Today’s Animal Farm
The point of the 1960s, again we were taught, was to tear down the rules, the traditions and customs, the hierarchies of the old guys. The targets were supposedly the uptight, short-hair, square-tie, adult generation who grew up in the Depression, won World War II, and were fighting to defeat Cold War Soviet Union.
The good guys, the students, and the activists, if they only had power, were going to break up corporations, shame (or “eat”) the rich, and bring in young, hip politicians. Reformers like the younger Kennedy brothers, the John Kerry war hero-resisters, the Bay Area Dianne Feinsteins, and the hip Nancy Pelosis would disrupt the “status quo” of politics.
They would all push hard for assimilation and integration of the races, and the equality of the sexes in pursuit of universal equality of opportunity…
Fast forward a half-century. What did these now-late septuagenarians give America?
Yes, the downtrodden pigs, the exploited horses, and the victimized sheep finally did expel Farmer Jones from America’s Animal Farm.
But in his place, as Orwell predicted, revolutionary pigs began walking on two feet and absorbed all the levers of American cultural influence and power: the media, the bureaucracies, Wall Street, Silicon Valley, publishing, the academy, K-12 education, professional sports, and entertainment. And to them all, the revolutionaries added their past coarseness and 1960s-era by-any-means-necessary absolutism.
We are now finally witnessing the logical fruition of their radical utopia: Censorship, electronic surveillance, internal spying, monopolies, cartels, conspiracy theories, weaponization of the intelligence agencies, pouring billions of dollars into campaigns, changing voting laws by fiat, a woke revolutionary military, book banning, bleeding the First Amendment, canceling careers, blacklisting, separate-but-equal racial segregation and separatism.
Conspiracies? Now they brag of them in Time. Read their hubristic confessionals in “The Secret History of the Shadow Campaign That Saved the 2020 Election.” Once upon a Time, radicals used to talk of a “secret history” in terms of the Pentagon Papers, or a “shadow campaign” in detailing Hollywood blacklisting. They are exactly what they once despised, with one key qualifier: Sixties crudity and venom are central to their metamorphosis.
I have a few quibbles with Hanson, although I generally agree with the way he is describing the trends. My first qualifier is that the Boomers (which is the generation I believe he is describing, which is my generation and his) were just part of a long continuum that began way before they were born and continued into more recent generations. The 1960s were an important transition time, but they did not stand alone and other hands have taken over since then and greatly extended what for want of a better term we’ll call the Gramscian march.
My second qualifier is that Nancy Pelosi is of an earlier generation. She was born in 1940 and graduated from college in 1962. Although that’s nominally the 60s, it really isn’t in cultural terms; it’s more akin to the 50s. She stayed in local politics (the family business) until the late 1980s, and only came onto the national radar screen after 2000. Not a creature of the 60s or even the 70s at all, although she certainly rode the changes it wreaked.
The same goes for Dianne Feinstein, only more so. Born in 1933, she graduated from college in 1955. Then she went into local San Francisco politics and only began to hold national office in the 1990s. I just don’t see either Pelosi or Feinstein as having any prominence during radicals’ 60s dreams.
I also see the major movers in this entire transformation as multi-generational and mainly cultural, with the political following the changes in education, entertainment, and the press. As Andrew Breitbart said, “politics is downstream from culture.”
[NOTE: In an old post of mine I discuss a formative experience that allowed me to understand the 1960s in a way that was much more ominous than optimistic, even as the 60s were unfolding. Here’s an excerpt from that post:
Much of school and even college felt like the memorization of dry and irrelevant facts. Many novels seemed obscure and and hardly applicable to my life, and one would have thought that would have been even more true of these startling and intense Russian works from a time that seemed so distant then (although it seems much closer now; odd how that happens, isn’t it?).
But something in them rang a bell, especially as the political upheaval of the 60s progressed. That bell had a sound not only of strange and inexplicable familiarity, it was also an ominous toll of warning. The books seemed to speak to the troubled times in which I was living, and made me realize that there is hardly any new thought under the sun. Those headstrong revolutionaries of the far-off Russian past were not stilted figures in an old and faded photo; they too closely and uncomfortably resembled the rebels of my own generation, who thought they had invented protest and cast off the shackles of the past.
