Liberal activists look back to the 1960s for inspiration. They should be looking to the 1980s instead.

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Jonathan Kaufman is director of the School of Journalism at Northeastern University and the author of “When America Roared: How the 1980s Saved, Then Broke, the Country — And Led…

Jonathan Kaufman is director of the School of Journalism at Northeastern University and the author of “When America Roared: How the 1980s Saved, Then Broke, the Country — And Led Us to Today.”

Democrats and liberals relish looking back nostalgically to the 1960s — the music, the freedom, the protests. That’s especially true these days when, whatever satisfaction they may take in the midterms’ “blue tsunami,” many on the center-left remain anxious about an out-of-control president, ascendant corporate power, and a conservative Supreme Court supermajority that is going nowhere.

The college students I teach every week can seem especially pessimistic — and especially susceptible to a paralyzing cynicism. They were in elementary school the first time Donald Trump was elected, in 2016, and have grown up with him as the dominant figure in their political lives. In a Harvard Institute of Politics poll taken this fall before the midterm election, only 9 percent of young adults aged 18 to 29 said they believed the United States was heading in the right direction, while 62 percent said it was on the wrong track. Half of the young Americans polled said they believe “people like them” have no real say in how the government is run.

What is the antidote to this paralysis? We can start by looking somewhere new for inspiration.

The civil rights and antiwar demonstrations of the 1960s were built for the moment. The visceral images of dogs attacking protesters in Birmingham, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s soaring speech at the March on Washington, and antiwar protesters marching through the streets of American cities were beamed into American homes on the three major networks that dominated what people saw on television. These dramatic protests were accompanied by a political agenda — voting rights, abolishing Jim Crow segregation, withdrawal from Vietnam — that applied continued pressure on Congress and the White House.

In this kind of environment, liberals would be wise to…

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