ABSTRACT
The Barack Obama era has witnessed an increasing tendency to revisit the 1960s in order to make sense of the political circumstances of our times. When the forces of law and order violently confronted Occupy Wall Street protestors on the Brooklyn Bridge in October 2011, for example, chants of “The whole world is watching” filled the air. Memories of the brutal repression of antiwar protestors at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, it seems, were still fresh in the minds of dissenters facing the forces of law and order today. And this was hardly the only time in the past decade or so that demonstrators in the streets collectively and somewhat spontaneously articulated a direct connection between their own actions and the protest movements of the 1960s, when, as historian and former activist James Miller (1994) has asserted, “democracy [was] in the streets.” The same chant was also heard repeatedly during the 1999 World Trade Organization protests in Seattle and at numerous demonstrations against the war in Iraq in 2003. Clearly, when Americans look for references to make sense of what it means to engage in protest politics in the streets, the 1960s still come quickly to mind. A significant number of the participants of protest movements today view their actions as falling within a tradition of political contestation that emerged in this relatively far-off rebellious decade.
