Two Voices on a Stage: The Early Notes of a Political Awakening
A few days ago a video of Joan Baez singing with a younger musician named Jesse Welles showed up in my feed, just one more item in the endless stream of things the internet thinks I might want to see.
I watched it the way I watch most things online, half paying attention, until I realized there was something unexpectedly moving about what I was seeing. It felt less like a performance than a moment of cultural relay, one generation of protest music briefly meeting another on the same stage.
Joan Baez, one of the defining voices of the protest movement of the 1960s, was standing beside Jesse Welles, who has emerged as a recognizable voice among artists trying to make sense of the current political moment.
Baez is now in her mid-eighties, and what struck me right away was how strong her voice still is. There was nothing fragile about her. Her hair is silver now, but she stood on stage completely at ease, like someone who has spent most of her life in front of a microphone.
Standing next to her was Welles, and the difference between them was part of what made the moment so compelling. His young, slightly boyish face and long hair immediately recall the old photographs of Bob Dylan from the early 1960s. He wore a plain fleece shirt, slightly rumpled, his raspy voice a sharp contrast to Baez’s clear soprano. What stayed with me, though, was the way she seemed to look at him during parts of the performance, with a quiet smile that suggested she might be recognizing something familiar, as if she were watching another generation’s Dylan beginning to find his voice.
The two of them were singing “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right,” a song Dylan wrote more than sixty years ago. It isn’t really a protest song. On the surface it’s about a relationship ending. But the tone of the song, that quiet decision to stop arguing and simply walk away, echoed something larger that was happening in the early 1960s, as many young people began turning away from institutions they had once trusted.
Listening to that song now, sung by a younger musician with Joan Baez beside him, it suddenly felt current again. Watching them, I wondered if we might be seeing the early stirrings of something the country hasn’t experienced in sixty years. The moment wasn’t really about the song. It was about the return of a mood the song once captured: the growing sense that institutions people trusted are no longer as solid as they seemed.
That feeling didn’t come out of nowhere. Over the past year there have been moments that left me with the sense that something in the political atmosphere was beginning to shift.
One of those moments that crystallized this feeling came a month ago, when I watched footage of protesters in Minnesota marching through the streets in sub-zero temperatures. People showed up anyway, bundled in hats and scarves, standing outside for hours. The protests had already been going on for some time when two people taking part in them were killed: an ICU nurse named Alex Pretti and another protester, Renée Good. Both were shot during confrontations with federal agents while simply exercising their basic democratic right to protest. I remember seeing the coverage on television and feeling a growing sense of anger as the details of the two shootings, a week apart, emerged. But what stayed with me just as much was the reaction that followed. People across the political spectrum seemed shaken by the government’s attempts to discredit the victims and its refusal to investigate what had happened. In a country that often feels bitterly divided, that kind of shared outrage was striking.
Minnesota wasn’t the only place where that kind of civic energy appeared. Across the United States there were moments that carried a similar charge, the “No Kings” parade for instance, or the quiet scenes of lawyers setting up folding tables in airports to help immigrants navigate the legal system. Some churches revived the old sanctuary tradition, and even a few state governments began openly resisting federal policies.
And it wasn’t only in the United States. In Canada, the response to the Trump tariffs sparked a broad “Buy Canadian” movement. Stores highlighted domestic products, and people across the country began deliberately changing their habits in small acts of solidarity. None of these actions were identical, but together they suggested something beginning to move beneath the surface, the early signs of a civic mood shifting.
Watching moments like these unfold, I keep thinking about the early years of the 1960s. What we now call “the sixties” did not begin as a clearly defined era. It began with moments that probably looked very much like this: protests, unexpected alliances, people beginning to question institutions that had long been treated as unquestionable. At the time those moments must have felt scattered and uncertain. Only later did they come to be recognized as the beginning of something larger.
One of the forces that eventually gave that period its explosive energy was the sudden collapse of institutional trust.
For decades Americans largely believed that the major institutions of public life were fundamentally legitimate. That confidence eroded quickly as the Vietnam War unfolded and the civil rights movement exposed the distance between American ideals and American reality. Something similar seems to be happening now, though for different reasons. Across the political spectrum people have become deeply suspicious of institutions that once commanded automatic respect: governments, media organizations, universities, corporations, even the idea of expertise itself.
