1968: The Year the System Lost Its Grip — Part 4, Ideology, Race, and Authority

[Luis Gonzalez]

1968: The Year the System Lost Its Grip — Part 4 
Ideology, Race, and Authority

The Last Wire

What began as protest became something larger in 1968. Something harder to contain and even harder to define.

Part 4 examines the point where race, ideology, media, and authority stopped interacting as separate forces and started fusing into a single national pressure system. Universities, city streets, and political institutions were no longer just sites of disagreement. They became stages for a deeper conflict over legitimacy itself.

As civil rights struggles, anti-war demonstrations, and urban unrest intensified, the question was no longer only what America should do, but who had the right to define what America was. Government authority, law enforcement, journalists, activists, and political movements all began operating under competing moral frameworks that no longer overlapped cleanly.

The result was not just instability. It was fragmentation of trust. Institutions that once mediated conflict were now seen as participants in it. Every major event fed into the next. Every response deepened suspicion. The system stopped feeling neutral, and started feeling contested at every level.

By the end of 1968, the country was no longer simply experiencing unrest. It was reorganizing around permanent tension points that would shape politics, culture, and public trust for decades to come.

This installment traces how that shift happened in real time, and why its effects never fully faded.

1968: The Year the System Lost Its Grip — Part 4, Ideology, Race, and Authority

[Free Vulcan]

The thing is, looking from the rural Midwest perspective, is the recognition that much of this was Marxist fomented primarily in the urban areas, taking advantage of at the time young and naive Boomers who grew up with a comfortable suburbanite lifestyle with zero comprehension of the destitute poverty just 30 years earlier during the Great Depression and the sacrifices of WWII.

And they played the classic Marxist passive-aggressive card of 'well it ain't perfect, our institutions 'failed' us, and we can't accept that, so we gotta burn it all down'.

And they did it with rhetoric, sermons, finger wagging, and projection, and it was all smoke and mirrors to trojan horse Marxist dictatorship upon this country, and not much else.

Meanwhile, the rural areas and small towns went on as usual, working hard, being prosperous, and living the Americana life till their foolish DC policies brought the Rust Belt upon is.

[Bigun]

The thing is, looking from the rural Midwest perspective, is the recognition that much of this was Marxist fomented primarily in the urban areas, taking advantage of at the time young and naive Boomers who grew up with a comfortable suburbanite lifestyle with zero comprehension of the destitute poverty just 30 years earlier during the Great Depression and the sacrifices of WWII.

And they played the classic Marxist passive-aggressive card of 'well it ain't perfect, our institutions 'failed' us, and we can't accept that, so we gotta burn it all down'.

And they did it with rhetoric, sermons, finger wagging, and projection, and it was all smoke and mirrors to trojan horse Marxist dictatorship upon this country, and not much else.

Meanwhile, the rural areas and small towns went on as usual, working hard, being prosperous, and living the Americana life till their foolish DC policies brought the Rust Belt upon is.

  

Marxism has been FAR more active for a longer period of time in this country than most realize.

[Luis Gonzalez]

The thing is, looking from the rural Midwest perspective, is the recognition that much of this was Marxist fomented primarily in the urban areas, taking advantage of at the time young and naive Boomers who grew up with a comfortable suburbanite lifestyle with zero comprehension of the destitute poverty just 30 years earlier during the Great Depression and the sacrifices of WWII.

And they played the classic Marxist passive-aggressive card of 'well it ain't perfect, our institutions 'failed' us, and we can't accept that, so we gotta burn it all down'.

And they did it with rhetoric, sermons, finger wagging, and projection, and it was all smoke and mirrors to trojan horse Marxist dictatorship upon this country, and not much else.

Meanwhile, the rural areas and small towns went on as usual, working hard, being prosperous, and living the Americana life till their foolish DC policies brought the Rust Belt upon is.

Thanks for the great post.

I’m fixated on 1968. It was my first full year in the US, and I was absorbing change at a rate that it’s difficult for me to actually imagine today. The new language was the least, and most easily addressed, for me. I can recall my Dad wondering out loud whether the decision to migrate here was the right thing to do, as we were inundated with more data in a day (even in 68!), than what we were normally exposed to in a year, back in the island.
Still… we moved from the dark ages to living within sight of the launch pads in the Cape, and rockets going off damned near daily.

What a ride.

[Bigun]

Read about Woodrow Wilson, Edward M. House, John Dewey, and Edward Bernays. @Luis Gonzalez

[Smokin Joe]

The thing is, looking from the rural Midwest perspective, is the recognition that much of this was Marxist fomented primarily in the urban areas, taking advantage of at the time young and naive Boomers who grew up with a comfortable suburbanite lifestyle with zero comprehension of the destitute poverty just 30 years earlier during the Great Depression and the sacrifices of WWII.

And they played the classic Marxist passive-aggressive card of 'well it ain't perfect, our institutions 'failed' us, and we can't accept that, so we gotta burn it all down'.

And they did it with rhetoric, sermons, finger wagging, and projection, and it was all smoke and mirrors to trojan horse Marxist dictatorship upon this country, and not much else.

Meanwhile, the rural areas and small towns went on as usual, working hard, being prosperous, and living the Americana life till their foolish DC policies brought the Rust Belt upon is.

That's how it looked to me, too.

Where better to find relatively wealthy urban young minds to pollute than Colleges and Universities, where the avant-garde became commonplace, and classical thought was being discarded for the latest craze?
In the mid-70s, there was an amazing assortment of philosophies, but we only had one card carrying Communist in our department. He was a student, and it was interesting that he could not discuss his beliefs in his own words, but only quoting his catechism chapter and worse. It was not well received.

[Luis Gonzalez]

That's how it looked to me, too.

Where better to find relatively wealthy urban young minds to pollute than Colleges and Universities, where the avant-garde became commonplace, and classical thought was being discarded for the latest craze?
In the mid-70s, there was an amazing assortment of philosophies, but we only had one card carrying Communist in our department. He was a student, and it was interesting that he could not discuss his beliefs in his own words, but only quoting his catechism chapter and worse. It was not well received.

A whole lot of what I experienced in those days, insofar as any sort of political ideology I may have held at the time, was driven by a total aversion to the idea of being sent off to some Asian swamp, to be shot at from anywhere and everywhere, by people I knew nothing about.

That was just self-preservation.