But it was Dostoevsky—as well as other 19th-century Russian writers I was assigned in a college course entitled “Russian Intellectual History,” the single most memorable course of my college career—who informed me across the span of time that my generation was at least as stupid and short-sighted, and even more lacking in knowledge of history, as those Russian firebrands of long ago who thought they were building a better world (some of them thought that, anyway) and ended up constructing a police state and the Gulag in which quite a few of them met their own ends, as well.
After that, I could never see the self-righteous zealot revolutionaries of the 1960s as taking us anywhere but down.]
This is certainly one of VDH’s most interesting essays. Curiously, to be “anti-establishment” now or part of the “resistance”, or to be mistrustful of the “system” or to be willing to speak “truth to power” is to reveal oneself as being conservative or somewhere on the right or, at the very least, anti-leftist. One of the most interesting bloggers on the topic (mostly) of natural history is a retired professor of biology from the U of C (Jerry Coyne at Why Evolution is True); I am often surprised and pleased at the criticism from this Trump-despising atheist Democrat about the “racialization of everything”, the contempt for free speech from the left, and the unbearable “wokeness” of the NYT and The New Yorker (both now almost completely worthless).
Those who led the 60s “revolution” were from the generation before the boomers. The baby boomers were the foot soldiers for them. It was only much later that it was publicly discovered that many of those “leaders” had received training and even orders from the USSR. Relayed through the old 1930s/40s people of the CPUSA.
I now wonder how much the new dominate Communist Party of China has had a hand in all the events of the past decade or so?
At base, the common belief that connects every revolutionary movement that seeks to overturn the ‘old’ with the ‘new’ is the belief that “building a better world” is possible.
The globalist Great Reset is founded upon that illusion.
A better world is not “built”. A better world can only arise as the result of a visionary leadership, grounded in common sense, that consistently acts with integrity that is in turn embraced by a society.
For “If the blind lead the blind, both shall fall into the ditch.” Mathew 15:14
“Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other” John Adams
My second qualifier is that Nancy Pelosi is of an earlier generation. She was born in 1940 and graduated from college in 1962. Although that’s nominally the 60s, it really isn’t in cultural terms…What!???! John Lennon was born in 1940. So…John Lennon was not part of the 1960s in cultural terms? Sorry, that’s a ridiculous statement. If the Beatles were removed from the ’60s, there would be no ’60’s in terms Hanson is talking about.
Geoff+b:
Mainly China just buys whatever your whoreish politicians and corporations are willing to sell to them… i.e. everything.
China is an opportunistic tentacle-pornish kind of power. It’s less interested in absolute destruction of the USA per USSR back in the pre-detente Cold War and more interested in taking a mile after ever inch gained. Still plenty of profit and fun in being inscrutable Pimp Master of the Old Whore.
They’re pragmatic most of the time. If you’ve ever done business with Chinese over any length of time, they quickly size you up for either a quick con or a long, ostensibly win-win game where you finally wake up 20 years later to the realization that they had three or four other angles on the deal that you were blissfully unaware of.
China is a Per-Level Civilizational Enemy. The best thing the USA could do for itself would be to clean its own shop — I mean really *scour* it and disengage from non-essential geopolitics for 50 years or so. You don’t need to be Sir John Glubb to know that the 250 year Clock is up on the USA and things are getting iffy.. Let the CCP Dynasty learn the same thing in their own time.
You do have external enemies. But understand clearly that your internal enemies (which are Legion) have had great fun this last 75 years by focusing all your attention on external enemies. Every time some new Bogey Man pops up, think critically.
Boomers… Wouldn’t Feed Them.
;P
Having said that, the rot goes back a lot further than Boomers. The rest of us just hate Boomers because they were the first and last generation to have it really easy and many of them have zero awareness of how tough things are for younger generations and pontificate too much.
But silly to focus on Boomers. It’s a more benign case of the “it’s the Joos” mental short circuit. Sometimes it is the Boomers… or the Jews… or the Kiwanis but most of the time it’s Us — where us is Western Civ or Human Condition, depending.
