Dan Piller was a business reporter for more than four decades, working for the Des Moines Register and the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. He covered the oil and gas industry while in Texas and was the Register’s agriculture reporter before his retirement in 2013. He lives in Ankeny.

As my wife and I, both spry seventy-somethings, walked the state capitol complex sidewalks to the No Kings rally on October 18, I couldn’t help but notice the gathering crowd and remarking, “I’d feel better about this if the majority of people here didn’t have grey hair.”

photo by Dan Piller from the No Kings rally outside the Iowa state capitol

I put down the seeming preponderance of the Medicare set at the Des Moines rally to Iowa’s elder-leaning demographics. But the next day, Fox News and the right-wing echo chamber used the apparent senior citizen majority of the No Kings crowds elsewhere as their prime talking point. The rallies were impressive in their numbers, but nonetheless may be remembered as the Last Hurrah of a generation with enough wit to make clever signs.

photo by Dan Piller

It was uncomfortable, to say the least, to see the well-coiffed and buffed twenty-and-thirtysomethings on Fox and social media put down the wonderfully cultured rallies as age-irrelevant—especially when the same people think it acceptable for a cognitive-questionable 79-year-old to doze in the Oval Office.

The future, we’re told, is the legacy held by Charlie Kirk’s legions of admirers on college campuses, or pickup-driving guys stuck in dead end jobs who nurse grievances at liberals, women, and people of color for subsuming white males into an economic quicksand of political correctness. Bob Dylan, Joan Baez and The Dead have been replaced culturally by burly, growling male country singers wearing camouflage onstage in front of flag-waving rednecks. On Sundays, Liberation Theology has given way to a Christian Nationalism that could easily be attached to the hood of a fascist armored car.

Newspapers that once stitched communities and states together have been replaced by hand-held devices that are called phones but really hold all of mankind’s accumulated facts and news, if not wisdom. The soothing, emotionally-distant TV network news-reading voices of Walter Cronkite, John Chancellor, and Peter Jennings, which were our national hearth, have given way to the emotive internet snarls of Joe Rogan, Ben Shapiro, and Alex Jones.

Technology allows everybody to produce their own news, according to their tastes and prejudices. So, facts matter much less than emotions. “Conservatives” celebrate a president who gathers power in the Oval Office at a rate that would leave Barry Goldwater or Ronald Reagan speechless. “Liberals” who in the 60s lamented use of the “States’ Rights” cry to hold off civil rights advances now clutch desperately to the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution, hoping to turn back federal troops and immigration officers dispatched to the streets of otherwise peaceful American cities.

In 1968, the pivotal year of the assassinations of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Senator Robert F. Kennedy, the forced retirement of President Lyndon Johnson and the riots at the Democratic National Convention, immigration and tariffs were considered 19^th century anachronisms. Bobby Kennedy’s namesake son was 14 years old and no doubt dutifully vaccinated against any and all childhood diseases. The younger Kennedy understandably took his father’s death hard; within two years he had posted his first expulsion from a prep school for a drug habit that eventually would lead him to cocaine and heroin.

Unlike most men of his generation, the young Donald Trump was secure with a 4-F deferment from military service and probable trip to Vietnam. Untouched and unmoved by the political and cultural upheavals of his generation, Trump focused instead on leveraging a $400 million inheritance to transform his family hustle from a Queens-centered apartment building collection business to the core of power on Manhattan.

Many of the 1968 contemporaries of Trump and Kennedy Jr., their lives not cushioned by family connections and wealth, took to the streets to demonstrate against the Vietnam War and the completion of the Civil Rights movement. Youthful idealism would define the 1960s in popular culture. Their politics were liberal; they had heeded the words of their ideological Moses, John F. Kennedy, at the beginning of the decade to “Ask not what your country can do for you” but instead devote themselves to political activism.

To the young activists of 1968, a collective political mindset replaced the traditional American goals of individual achievement in careers and wealth-building and personal fulfillment in marriage and parenthood. Many hoped to make permanent the recent triumphs of the Kennedy-Johnson administrations, which had given the nation Medicare and Medicaid, civil rights laws that better protected racial and ethnic minorities, federal aid to K-12 schools and community colleges, and generous federal aid to decayed inner cities.

Peace, love, and cooperation were to replace the competition and nationalism that had driven the U.S. since 1945. The social wisdom of rock and roll singers, a so-called “underground” press that printed new truths, young and enlightened programmers on television and in Hollywood, an egalitarian education system and a less judgmental Christian theology would guide the nation to a higher consciousness leading to a more peaceful and just society.

