
The Accidental Activist
The conservative counterrevolution in American politics has its roots, so the story goes, in a broad-based revulsion at the radical excesses and battles of the 1960s. That long right-wing ascendancy continues today in free-market supremacy and hyperindividualism: in sum, a wholesale repudiation of ’60s-movement values. This plot has become the conventional account of the era. Like any master narrative, though, it doesn’t tell the whole story.
Amid the rightward shift, a host of radical movements flared as well—gay rights, women’s liberation, Puerto Rican independence, prisoners’ rights—suggesting