We’re never going to achieve any kind of nirvana, but rooting out the sources of our current issues and working toward multi-generational fixes will require the kind of historical study and introspection and personal development that is most uncommon these days.
Some of you may find this summary of the Super Bowl broadcast to be of interest:
https://bigcountryexpatoriginal.blogspot.com/2021/02/wtf-did-i-just-watch.html
Pontificate too much, meet Mr. Beeblebrox.
Zaphod:
Really easy? Ha!
Try the draft during the Vietnam War – or my position as girlfriend of someone fighting there. The riots and assassinations, plus growing up in the Cold War thinking as a child that the Bomb was likely to blast you to kingdom come, having drills that drove that home and being issued dog tags in kindergarten.
Then coming of age for some of us during the 70s Carter years, when the economy wasn’t doing well at all.
There have been harder times on earth, but I don’t really think those times were so easy at all.
Adrian+Day, you’re missing the point that Neo was making there, I think. She was talking about the calendar year 1962, not Pelosi in general or the decade in general. There is a case to be made, I imagine, for 1960, 1961, 1962 to belong somewhat more to the Fifties than to what most people think of as “The Sixties”. I wasn’t around then, but it does make some intuitive sense, this idea – we barely had a fingernailhold in Vietnam as yet (I forget when JFK sent the first ‘advisors’), and while the civil rights movement had certainly got going by then, notable civic unrest hadn’t yet come into play as it would in the later part of the ’60s. It’s a question of what is generally perceived to have set the tone for a given decade.
Also, it is appreciated that if you’re going to quote our hostess or anyone else here, please make it visually clear that you are quoting someone and that the words are not your own. There are a couple of different ways to do that with HTML tags and things like that, or even simple quote marks. It makes things less confusing in the conversation.
@Neo:
In all seriousness, that’s the best Boomer Defence I’ve read ever since it became fashionable to dump on Boomers — there’s quite a bit of that going on out on the Ernst Jünger end of the political spectrum.
I guess we tend to discount the troubles of the sixties if we didn’t live through them — the destruction of a whole inner-city way of life when the Orcs were let off the leash and then not being able to talk about it properly. Oil Shock, Carter… meh. But I think this gets closer to the point: anyone with a college education and a bit of drive could land a nice (if not super-remunerative) publicly-funded sinecure back in the day without having to join AntiFa or get himself gelded. Additionally, anyone with college education and a bit of drive couldn’t fail to make out like gangbusters during the 80s boom.
The youngsters today don’t see the riots and don’t give much of a Rats’ about RFK — but they do see that the rope ladders have mostly been pulled up and they’re stuck on the ground floor.
December 1, 1969 (the first draft lottery since 1942) … a day I’ll remember forever. I was enrolled in college to get a degree but also to avoid the draft.
That day no male went to class and 100’s of us were in the student union building (or somewhere else) glued to the TV. I got lucky and my # was 205. The projected draft for that year was to take up to #195. All of us that had high #’s went and dropped our deferments that day. We only had to make it till Jan 1 and we would move to second priority group which meant we would more than likely never be drafted.
Some with lower #’s enlisted in a preferred service instead of just getting drafted into Army. Some just sit and waited for the letter to arrive. One of my good friends joined an Army diver group and he never had to go. He also made a career as commercial diver from his training with that group.
I would have went if I were drafted BUT I’m very glad and thankful I didn’t have to.
Oh what a year, my freshman year in college was 1963, a small private men’s college with a small private women’s college in the same town, Fulton Missouri. That was an interesting year, all freshman had compulsory study halls, seven to ten with about a 15 min break at 8:30 and phone calls were made to the girls dorms. Weekends when we dated the girls had to be back in the dorms, signed in by midnight and the only PDA’s in the open on campus were the goodbyes at the doors of the girls dorms. Of course in the frat houses where we had great parties and out in the boonies on blanket parties there was a fair amount of kissing and other stuff but not too much in those olden days.
