It May Feel Like the 1960s. But It’s Worse.

Many of us who lived through the 1960s are tempted to seek similarities between then and now. We see the acute polarization of the nation, the warring ideologies, the presidents who abuse power, the sense of America losing its bearing. Where President Richard Nixon’s silent majority battled flower power and “commies,” President Trump’s MAGA assails wokeness and the radical left. Where students closed down campuses over Vietnam, students now — or at least a year ago — rose up over Gaza.

The list could go on. But it soon becomes evident that there are numerous differences. Some are obvious: the revolutionary advances over the past six decades in technology and communication, especially the prevalence of social media and smartphones; the absence of a Cold War to clearly define global relationships and a draft to threaten young people with death in a distant jungle.

For me, though, the big difference is in the spirit of the times, the sense back then that change was possible, and today that doors are being closed.

For all their passion and violence, the 1960s were an eruption of idealism, a youth-led rebellion against a misguided war and the racism and misogyny lurking in the placid suburbs and Made in the U.S.A. prosperity of the ’50s. There was a conviction in the songs, love-ins, protests and even mind-bending drugs that the world could be made better. “The Times They Are a-Changin’,” sang Bob Dylan in the hymn of that era, while John Lennon pictured its utopia: “Imagine there’s no countries / It isn’t hard to do / Nothing to kill or die for / And no religion, too.”

The student protests in the spring of 2024 against the carnage in Gaza, by contrast, never ignited a broader movement and petered out, mired in accusations of antisemitism and the humiliation of university leaders.The momentum was with Mr. Trump and his MAGA campaign, and its goal was in effect to reverse the ’60s gains — to undo the civil rights, sexual tolerance, environmental protection, campus activism and all the other themes and values clustered under the banner of diversity, equity and inclusion.

Mr. Trump’s appeal to a broad swath of America is more complex than that, of course. D.E.I. sometimes deserved the criticism; people who voted for Mr. Trump had some valid grievances, and many of them do not necessarily support his angry, personal and often potentially illegal assaults on varying targets, including immigrants and Harvard. But the unmistakable message in “Make America Great Again” is that the forces of change unleashed in the ’60s are anti-American and needed to be expunged in order to restore the “real” America — one of Christian values, respectful students, public order and blinders on racial discrimination, inequality and other blemishes.