern of a conservative Republican vs. left-wing Democrat continued for the next 60 years.

So, in many ways, today’s culture wars developed in the 1960s and came to political maturity in the 1972 nomination of McGovern. Theodore White, in The Making of the President 1972, explained why this shift to the left was so central to the future of American politics — and how it locked the Democratic Party into a steady drift toward more radicalism.

As White described it: 

Somewhere, somehow, without adequate public attention or debate, the liberating idea which had inspirited the Democratic Party for so long had become a trap. Quotas decided no primaries and no elections—but the symbolism of the idea was too overpowering to ignore. It touched the roots of American culture, and the campaign of 1972 was to become one of those events in American history which can be described as cultural watersheds as well as political happenings. For many liberals, the experience was to be heartbreaking.

White captured the reality in which we are now living: 

The beautiful Liberal Idea of the previous half-century had grown old and hardened into a Liberal Theology which terrified millions of its old clients.

For those who wonder how long the cultural war has been on the national stage, consider White’s description of the 1972 campaign:

The attack on the establishment—whatever it is—was the central cultural concept of the McGovern campaign. It came, however, with a corona of less important but more vivid cultural issues that made him one of the most luminous figures in the orthodoxy of the Movement. In part, the vivid quality of his lesser issues was forced on him by his enemies, in part by his own strategy. He had had to recruit his army and its troops from the most extreme of the peace groups and the young of the campus—and if their cultural values were not majority cultural values, nonetheless tactic demanded he pursue them. He had spoken at the Washington Moratorium in November, 1969, on a stand flanked nearby by the banners of the Viet Cong. He had pounded his way through a hundred campuses; student cheers and student applause gradually fashioned the style of his rhetoric. He was for amnesty—and on the campus, students shrilled with delight. He felt, and specifically stated, that abortion was a matter best left to state governments—but he left no doubt that he, personally, was for it. He was for black people, busing and integration—without qualification. He was for civilizing the extravagant penalties exacted in many states for the use of marijuana. The colleges took him to their hearts. To win the nomination at all, McGovern had to energize with his morality whatever clusters of women, students and cause people could be moved by morality to action in the primary states. With these, he might be able to seize control of the party; with control of the party he might win control of the government; and then morality could be imposed as national policy. Yet what he said and spoke in the spring months could not be limited to audiences of his choice. On the college campuses, within the circle of his faithful, he might be cheered as the voice of the future; in the tormented cities of America, however, after a decade of similar ringing high-minded proposals, he sounded like the voice of the past—more of the same, and frightening.

Note the reality of the current left-wing bureaucracy, news media, education system, and political voices. As White prophesied, once they had power, “then morality could be imposed as national policy.”

It is this fight over the Left’s definition of morality and intense drive to impose that morality over the rest of us that has made the current situation so conflict-laden, tense, and fraught with danger.

It helps to remember that the Biden administration’s desire to define your car, your kitchen, your child’s future, your thoughts about gender, and every other aspect of life has its roots in the 1960s and in the first great party victory of nominating McGovern in 1972. Two generations of Democrats have moved steadily to the left and toward more totalitarian ideas. They unabashedly intend to impose their values, morality, and policies on the rest of their fellow countrymen.

The second great disrupter that began to profoundly shake America in the 1960s was the struggle over the role of African Americans. My next essay will take up the struggle to end both de jure and de facto segregation — and the unexpected consequences of that great struggle.

For more commentary from Newt Gingrich, visit Gingrich360.com.