Compulsary ROTC for all able bodied males with drill on Friday afternoons and I was in the ROTC band, (we played ‘Hail to the Chief’ in the spring of 64 when Harry Truman came to the campus for graduation and spoke in the same Gym where Winston Churchill had given the ‘Iron Curtain’ speech in 1946.) We also had Saturday morning classes so we could not get too messed up on Friday night and we had regular chapel services during he week and attended church services on Sunday, often with girl friends joining us.
That was the year the Beatles became hot and there were a lot of great dance songs and our frat had five guys who were excellent musicians, they would work on the songs practicing in the afternoons and Friday and Saturday night parties were incredible. ‘Rebel Rouser’ was most fun joining hands in a round dance until folks were falling down. For some reason ‘Hava Nagila’ was another fantastic group dance, we drank a lot of beer and some whisky but I never saw any drug usage at all. We were still living in a bubble with most of us have dads who saw service in WWII and we were pretty much nice young people, aware of the the race issues and wanting to see things become better but pretty much just living the college life.
Yeah, Sgt. Pepper’s didn’t come out until 1967. The early Beatles admired Buddy Holly and borrowed from him. I think Paul almost bought the Holly catalog.
Crime and Punishment was one of the first few serious novels I read at about age 13. It was a lucky choice, in that I got that it was something of a counterpoint to trendy and rotten philosophies of the era. I was hooked and read most of Dostoyevsky’s works in the next few years. And D.H. Lawrence.
@OldTexan:
Have you considered writing about your earlier life? It’s the details and minutiae which will matter so much to your descendants (even if they don’t realize this today).
Mind you, your reminiscences of College Life in simpler, happier times diverge rather from those of the late and most unlamented Hassan al-Banna 😛
I am also a reader,
I was and am very near sighted and I was a reader from my first year in school, I enjoyed short stories and longer ones, by authors such as Guy de Maupassant, Poe, Dostoyevsky, Steinbeck, Chekhov, Henry Miller, Hemingway and my last year in high school; Ayn Rand, I grew up in a home full of books and music since my mom taught piano with a lot of classical music, six days a week in our house. Now in my later years I have no need for TV and my hearing is not good at all but I love my books and read several each week, what a sorry world this would be without lots of books written over the centuries, Kindle has all sorts of biographies from the 1800’s, lots of Churchill and Teddy Roosevelt books for free or next to nothing, my wife and I have been working through the Nero Wolfe books recently, silly and ever so much fun to read.
I am so sorry for younger generations who have not devoured all of these great stories and to think these and others will no longer be part of their education, not reading Dante, Shakespeare, and others who helped, with their stories make us who we are, what the hell, what are they thinking but I know, they are not doing much thinking at all. I did a short time as a sub teacher in South Dallas over ten years ago when I first retired and it ate my lunch, we were just kind of baby sitting teen agers trying to keep a level of control in the class and passing the kids on to the next grade just to keep them moving on along and I could not handle that so I quit. Now those poor befuddled kids ten years later parents and they vote. In order to move forward with a life it is best if there is a compass to set your course, otherwise you just drift along and young folks don’t have much information and knowledge to know where their True North is. Decades and generations have lost their bearings.
Mr. Beeblebrox doesn’t seem to understand the dislocation of the economy that occurred in the 60s – 80s. When did Detroit begin to fall to Japan? When did the price of gasoline go from $0.35 to $2 or more a gallon? And why in 1973 was rationing of gasoline was imposed? From the late 1970 to the early 1980 there was the oil-boom (geologists were kings), then by 1984 the industry collapsed (“You want fries with trhat?”) as did the uraniun and coal industries. Good luck with those career paths. But the environmental movement created jobs, as it was killing industries. Was this a self imposed destruction by the Boomers on the Boomers? Partly. But the millies have a better idea, windmills. Good luck running your 5G phone systems or server farms with that.
But don’t don’t cry to me Millie when you don’t know anything that happened before you became self awar, Oh I forgot, only Boomers are self absorbed,
I would imagine the generation destroyed in WW1 might have written a few things about hardship. Or those who lived through WWII.
https://io9.gizmodo.com/this-animated-data-visualization-of-world-war-ii-fatali-1709065880
Or those from the American Civil War.
Tell me again how hard your cohort has it. Whatever, millie.
