Back to the boomer: Not even sci-Fi is safe from the specter of the sixties
Most alternate histories are built around a grand conceit: What would have happened if Booth’s bullet missed Lincoln or if the Nazis built an atomic bomb? For All Mankind, which recently concluded its fourth season on Apple TV+, offers a more modest counterfactual: How different would things be if the Soviets beat us to the moon by just 24 days?
At first, the show’s answer to this question is “not very.” Elections, wars, and technological advances all proceed slightly differently, but For All Mankind’s world is still very clearly ours. But as the show progresses, its world gets better and better, even as it weathers the same human tragedies and political scandals that line the annals of American history.
Up to a point, there is a technological explanation for this difference: In For All Mankind, the Space Race doesn’t end with Neil Armstrong’s small step but rages well into the 21st century. This push for celestial dominance leads the United States to develop some technologies decades earlier than in reality and results in the discovery of things we have yet to see.
But For All Mankind is as much a political drama as it is a space opera. Every rocket launch and Mars landing is grounded in the show’s alternate timeline, which begins in 1969 and has thus far run through 2003. Politicians real and imagined are crucial to the show’s machinery, driving events both on Earth and throughout the cosmos.
This is where For All Mankind dips from alternate history into utopia. In this world, every negative action has an unequal, opposite reaction: Espionage leads to renewable energy; White House sex scandals give way to gay rights; a 9/11-caliber tragedy paves the way for world government.
To its credit, For All Mankind is internally consistent. It is clear where its history deviates from ours and how its political world behaves, and the show’s scientific developments, though futuristic, proceed linearly and logically from one to another. But when these narratives interact, we end up with something out of Hegel, if Hegel were a baby boomer.
Things start very cleverly, with a news broadcaster noting that “Sen. Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts announced … that he was canceling a weekend party on Chappaquiddick Island in order to return to Washington and confer with congressional leaders on the need for hearings into how the United States lost the race to the moon.”
From there, we’re off to the races. Kennedy beats Nixon in 1972 and gets the Equal Rights Amendment passed, though his career takes a nosedive after he is revealed to be having an affair with the still-alive Mary Jo Kopechne.
But Kennedy’s affair is a net positive: Gary Hart, who we can infer was scared too straight by l’affaire Kopechne to consider any monkey business, wins the White House in a 1984 landslide. Hart serves two terms, during which the U.S. develops nuclear fusion, embraces electric cars, and reaches detente with the Soviets.
As if that’s not enough, we also learn that the U.S. and Soviet Union withdrew from Vietnam and Afghanistan, respectively. And while Margaret Thatcher’s and Pope John Paul II’s assassins are both successful, John Lennon’s is not, leaving him free to become a voice for peace and launch a Beatles reunion tour in the 1990s.
Even if you’ve never seen For All Mankind, this alternate timeline probably feels familiar to you. Because it’s how baby boomers talk about history since the ’60s. If only we’d passed the ERA, or stayed out of ‘Nam, or if they didn’t kill Martin and Jack and Bobby … things would have been so much better, man!
For All Mankind is not a boomer show in the way The West Wing is a boomer show. Its characters are not witty, handsome paragons of moral rectitude who sacrifice personal gain for the greater good. They are angry, greedy drunks who betray their country and hurt the people they love in a quest for power and glory. But the show undoubtedly has a boomer teleology, which becomes clear when you consider the specific political causes that result in glistening social and technological effects throughout this alternate history.
For years, the idea that America in the ’60s was just a few clicks away from perfection was prominent on the Left. But more and more these days, you see it on the Right as well. Consider, for instance, the increasingly held belief among conservatives that the “deep state” kneecapped Nixon. Where would we be if Tricky Dick had been able to finish out his term? The possibilities are endless!
The notable thing about this type of thinking is not the better worlds it imagines but the ease with which it assumes we could have realized them. We didn’t need a lot of big things to go very differently for the world to be better, just for a few things to go slightly differently. A few votes in the other direction, a slight delay in the moon landing, and we’d have a hotel on the Sea of Tranquility.
This kind of thinking dominates alternate histories. In HBO’s 2019 Watchmen series, the U.S. wins the Vietnam War, and an alien attack brings the world together in an era of post-nuclear harmony. But at home, it’s the 1993 election of Democratic President Robert Redford that ushers in an era of police reform, reparations, and campaign finance reform. Just another movie star president with an “RR” monogram. But give it a few years and swap the parties and everything’s better.
The fact that Watchmen, like For All Mankind, jams this idealized history into an otherwise bleak, gritty human drama shows just how far into our cultural imagination the boomer mindset has seeped. The problem is not that it shapes our science fiction but that it shapes our political imagination as well.
For all he claims to be a political disruptor, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is really just pledging to fulfill the long-awaited promise of the ’60s. In a much-hyped video shared on Twitter in March, Kennedy speaks wistfully of the days when America “made blue jeans … put men on the moon” and when “our ‘can do’ spirit [was] the envy of the world.”
Kennedy almost certainly won’t win the White House. But even if he did, he wouldn’t be able to deliver on the promise of the ’60s — because, no matter how we talk about these things, the possibility of realizing that promise never existed. The ’60s were a decade like any other, the boomers just another generation. They did some things well (Creedence Clearwater Revival) and others less than well (macroeconomics). Nonetheless, whether we valorize or ridicule them, the boomers remain the prism through which we view the country. So long as they do, American politics will be captured by this mythological notion of fulfilling the promise of a bygone age, to the detriment of present realities and future hopes.
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Tim Rice is senior editor of the Washington Free Beacon.