To a Boomer like me, who graduated from high school in 1965 and was a senior in college in that crucial year of 1968, those heady days 57 years ago seem as far removed from today as the joy and hope after Appomattox in 1865 were a century later.

To many a Boomer, the political and cultural landscape today resembles the far side of the moon—dark, cold, and mysterious. I couldn’t help but think that many of my fellow septuagenarians at the Saturday rallies were calling for a return to the liberal-laced right-and-wrong mores of the 1960s as the preferred way to turn back the excesses of Trump and MAGA.

Trump is the culmination of events that began in November 1968, when a confusing political year produced a three-way presidential race whose winner was Richard Nixon, the villain of JFK’s Camelot. Nixon’s fumbling attempts to swing the country rightward seemingly were thwarted by Watergate—only to find even greater fulfillment in 1980 with the coming of Ronald Reagan and his brand-new political pilot fish, the religious right.

During the Reagan administration, most ex-60s political activists had given up their long hair, drugs, communes and the more anarchic versions of rock and roll in favor of careers and marriages. Too busy raising children and paying mortgages, they didn’t notice that politically-active elements of the Southern Baptist and Roman Catholic faiths had buried their longstanding theological and doctrinal antipathies in favor of their shared reaction to what those ultra-devout folks viewed as the blasphemous cultural excesses of the 1960s. The political activist juice that in the 60s was focused on ending a war and making the country more just was now turned to the task of ending abortion and imposing doctrinal Christianity on our legal system.

The new religious activists meant to use the political system to return the U.S. to what they called “traditional values.” They were disinclined to let the nation’s longstanding tradition of separation of church and state get in their way.

When Reagan and his California champagne-sippers departed at the end of the 1980s, the religious right was ready to take control of the Republican Party and get down to the serious business of reversing all traces of the 1960s. By then they had a new set of potential allies; the veterans of the Vietnam War and their families, embittered by the disaster in the jungles and by a country that seemingly turned its back on them.

When communism collapsed in the early 1990s, scarcely a word of appreciation was extended to men who, as Bruce Springsteen had sung, were “Born in the USA” and had dodged communist bullets with precious little to show for it. They weren’t inclined to follow aspiring leaders who had dodged the draft in college in the 1960s and now were advancing into positions of primacy in government and politics.

Bill Clinton’s superficial revival of the JFK era seemingly halted the nation’s rightward swing. But by the 1990s Kennedy’s aura was dimmed by a steady stream of revelations about his private life. The right thus could leverage Monica Lewinsky and Hillary Clinton’s clumsy defenses of her husband into a re-branding of the Democratic Party as wrong not merely ideologically but also morally.

After the turn of the century, the Democrats continued to lose by winning when they put Barack Obama in the White House. Naïve Democrats believed that the presence of the elegant, brilliant, and honest African-American man in the White House would banish America’s Original Sin of white supremacy for good. But shrewd race-baiter Donald Trump, unhindered by any sentimental attachment to the 60s era through which he had come of age, loosened his con-man talents into politics to awaken every dark and authoritarian reaction in the American mind. Fox News, which didn’t exist in 1968, stood ready to provide extra media lift to the right-wing tide

Baby Boomers thus marched on their arthritic legs to state capitols and other public places on October 18 to try to turn back the clock to what Abraham Lincoln called “the better angels of our nature.” To accomplish that, they’ll have to overcome a right-wing media and religious culture every bit as zealous as they were a half-century ago and a lot better financed.

The outcome is far from certain.

The optimist would summon the memories of America’s foundational heroes of its democratic republic, Washington, Jefferson, Franklin, and Lincoln who described our system as “government of the people, by the people and for the people.” That strategy will work if Americans can recover a semblance of knowledge of their own history beyond what they’ve seen in John Wayne movies, and recall a Jesus of Nazareth who was more than a Republican Party operative.

The pessimist might be haunted by a more recent philosopher-hero, Peter Fonda’s character Wyatt in the 1969 movie “Easy Rider” (which many historians and sociologists consider the best cinematic summary of the 1960s).

Wyatt and friend Billy (Dennis Hopper) parlayed a big drug score in LA into a stake for a motorcycle adventure trip to New Orleans and the Mardi Gras to, as the movie’s promotion offered, “search for America.” The result was every cliché of the 60s decade that was ending; violence, marijuana, a bewildering LSD trip, and casual sex with two prostitutes. When they came to, a disillusioned Wyatt declares to Billy “we blew it.”

Time will tell.