Om: I’m Early Gen X. Now get off my (non-existent) lawn!
@Old Texan:
Looks like I’m off to stock up on Nero Wolfe diversions. Thanks!
Keep going, keep going :).
My second qualifier is that Nancy Pelosi is of an earlier generation. She was born in 1940 and graduated from college in 1962. Although that’s nominally the 60s, it really isn’t in cultural terms; it’s more akin to the 50s. She stayed in local politics (the family business) until the late 1980s, and only came onto the national radar screen after 2000. Not a creature of the 60s or even the 70s at all, although she certainly rode the changes it wreaked.
Disagree, disagree.
1. The nadir in the size of birth cohorts was reached in 1936, the peak in 1957.
2. The ecosystem flip in family life began in 1967 and finished in 1979. During that time, the annual attrition rate of marriages trebled (net increased between 1947 and 1967 was nil). The modal age of a party to a divorce proceeding in 1967 (consequent to a 1st marriage) would have been about 28 years, ergo born in 1939.
3. The mode in popular music changed quite abruptly ca. 1955, as did the age distribution of those buying records. High school seniors were those born in 1938.
4. The sum of inductions and first enlistments ca. 1962 accounted for about 1/3 of male cohorts around age 20; those ca. 1968 accounted for about 1/2. The former proportions were retained through about 1965, referring to the 1945 cohort.
5. Certain consumer preferences among college-bound youth changed quite abruptly around 1967.
The median of 1937, 1939, 1938, 1945, and 1947 is 1939.
Note about Pelosi: she was not enmeshed in Baltimore politics after her marriage in 1963, her brothers were. She was a protegée of Sala Burton. The Burtons were federal politicians at the time, though they’d previously worked in Sacramento; they were never local pols. It was Sala Burton who arranged for Pelosi’s election as Democratic state chairman in 1977. The Burtons were secular Jewish, had one child between them, had each migrated to the Bay Area in adolescence, and were employed in either law or politics from 1948 onward. Pelosi’s father lived his whole life in Baltimore, her mother from perhaps age 3. Her mother was strictly domestic, and bore seven children. Her father was in the insurance business and kept a hand in even as he held public office. Pelosi’s career can be understood as a rejection of her parents’ values in favor of the Burtons’.
The same goes for Dianne Feinstein, only more so. Born in 1933, she graduated from college in 1955. Then she went into local San Francisco politics and only began to hold national office in the 1990s. I just don’t see either Pelosi or Feinstein as having any prominence during radicals’ 60s dreams.
Feinstein was a child of San Francisco’s Jewish haut bourgeois. She was married successively to a lawyer, a doctor, and a real estate developer. All her life she qualified as a fancy person – haut bourgeois certainly, patrician most of the time. She got involved in local politics after her one-and-only daughter hit school age, presumably to keep busy. As late as 1991, she was willing to say ‘no’ to the Democratic Party’s clamoring constituencies. Feinstein in her prime was an independent thinker who thrived in executive positions. Feinstein is known to have had wretched issues with her mother, but her politics were perfectly normal-range for a Jewish society wife of a certain vintage; she doesn’t appear to have repudiated anything or anyone.
Art Deco:
What are you disagreeing with?
I said they were not Boomers, and they’re not. I said they didn’t get into national politics until long after the 60s and 70s, and they didn’t. Thus, they were not part of the “reformers” people in the 60s were looking at who “would disrupt the ‘status quo’ of politics.” Kennedy and Kerry yes, but Feinstein and Pelosi were much later in terms of anything except a very local SF visibility.
I know about Pelosi’s Baltimore background and in fact I’ve written a post about her political evolution that included it. But her political involvement (not her family’s; her own) started in SF, as I said. And politics was the family business, as I said.
As for Feinstein, she was born to a Jewish father and a mother whose parents were ethnically Jewish but who practiced the Russian Orthodox faith. Feinstein’s mother insisted she go to Catholic schools, and she did. This is a topic I’ve also mentioned in the past, here.
My point about Feinstein is that (a) she’s no Boomer (b) no one was looking to her for political hope in the 60s or even the 70s, except on a very local level in SF. Same point as with Pelosi. That’s basically it.
