It's a real argument, not easily dismissed but I think it simplifies things a bit too much.
The truth is, there was reformation (various liberation movements), counter reformation (politicized evangelicals, a well organized right and so on) and absorption of certain ideas and people more or less into the capitalist mainstream – what Thomas Frank refers to, in a slightly different context, as the “the conquest of cool”.
None of this should suprise Marxists or students of Marx's thought -- “all that is solid...”
So, what we're seeing is an America at various stages of social development depending upon where you happen to be. This is why it's so easy for a film documentarian to visit one community and come away with the sense that the US is a pretty progressive, modern and happening place and, by pointing the rented Taurus down the road for a few more miles and filming in a different community get the overwhelming feeling it's all travelling to hell in a well greased handbasket.
I've gotten this feeling from simply travelling from one social scene to another within my own city.
This is why I'm so amused when I read learned essays by Westerners in general but Americans in particular about how the “Arab world” needs reform. They say these things as if some of the same ideas about patriarchal rule, religious centered thinking and other supposedly “anti-modern” ways of living can't be found in abundance right here in the good ol' USA.
But getting back to the 60's...
I wasn't there, but here's my sense of things.
There were victories, of a sort, there were surely defeats and there was absorption of much of the energy generated into the machinery of capital. So, the fact that I've yet to have a really bad job experience based upon my color (oh, some incidents here and there but no sustained anti-cyberNegro campaign) means that I'm experiencing an improved social situation than my Grandmother did at my age.
However, the fact that I'm compelled to participate in a stupid and wasteful system to live is the force nullifier of that progress.
This is the paradox and the problem going forward.
.d.