For a fascinating catalog of early sixties cultural phenomenon, check out Bruce Bawer's Article, "The Other Sixties" in the Wilson Quarterly. He sums up:
Though new issues occupy the front burner, that polarization endures today, and the concept of civic obligation—so central to the early 1960s—has long since been supplanted by a reflexive cynicism and a tendency to judge all public discourse by its entertainment value. Who, in the early 1960s, would have imagined that 40 years later the best-selling books on public affairs would be not earnest tracts on poverty and the environment but crude partisan rants by the likes of Michael Moore, Ann Coulter, Al Franken, and Michael Savage? Likewise, the respectably middlebrow common culture of the early 1960s is only a memory, as is the pipe dream of an America enchanted by serious literature and classical music; instead we have American mass culture, a worldwide economic powerhouse that transforms almost everything it touches. And though that mass culture is, admittedly, large and diverse—and fragmented—enough to include many bright spots, it also has staggering depths of vulgarity, is aimed (largely) at 12-year-olds, and has little regard for intelligence, seriousness, or wit. The early 1960s’ naivet頭ay be gone, but philistinism and ignorance thrive unashamed. In a time when many Americans appear far more eager to be coarsened than to be edified, the early 1960s look very attractive indeed.
Bawer might miss the mark ever so slightly in pinning the cultural decline on the Sixties. As David Frum masterfuly shows in his How We Got Here, The Seventies, the real cultural decline took place after Watergate and the fall of Saigon tarnished our institutions. We are still recovering from these self-inflicted wounds.