Zaphod:
I think you are mostly correct about it being economically easier for the Boomers, easier to get a job back then – except for that one exception I mentioned, which was the Carter years and even the years leading up to those years. There was a recession and then “stagflation,” and some types of jjobs were hard to come by. I remember it well because my husband got out of school then and was looking for work, and it was very difficult in his field.
Also, the speed of the cultural changes are often presented as having been fun. They were not fun to me, and I doubt I was alone in that. It was cultural whiplash time, and some of us recognized the dangers of what was happening when rules were tossed out the window seemingly overnight.
Philip Sells:
Yes, the year 1962 was part of the 50s. 1964-1965-1966 was the beginning of the transition (although it depended where one lived; Berkeley was earlier and the midwest was later). 1967 was the full 60s.
@neo:
1963 according to Philip Larkin’s Annus Mirabilis poem.
Zaphod:
Ah, yes, but you must remember this:
(1) Larkin was surely no Boomer. He would have been 41 at that point.
(2) He says sex began, not the 60s. You might say they’re synonymous, but no.
(3) Poetic license. “1963” rhymes with “me.”
(4) The Beatles didn’t get to the US till 1964.
(5) The Pill was around in 1963, but it wasn’t easy to get. It was only fully legal in all states with Griswold in 1965, even for married couples.
(6) The transition year for the most part in the US was 1967. I remember it well. It was like someone pulled the plug on all the rules.
@neo:
OK, Boomer.
Sorry, couldn’t resist!
Must have been an uncanny feeling the world shift underneath your feet in 1967. And then to have it happen again this past twelve months. Once is enough for me.
Let’s forget Larkin… Second Coming + The Mask: Yeats has it all covered.
Reminds me of an old post by Daniel Greenfield:
“The social progressivism of the left has never been anything but a fraud. A tool used to recruit bohemian activists to fight on their side, while purging them once the revolution was successful. The left tries to overturn the values of a target society as part of a comprehensive revolutionary assault. That doesn’t mean that its actual values are different. Once the left gains absolute power, it seeks to create a static and unchanging system. The perfect Utopian society with immovable laws administered by an endless political bureaucracy. In the real world this translates into a repressive search for stability. Which means banning exactly the same things that the left had been fighting for. And the first thing to be banned is always the right to dissent. A right that the left insists on for itself when it is out of power, but does not permit to others when it is.
George Orwell expressed this closed circle at the end of Animal Farm by having the ‘new bosses’ who were once pigs become indistinguishable from the farmers, the ‘old bosses.’ The pigs had not been interested in an animal run farm. What they all along wanted was to take over. To become the farmers. Championing the rights of all animals to be free was only a tool to accomplish their end goal. Absolute power.”
re the 1960s, another Sebastian Haffner quote is relevant. Speaking of the Weimar era:
“Despite everything, one could find a fresh atmosphere in Germany at this time…The barriers between the classes had become thin and permeable…There were many students who were labourers, and many young labourers who were students Class prejudice and the starched-collar mentality were simply out of fashion. The relations between the sexes were freer and franker than ever–perhaps a fortunate by-product of the lack of discipline of the past years…we felt a bewildered sympathy for previous generations who had, in their youth, had the choice between unapproachable virgins for adoration and harlots for relaxation. Finally, a new hope even began to dawn in international relations; there was less prejudice and more understanding of the other side, and an unmistakable pleasure in the vivid variety that the world derives from its many peoples.”
Interesting parallel, don’t you think?
And it’s interesting to speculate: Were the good aspects of both Weimar and the 1960s inevitably linked to the bad things that happened later?
I said they were not Boomers, and they’re not.
Feinstein, no. Pelosi, yes. Boomers and to a degree Gen-X were subjects of disagreeable cultural shifts. Silents are the before, Millennials the after. To the extent that any of this matters. Pelosi’s cohort were actors at the beginning of the shift, her children living in the matrix of the end of the shift. Note, except for item five, I only referred to phenomena that were abroad among every strata of society. (After an initial period, you could see item five among wage-earners and Southerners as well).
