The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Sixties

The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Sixties is the nineteenth book is the Politically Incorrect Guide series by Regnery Publishing and is written by playwright Jonathan Leaf as his first non-fiction book. The book began when Leaf began interviewing Sixties radicals about the decade and then being asked by Regnery to write a book about his experiences
Leaf argues that, contrary to the perception created by Hollywood and academia, America in the 1960s remained a deeply conservative country. He says that, contrary to popular perception, most Americans actually supported the Vietnam War and that anti-war radicals like Abbie Hoffman and Mark Rudd were not in any way in favour of peace but wanted the Vietcong to win. Leaf also argues that most of the present-day "tenured radicals" took to academia in order to avoid fighting the war, and that the US could easily have defeated the Vietcong had it not withdrawn troops under Nixon.
Leaf argues that rock music was not in fact very popular in the Sixties and that most chart-toppers apart from the Beatles and Rolling Stones remained in older genres of music. He also says that the misogyny in the Rolling Stones' lyrics ought to have offended the nascent feminist movement but that it failed to do this. He also says that Bob Dylan, in spite of having been frequently nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature, was in fact a second-rate poet whose appeal in the 1960s was no different from that of hair metal bands in the 1980s. Leaf also says that, in comparison to the 1970s and even the 1980s, the 1960s saw almost no change in the sexual behaviour of Americans, and that the sexual revolution really began as far back as the 1890s, long before Alfred Kinsey.
Politically, Leaf asserts that the civil rights and feminist movements must be seriously questioned because they were hijacked by radicals like Huey Newton and Gloria Steinem, whose viewpoints simply are quite untenable when seriously examined. He also says that the Great Society led to major setbacks for blacks because it provided strong incentives for them to remain in poverty to obtain government welfare.

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