But the distrust today is not simply a repeat of the 1960s version. The skepticism of that era, however intense, still operated within a shared factual world. People argued about Vietnam, but they largely agreed on what was happening on the ground, in part because they were watching the same images and hearing the same evening news broadcasts. Today the distrust is different. It is fragmented, viral, and often untethered from any common reality. It doesn’t just question institutions; it questions whether a shared reality exists at all. That shift makes the present moment more chaotic and harder to navigate.
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The technological environment has also changed in ways that make the present moment feel unstable. In the 1960s television created a shared national conversation. People watched the same broadcasts and experienced political events together. Figures like Walter Cronkite came to symbolize that shared trust; for years he was often described as the most trusted man in America, and millions of people believed that when he delivered the evening news he was simply trying to tell them what had actually happened that day.
Today the information landscape is far more fragmented. Social media has decentralized authority and accelerated the spread of political division. Many people now choose news sources that confirm the political views they already hold, turning to outlets such as Fox News, MSNBC, or highly partisan sites like Breitbart or The Young Turks. The result is an environment in which trust in the news has eroded and even basic facts are contested. In that atmosphere of uncertainty, unscrupulous politicians, especially on the far right, exploit confusion for political advantage.
In that kind of environment, it isn’t surprising that trust in institutions has changed. In conversations with younger people, what strikes me most is how little automatic faith many of them have. For them, skepticism is simply normal. They have grown up with political conflict, economic uncertainty, and institutional failure as part of the background. For people in their early twenties, Donald Trump has dominated the political conversation for more than half of their lives. Their attitude toward institutions feels less like rebellion than a default setting. In some ways, it resembles the kind of quiet generational shift that often precedes larger cultural change.
The upheaval of the 1960s is often remembered as a generational conflict, with young people pushing against the older generation. The present moment does not look quite like that. Today the divisions cut across generations in more complicated ways. Many young men who follow social media figures like Joe Rogan supported Donald Trump in the last election, while many baby boomers voted for Kamala Harris. Older and younger people alike express distrust toward institutions, suggesting that the political culture itself may be entering a period of transition.
In many cases the divisions run between people who still trust institutional authority and those who believe those institutions have fundamentally failed. You see this in conversations about the media. One person cites a major newspaper as definitive proof; the other dismisses it as fake news. Similar divides appear between those who still look to established organizations for guidance and those who increasingly trust decentralized networks and independent voices, and between people who believe existing political structures can still be repaired and those who think something entirely new may be needed.
Historical eras often carry an emotional atmosphere that people sense before they can fully explain it. The early 1960s had a feeling of impatience and moral urgency that eventually expressed itself through music, protest, and cultural change. Today’s moment has a different tone, but the same restlessness is there: a sense that the old arrangements no longer make sense and that something new may be struggling to emerge.
Which brings me back to that moment on stage.
Watching Joan Baez and Jesse Welles together, it felt less like nostalgia than succession. Baez’s voice carries the memory of another era of upheaval, when music and protest were intertwined with a generation questioning the institutions around them. Standing beside her was a younger musician, giving voice to the same words in a very different political moment.
Briefly, it felt as if two different points in history had briefly touched, not the same story repeating itself, but something being passed from one generation to another.
Every period of transformation eventually develops its own voice, but before that voice becomes unmistakable there are smaller signals. The cultural atmosphere begins to feel charged. People start acting in ways that suggest they no longer believe the old assumptions hold.
Watching that performance, I wondered if this might be how moments like that begin. The 1960s did not begin as “the 1960s”; they began as scattered signals: songs, protests, arguments, acts of defiance that only later resolved into a recognizable era.
And perhaps the reason that performance felt so strangely current is that something similar is beginning to move through the culture again. Not the same upheaval; no era repeats itself exactly.
But something in the air feels familiar, like the first signs of a political awakening.
Postscript
A quick note for readers curious about Jesse Welles. The clip with Joan Baez that opens this essay is interesting mainly for the moment it captures. But if you want to hear what Welles sounds like performing his own material, his appearance on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert shows much more clearly why some people are comparing him to Bob Dylan
Originally published at https://markflumerfelt.substack.com.