My point about Feinstein is that (a) she’s no Boomer (b) no one was looking to her for political hope in the 60s or even the 70s, except on a very local level in SF. Same point as with Pelosi. That’s basically it.
Neither one was Bobby Kennedy, true. In re Pelosi, she had no popular following at all. Her career is a function of the willingness of San Francisco voters to eat the bowl of manure power brokers put in front of them.
Larkin nailed the Zeitgeist elsewhere:
“I just think it will happen, soon.” (“Going, Going”)
“After that, I could never see the self-righteous zealot revolutionaries of the 1960s as taking us anywhere but down.”
Why do you think hubris is number one of the seven deadly sins?
So Beeblebrox is trying to keep up with the millies and sad to be X’ed out and not relevant.
Inside Antifa,
The Andy Ngo podcast, “Antifa Unmasked” Jan 28 2021
“Andy Ngo – Antifa Unmasked: Inside America’s Anarchy | Modern Wisdom Podcast #275”
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=cqNrLObX-mA
This is only slightly off topic. Guess who is worried about rotten ideologies from which source.
That quote is from the NYTimes. The link can be found in the piece by Thomas Lifson here. The whole Lifson piece is interesting in that he argues both pros and cons on French politics and ideology.
Two things – I don’t think VDH was claiming that Pelosi or Feinstein were “leaders” of the 60s cultural revolution, but having come of age during that time, and considering their Democrat politics, their viewpoint of the world was unquestionably informed by it. I feel like focusing on whether they were leaders of the movement or not is, not necessarily missing the point, but focusing on part of it that is tangential, at best.
@zaphod Second, the notion that kids today somehow have it hard is, least of all compared to kids in the 60s or 70s is HILARIOUS!
OMG, you have to be kidding me. I, too, am early Gen X, and as such, I suspect YOU grew up well off. I did not. The economic issues of the 1970s were very real, whether it was unemployment or inflation, or any other issue. Kids today are the richest generation in the history of the world and the fact that they can’t all be billionaires doesn’t make that fact any less true. The worst thing to ever happen to kids has been the ridiculous over-reaction to Covid. Prior to that, the worst thing any of them could claim is that someone said words they didn’t like or they were bamboozled into paying $250K for a gender studies degree. And the Covid hysteria didn’t have to be this way, but we all know why it was.
deadrody:
Well off? I am one of six children of a SFC US Army (20 yrs retired) and a legal secretary, After retiring from the Army he worked as a millwright and then was employed by the Army as a tow truck driver and supervisor of teamsters. Yeah that is the route to wealth (not). Lower middle class at best. Both worked full time to support the family. Two of my siblings earned college degrees.
I paid my way through undergrad and grad school by working residential construction, heavy construction (power plant smokestack crew), as uranium miner, a coal exploration geologist, a geothermal exploration geologist, and a marine geology research assistant. No Ivy’s in my family, no old or new money, no trust funds, no inheritances or legacies passed down.
Ever work on jobs where bad judgement or inattention would get you seriously injured or killed? Been there done that. I wasn’t in the military or a LEO so no one was actively trying to kill me, but a D9 operator who doesn’t see you will run you over just the same …
Who is this daddy warbucks OMG you speak of? Some folks I grew up with had it a lot harder than me .
And it’s interesting to speculate: Were the good aspects of both Weimar and the 1960s inevitably linked to the bad things that happened later?
What good aspects?
The issue that I see as absent from this discussion is the descent from ‘equality of opportunity’ to division of spoils in accordance with racial, gender, etc., criteria. (All with the full support of the US Supreme Court.) I have been aware of the identification of ‘whiteness’ as the root of all evil on the outskirts of polite conversation, but now, it is not only front and center, but exclusive of any other point. I just wonder if in all of this, some of the ‘titans’ (it’ll have to be of the media, they are the only ones with sufficient resources to make some changes) might look at all of this (and, lets not forget Molly Ball’s article in Time) and realize that this is not good and not American.
Having said that, the rot goes back a lot further than Boomers. The rest of us just hate Boomers because they were the first and last generation to have it really easy and many of them have zero awareness of how tough things are for younger generations and pontificate too much.
