Few time periods have been as defined by waves of monumental social change as the United States during the 1960s. Even today, almost sixty years later, the era is often depicted as a triumph of social progress. Yet, as Larry M. Bartels and Katherine J. Cramer show in The Politics of Social Change, it was Americans’ diverse reactions to the milestone events of the time—from the welcoming, to the fiercely resistant, to the largely oblivious—that planted the seeds of our current political turmoil.

Their masterful analysis draws on a unique historical resource: the longest-running systematic tracking of individual Americans’ political attitudes and behavior ever attempted. The study began in 1965 when researchers interviewed hundreds of high school students across the country and then periodically reinterviewed them over the next three decades. Bartels and Cramer then reinterviewed dozens of the original students, painting a detailed picture of the generation’s individual and collective political development. By tracing the responses of the Class of ’65 to major events of their political lifetimes—including the Civil Rights and Women’s Rights movements, the Vietnam War, the shifting role of religion, escalating economic inequality, immigration, and the rise of Donald Trump—Bartels and Cramer shed new light on the evolution of public opinion and the unsteady progress of American democracy.

In the following excerpt from the introduction, “Past and Present,” the authors discuss why 1965 was a true inflection point in history, paving the way for today’s political landscape.

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History is seamless, and the starting point of any retelling is a mat­ter of choice. However, our chosen starting point—the spring of 1965—represents a significant inflection point in the evolution of American society and politics. In an insightful 2020 book entitled The Upswing, Robert Putnam and Shaylyn Romney Garrett tracked significant changes in economic, political, social, and cultural life in the United States from the late nineteenth century to the present. Syn­thesizing mountains of data on union membership, the distribution of wealth, voting patterns in Congress, church membership, philan­thropy, and many other indicators, they concluded that America had become steadily “more equal, less contentious, more connected, and more conscious of shared values” over the first six decades of the twentieth century. “But then—unexpectedly, though not without forewarning—the diverse streams simultaneously reversed direction, and since the 1960s America has become steadily less equal, more polarized, more fragmented, and more individualistic.”

In Putnam and Garrett’s story of “intertwined curves,” the sixties mark the point at which the United States began its decades-long descent from the relative equality, harmony, and shared values of the immediate post-war era to inequality, polarization, and fragmenta­tion. Thus, readers might expect our story to be one of “downswing,” an account of steady decline from a mid-century golden age to the troubled present. However, that perspective would be overly simplis­tic. A broader view requires us to recognize and balance a variety of positive and negative implications of social and economic change in America over the past six decades. Even more importantly, it requires us to recognize that the characterization of these changes as positive or negative is itself deeply contested. Indeed, to a surprising extent, contemporary political divisions are defined by conflicting points of view regarding the legacy of these changes.

Consider, for a moment, the shifts experienced by people who were born shortly after WWII over the course of their lives. As they moved into adulthood in the mid-1960s, the rights, power, and op­portunities of many previously marginalized people—including non-whites, women, people identifying as something other than heterosexual, people with disabilities—grew and have continued to do so in fits and starts to the present day. The idea that the true Amer­ican is a white, straight, Christian man has been increasingly called into question over their lifetimes. In the background have been earthquake-like shifts in Americans’ trust in government, as well as massive shifts in the way Americans hear about their governments and public affairs, from the advent of television in their childhoods to the invention of the internet and the proliferation of social media later on in their lives.

Some massive changes in American society are big positives in the eyes of some but anathema to others. The size and scope of the federal government has expanded enormously, and that development continues to be a central issue in contemporary political debates. To­tal federal outlays in 2023 were five times what they had been in 1965 (in inflation-adjusted dollars), increasing from 15.9% to 22.4% of GDP. An “explosion” of social programs in the 1960s “produced the largest array of social welfare measures the nation had ever seen,” and those programs have accounted for the lion’s share of subsequent spending growth. In 1965, federal expenditures on health, labor, welfare, edu­cation, housing, and community development, including Social Se­curity and the Johnson administration’s fledgling “attack on poverty,” totaled just $310 billion in inflation-adjusted dollars—about two-thirds of what the federal government spent on Medicaid alone in 2019.

Another contested development is the changing racial and eth­nic composition of the United States. This change is due in part to a considerable growth in the immigrant population. In the 1960s, immigrants made up about 5% of the US population, a twentieth-century low. In 2022, they were 13.9% of the population, the highest proportion in more than a century. In the 1960 US census, 3.2% of the population reported Hispanic heritage; in 2020, that percentage had grown to 18.7%. Over the same six decades, the Asian American population increased from 0.5% to 6.2%, the Native American popu­lation from 0.3% to 1.1%, and the percentage of African Americans in the population grew from 10.5% to 12.4%. The number of people who considered themselves descendants of multiple racial backgrounds grew so fast that by 2000 it was possible to indicate this on the census.

As a result of all these changes, non-Hispanic whites have been a shrinking share of the US population, from 85.4% in 1960 to just 57.8% in 2020. Demographic projections suggest that the share will continue to shrink in the coming years, raising the prospect of a “majority-minority” nation in the not-too-distant future. For some Americans that prospect evokes hope and pride; for others it evokes anxiety and despair, spurring political backlash.

Even some changes that might once have been widely viewed as “progress” are now contested, including the significant increase in formal education. In 1965, only half of American adults had com­pleted high school; 12% of men and 7% of women had four or more years of college. By 2022, 90% of those aged twenty-five and older had high school diplomas and 36% (including slightly more women than men) had four-year college degrees. Yet, in recent years, public confi­dence in higher education has eroded substantially and colleges have become flash points of political controversy. As recently as 2015, 57% of Americans reported “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in higher education, while 9% reported “very little”; but by 2023, only 36% reported “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence, while 22% reported “very little.”
             

