Where Have All the Protests Gone?

"There was a culture of confrontation back then," he said. "You were either on the side of the authorities -- not just the president, but the police and the suits -- or you were an outlaw. You took psychedelic drugs and you protested and you drew a line between yourself and the prevailing culture."

That line is getting harder to draw, Gitlin said, in part because the counterculture has been mainstreamed. Rebellion is no longer a clarion call; it's a marketing pitch.

"Where is the Frank Sinatra of today? Where is the Tony Bennett? Who represents easy-listening normality? Popular culture is now a rebel industry. There is no inside to it. It's all outside now."

Look at rap. Gangsta rappers such as Jay-Z and Rick Ross are self-professed outlaws all right, but they don't want to opt out. They want to buy in. Their aspirations are hard to distinguish from those of a hedge-fund cowboy -- luxury cars, Cristal, yachts. They are unabashed fans of success just as it is defined by the latest crop of MBAs.

"430 Lex with the convertible top," Big Tymers rap on "Still Fly," a song that also name-checks Mercedes-Benz, BMW, Prada and Gucci.

Luxury product placement in a song from the mid- or late '60s? No way. Music was ominous (Dylan's "All Along the Watchtower"), sometimes sardonic (Creedence Clearwater's "Fortunate Son") and occasionally satiric (the Beatles' "Piggies"). It reflected the gravity of the times or it looked forward to a utopian future that seemed distant but possible. There wasn't a lot of rhapsodizing about money.

If anything, the almighty dollar was scorned. So was Wall Street, at a time when it was rolling along without incident. Abbie Hoffman and 20 friends visited the New York Stock Exchange in August 1967 and gleefully tossed dollar bills from the gallery above the traders. The group was quickly tossed out of the building, but photos of the episode firmed Hoffman's reputation as the nation's greatest yippie prankster.

And now, after a $700 billion bailout? No street theater, no demonstrations. Wall Street has been bloodied and embarrassed, but on-site, public displays of rejection have yet to materialize.

"It might happen," said Steven Fraser, author of "Every Man a Speculator," a history of Wall Street's place in American culture, "because what we've seen is so bad and so serious, and its ramifications are so scary." But, he said, we're a long way from the kind of anti-Wall Street rhetoric that was particularly common after the Depression.

"It's partly a function of Americans becoming familiar with the market," Fraser said. "Half of all American families are, at least in a passive way, invested in the market. We've become accustomed to looking toward it to finance homes, vacations, college, whatever."

That wasn't true in 1968. But back then, long before the age of the mutual fund, life on the margins was surprisingly affordable. If you decided to move to a hippie hothouse such as Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco, you could live decently on $100 a month. Today, without a law degree or an MBA, you can't afford the rent. And the whole firebrand lifestyle is tricky when you live in the suburbs with your mom and dad, as a record number of college graduates now do.

But what if we're just looking for dissent in the wrong places? What if there's just as much rage against the machine as ever, but it's vented in ways and in places that aren't as loud and unmissable as a street march. Web sites, for instance.

"I think the Internet has become a channel for all kinds of countercultural expression, including discontent and critique," said Miles Orvell, a professor of American studies at Temple University. "But it might have this paradoxical effect. It enlarges the conversation, but it can also produce a kind of passivity. It's like, 'I've said it and that's all I need to do.' A lot of young people seem to use the Internet as a surrogate community, and to that extent, it might diminish participation in the visible sphere."

But there are those who say that most political agitation today isn't on the Web or on campuses. The action now, according to Daniel May, who once worked for the Service Employees International Union, is all door to door. They're raising money, they're getting out the vote.

"The organizers of my generation were shaped by 1968," said May, who is working toward a master's degree from Harvard. "But one lesson is that 1968 marked the first year of 40 years of conservative rule. Why would we want to replicate that? There's a real limit to protest politics. It's politics as catharsis and that eventually leads to cynicism."

It would be a mistake, in May's estimation, to confuse the lack of effigies with a lack of passion. The kids who once marched are now trying a different approach, he said, using techniques that were dismissed by their parents as too establishment. May's mother, Elaine Tyler May, a historian at the University of Minnesota, says she used to think that the youth of today just couldn't be bothered. But she has changed her mind.

"My son tells me it's politics that's more interested in power than in protest, and on a good day, that's how I see it," she said. "I still have this impulse to go yelling in the street, but what I see my kids doing is far more effective. I think we're just old and we don't realize -- there's a groundswell of political engagement that we just don't see."