When the toothy teen band the Osmonds reached No 1 with their first hit, One Bad Apple, Joe Jackson was furious. The father of the Jackson boys believed that Michael and his brothers should have had that song. Jackson attacked Berry Gordy, the Motown founder, in bitter terms. “He handed those white boys a song we should have recorded,” he wildly alleged. “And Mormons too!”

From his earliest days, Michael Jackson was a phenomenon. From the age of 5 he could be found watching James Brown’s extravagant stage antics for hours, copying what he saw. Gerald Posner records in his spectacular history of Motown how young Michael brought in the crowds, astonished seasoned executives, wowed the media. And, until the drugs got him, he didn't stop.

So Jackson deserves to be regarded as an extraordinary showman. A brilliant, dazzling talent. But as a pioneering figure in the history of rock and pop? I think that is more controversial. He wasn’t, as some have suggested, the first black star to appeal to a mass white audience. What about Diana Ross and the Supremes? (“Listen, Diana Ross didn’t become a star by being black,” as Gordy puts it.) Nor was he, by some distance, the first disco dance act. He brought the curtain down on the Motown era. As Gordy says of the Jackson 5: “They would be the last big stars to come rolling off my assembly line.” The last, not the first.

Jackson’s claim to greatness is more prosaic. He sold a lot of records. He may have competed with the Osmonds as a kid, but he outran them, outsold them, outlasted them. Indeed he outsold everyone. I think the right judgment on Jackson’s career is that he was a magnificent entertainer, a thriller (sorry), but not someone who shaped pop history.

And it is worth calibrating that judgment finely — spending a little time on it — because it prompts bigger questions. Why, given his status, did Jackson’s death make such an impact? Why was it covered wall to wall in upmarket newspapers as well as downmarket ones? Why did it attract more serious attention than the passing of Elvis and John Lennon, both of whom were undeniably more culturally important?

The answer is not that newspapers and others got their assessment of Jackson wrong. It is that in the nearly 30 years since Lennon’s death society has changed fundamentally. The culture war that has been raging for 50 years or so has come to an end. And popular culture has won.

The primary way of explaining politics has traditionally been class. Democracy allows the peaceful resolution of the clash of material interests. Leaders have been seen as representatives of one interest group or another. The founders of the Social Democratic Party were told that they would fail because they represented no real class interest. And when they did fail, it seemed to prove the point.

Yet another way of explaining politics, certainly the politics of the past 50 years, is through age cohorts. Alongside the class struggle has been the generation gap.

When the generation gap first appeared, at the beginning of the 1960s, it was thought to be the result of longer lives. Survivors of the US Civil War could expect to die before they were 50. Survivors of the Second World War might expect to live until they were 65. In these extended lives there came a new period. One of adolescence, of perhaps a decade between being a child and an adult. The alienation of these young people from their parents, something that became obvious in the 1960s, seemed a natural thing that would recur generation after generation.

But that isn’t quite what happened. As Ian MacDonald writes in Revolution in the Head, his book on the Beatles, while children will always row with their parents, the 1960s generation gap turned out to be a single event. It divided those who saw the period before that decade as their reference point from those who saw the period during and after it as their reference point.

In the succeeding decades the battle over the 1960s and its legacy has raged in politics. It has raged more strongly and more fiercely in America than here (as things do), but it has raged here too (or some polite British word that means sort of raged). In the 1960s it was violent. But when young men grow up they generally stop being violent. So as they turned adult, the Sixties street-fighting men quietly carried their liberal values, their egalitarian assumptions, their pop sensibility, their democratic accents, their low-culture hipness into the mainstream. And they became doctors and dentists and Cabinet ministers and civil servants. They changed the elite from the inside.

Politicians like Tony Blair and Bill Clinton make no sense viewed through the traditional lens of class politics. In the clash of material interests and economic ideas they are vastly inferior figures to Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. Not so if politics is also seen as the clash of generations. For these were the first political tribunes of the post-1960s generation to reach the highest office, bringing major social change with them. What David Cameron means by modernising the Tory party is more about moving from old to young than from right to left. It is much more about accommodating to the 1960s than to abandoning Conservative economic thinking.

The trials and tribulations of Clinton can be best understood by seeing him as a generational politician fighting a knockdown battle against those who hated the 1960s and all it stood for, as he himself acknowledges in a pugnacious defence of that decade in Tom Brokaw’s Boom!, a history of the 1960s generation.

No more. The battle is ending, the smoke is clearing. The wildest, stupidest ideas of the 1960s New Left have died out. And so too, slowly but surely, are the generations who came before the gap.

Barack Obama sees himself, explicitly, as the first representative of a new era — the era of peace after the culture war. “We have seen the psychodrama of the baby-boom generation play out over the last 40 years,” he told New York magazine in 2006. “I think people sort of feel like, OK, let’s not relitigate the Sixties 40 years later”.

The fact that across class, across race, among those of vastly different educational and material backgrounds an essentially innocuous showman like Michael Jackson can be big news is just one little sign that the culture war is done. We’re all pop fans now. Happy Xmas. War is Over.

daniel.finkelstein@thetimes.co.uk

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