Has America forgotten the lessons of the 1960s?

Those of us who lived through the 1960s and 1970s should be forgiven for feeling incredulous right now. We learned valuable lessons back then, about war, energy security, the environment and racial justice. Now, we are making the same mistakes we made before, as though the past taught us nothing. 

Nearly half the members of Congress and President Trump should know better, because they were alive in those years, too. 

I wrote recently about how Trump’s warring in Iran ignores what we learned from the war in Vietnam. We paid a heavy price for those lessons: 58,281 soldiers killed or missing, more than 300,000 wounded or injured, and as many as 3.4 million dead Vietnamese soldiers and civilians.

We also learned hard lessons about America’s oil addiction. Our economy, lifestyles and household budgets are vulnerable to outside actors: oil-producing countries that manipulate prices, as well as enemies capable of closing any of the eight major choke points through which the world’s oil shipments must pass. Even in peacetime, the U.S. spends as much as $132 billion annually to keep the waterways open. 

Then, like now, Iran and Israel were major factors in America’s oil crises. But rather than reducing our oil dependence, Trump appears to covet other countries’ reserves. Venezuela has the world’s largest reserves; Iran’s are third largest. Axios notes that Trump is “positioning himself as a central architect of Iran’s post-war future” and “signaling ambitions that extend beyond military action into reshaping Iran’s political and economic order just as he did in Venezuela.”

Another lesson from 60 years ago is the threat of unregulated pollution. The Environmental Protection Agency recounts, “For years, raw sewage, industrial and feedlot wastes had been discharged into rivers and lakes without regard for the cumulative effect that made our waters unfit for drinking, swimming, and boating. Smokestack emissions and automobile exhaust made air pollution so bad in certain communities that some people died, and many were hospitalized. The land itself was being polluted by indiscriminate dumping of municipal and industrial wastes. … (T)he earth’s automatic, self-cleansing, life-support systems became increasingly threatened. By the 1960s, it was obvious that decisive steps had to be taken to correct this imbalance and to prevent future reoccurrences.” 

Business competition is one of capitalism’s best features. It spurs innovation and keeps prices in check. However, it pressures companies to reduce costs, including the expense of preventing or controlling pollution. The ecological crises of the last century proved that government must regulate pollution to protect public health and the environment from a corporate race to the bottom.   

So, Congress passed more than a dozen landmark environmental laws in the 1970s and created the Environmental Protection Agency. Now, Trump has gutted the EPA, shut down its scientific research, and launched the “biggest deregulatory action in U.S. history.” EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin calls this the “Great American Comeback.” Instead, it’s a throwback to poor health and environmental degradation. 

Trump has also dismantled America’s effort since the early 1990s to address civilization’s most serious environmental threat, global climate change. Republicans and Democrats used to agree that climate change endangered domestic and global stability. The U.S. Senate concurred in, and President George H.W. Bush ratified, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in 1992. The obvious solution is to transition from fossil fuels to clean energy. But to protect its profits, the oil industry enlisted Republican leaders in a counteroffensive to prevent the transition. 

Trump is the industry’s ultimate ally, insisting that global warming is a hoax, rescinding investments in clean energy and withdrawing the United States from the otherwise unanimous worldwide effort to reduce fossil fuel pollution. With weather disasters becoming more extreme and hazard insurance pricing people out of the housing market, Trump has even emasculated the federal agency that helps the American people prepare for and recover from disasters. 

We are backsliding on racial equality, too. The civil rights movement is usually defined as occurring from 1954 through 1968, but it continues today. The movement’s sacrifice of blood and lives resulted in the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which prohibits states from racial discrimination in their election procedures. Now, Republican states in particular are engaged in gerrymandering and efforts to make it harder for poor and minority citizens to vote. Trump, whose totalitarian control is threatened by fair elections, is at the forefront of the effort. 

There’s truth in the maxim that those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it. However, bad intentions, not a learning disability, are driving America back into the problems we hoped we solved generations ago. 

Those were times of intense turmoil, but America emerged healthier, stronger, more just and more cautious about war. It hurts to see the country sliding backward. 

William S. Becker, 79, is co-editor of and a contributor to “Democracy Unchained: How to Rebuild Government for the People,” and a contributor to Democracy in a Hotter Time, named by the journal Nature as one of 2023’s five best science books. He previously served as a senior official in the Wisconsin Department of Justice and the U.S. Department of Energy. He is currently executive director of the Presidential Climate Action Project (PCAP), a nonpartisan climate policy think tank unaffiliated with the White House.

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