For some people, the marked increase in labor force participation among women—from 39% of women in the labor force in 1965 to 58% in 2024—is a symbol and product of progress with respect to women’s rights and a significant source of growth in Americans’ household incomes. To others, the trend represents the unraveling of gender roles or merely an unfortunate concession to economic necessity. It might also be seen as a threat to the place of men in the workplace, as their participation in the labor force has declined from 81% to 68% over that same period.

Shifts in gender roles and expectations about what men and women should do with their lives have also had a significant im­pact on marriage patterns. In the 1960 census, 71.1% of males fifteen and older and 67.4% of females reported being married, the highest rates of the twentieth century. But by 2022, just 50% of males fifteen and older and 46% of females reported being currently married. Be­tween 1965 and 2015, the average age of first marriages among men increased from 22.8 to 29.2, and among women from 20.6 to 27.1.

That’s a lot of change and disruption for any lifetime. The class of ’65 came of age just as most of these shifts were starting to occur. In the 1950s, scholars described (white) American society in books with titles such as The Lonely Crowd, The Organization Man, and The Liberal Tradition in America.9 Some observers perceived widespread consensus regarding American values and life choices. But by the 1960s, significant cracks were appearing in that veneer of confor­mity. In popular music, the Beatles were supplanting Elvis Presley, who had supplanted Frank Sinatra. Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho and Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove stretched the boundaries of cinema. Searing books like Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, Michael Harrington’s The Other America, Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, and James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time drew attention to long-neglected prob­lems of environmental degradation, poverty, sexism, and racism.

But while much has changed in American life since the sixties, many things have not. Racial and gender disparities have persisted, and in some cases grown. The median income of white families in 1965 was $7,250 (the equivalent of almost $72,000 in 2024 dollars), while the median income of black families was only $3,990 (less than $40,000 in inflation-adjusted dollars). By 2019, the median income of black families had doubled in real terms, but the median income of white families had increased by more than 70%, producing an even larger absolute disparity. The gap in wealth between white and black households was even larger, and it also expanded. As the Washington Post explained:

In 1968, a typical middle-class black household had $6,674 in wealth compared
              with $70,786 for the typical middle-class white household, according to data
              from the historical Survey of Con­sumer Finances that has been adjusted for
              inflation. In 2016, the typical middle-class black household had $13,024 in
              wealth versus $149,703 for the median white household, an even larger gap in
              percentage terms.

 Black-white racial disparities have also continued for homeowner­ship, unemployment, childhood poverty, and overall poverty.

Gender disparities also persist, despite advances in women’s equal­ity. Women continue to earn less than men in comparable jobs, just 85 cents for every dollar earned by men in 2024. Wage disparities for women of color are even more extreme. Despite gains in women’s rep­resentation in professional roles in law, health care, and higher educa­tion, they still make up far less than half of leadership in those fields. They are underrepresented at every level, from entry-level positions to senior leadership roles in private industry. And they are dramati­cally underrepresented in government, with just 26% of the US Senate, 28.7% of the US House, 30.3% of statewide elected executive offices, and 33.5% of state legislative offices held by women as of 2025.

Politically, 1965 marked the beginning of a long transition from the mid-century post war era. The assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963 had jarred the nation, robbing many young Ameri­cans of a political hero and fueling a variety of dark conspiracy the­ories involving communists, mobsters, right-wing extremists, and government officials. Over the course of the 1960s and ’70s, Lyndon Johnson’s “credibility gap,” Richard Nixon’s Watergate scandal, and a general cultural shift toward questioning authority caused trust in government to plummet. In the University of Michigan’s 1964 Na­tional Election Study, three-fourths of Americans said they trusted the government in Washington to do what is right “most of the time” or “just about always”; by 1980 that proportion was just 25%.
 

The party system was also entering a period of significant flux. Johnson’s landslide victory in the 1964 election was viewed by some as the reconstitution of a Democratic majority dating back to the New Deal era. Instead, it commenced a stretch of unusual electoral volatil­ity, marked by wild swings in electoral successes and waning partisan loyalties. Almost 40% of the respondents in the 1964 National Election Study said they thought of themselves as strong Democrats or Republi­cans; by the 1970s only 25% would. But just as scholars began to suggest that “organized political parties may be an anachronism,” partisanship began to rebound again, and over the next forty years, America would settle into an era of closely contested, highly partisan elections the likes of which had not been seen since the late nineteenth century.

In all these respects and many others, the sixties were a crucial turning point in American history. By assembling and correlating a wide variety of indicators in the domains of social life, politics, and economics, Putnam and Garrett provided a high-altitude perspective on the underlying pattern of change. But these aggregate trends were made up of changes in the day-to-day lives of millions of individuals, all responding in their own ways to changing circumstances in their own communities. We wanted to know what change looked and felt like to them, and how their political responses grew out of their back­grounds, values, and circumstances. And we wanted to know what their lives could teach us about the contemporary state of American society and politics.

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Larry M. Bartels is University Distinguished Professor of Political Science and Law and May Werthan Shayne Chair of Public Policy and Social Science at Vanderbilt University. His books include Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age and (with Christopher H. Achen) Democracy for Realists: Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government.

 Katherine J. Cramer is the Natalie C. Holton Chair of Letters & Science and the Virginia Sapiro Professor of Political Science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is the author or coauthor of several books, including The Politics of Resentment: Rural Consciousness in Wisconsin and the Rise of Scott Walker.

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