1. A person born in 1950 would have been at the midpoint of his work life around 1992. In 1992, personal disposable income per capita (in 2012 currency units) was about $27,800 a year. This year, when the 1978 cohort is near the midpoint of their work lives, that metric stands at $47,700 per year.
2. Overall unemployment rates in 1982 slightly exceeded those registered in 2009. I think the median age of an unemployed person tends to be around 36, though there may be secular and situational change in that number. Someone 36 years of age in 1982 was born in 1946. And no one born after 1975 has had experience as a consumer with truly unstable prices (though the people who were ruined by the inflation registered between 1965 and 1983 were older people with fixed income pensions and savings in time deposits and U.S. Savings Bonds).
3. Can I introduce you to my sister’s 1979 Chevette? By the end of 1981, that car was a menace to everyone’s health and well-being. My 15 year old Subaru (bought used) is more reliable than that junk heap was spanking new.
4. The young in the era of BLM and ‘defund the police’ are getting a taste of urban life as we knew it in 1979.
Neo said, “The transition year for the most part in the US was 1967. I remember it well. It was like someone pulled the plug on all the rules.”
My first year in college, large university, upper Midwest, started Sept. 1966, ended June 1967. “Cha-cha-cha-changes” indeed.
But I think this gets closer to the point: anyone with a college education and a bit of drive could land a nice (if not super-remunerative) publicly-funded sinecure back in the day without having to join AntiFa or get himself gelded. Additionally, anyone with college education and a bit of drive couldn’t fail to make out like gangbusters during the 80s boom.
Chuckles. I’d recommend you consult Ann Beattie’s Chilly Scenes of Winter or some of Billy Joel’s oeuvre to get a sense of what was a salable understanding (to a certain audience) of the lives they were actually leading.
Art+Deco: ‘What good aspects?’
Which of the items of Haffner’s list would you not view as positives?
..the reduction of class barriers?
..better feelings toward people of other countries? (if only this attitude had been more widespread and/or been better-sustained…)
…or do you think it’s better for women to be rigidly divided between “unapproachable virgins for adoration and harlots for relaxation”?
Art Deco:
Some additional smoke from the Beebelbrox. Wheat and chaff, wheat and chaff.
Was Haffner a purveyor of caricatures or strawmen? How many adults bought into those concepts of women? Or is that an intellectual thing? 🙂
..the reduction of class barriers?
I’m not sure there was such a reduction, but if there was I’d attribute it to (1) mass military conscription (1940 et seq), (2) incremental acculturation of Eastern and Southern European ethnics (recall the line Peter de Vries put into the mouth of one of his characters; asked why, given he had only one Jewish grandparent, he passed himself off as Jewish, his response was, “Easy. I’m a social climber”), (3) suburban development and the expanded prevalence of owner-occupied housing, (4) convergence in the quantum of formal schooling, (5) the advent of nationally-distributed mass entertainment (first film, then radio, then television), and (6) the cultural shift which reached a point of inflection around 1955, when the majority of whites stopped thinking of blacks as a permanent guest worker population.
..better feelings toward people of other countries? (if only this attitude had been more widespread and/or been better-sustained…)
Huh? Again, to the extent this was the case, I’d point to our participation in WWi, in the relief efforts of that era, in WWii, and in the post-war relief and development efforts. These all antedated 1964.
…or do you think it’s better for women to be rigidly divided between “unapproachable virgins for adoration and harlots for relaxation”?
Only a tiny minority of women are employed as prostitutes. In our own time, somewhere between 15% and 25% of the male population behave badly in their late-and-post-adolescent years (and often beyond). I wouldn’t wager the share using prostitutes was any larger in my great-grandparents’ generation, if it was indeed that large.
Among my parents’ contemporaries, sex was a component of domestic life and meant to nestle in that life. My parents and their friends weren’t fools, and they lived better lives than any succeeding cohort.
The driving engine of the Economy is the transfer of wealth from males to females. Whether that be through illegal prostitution, legal prostitution (marriage), the divorce courts, affirmative action for women, inheritance (women work less and in less dangerous jobs and live longer), Public Sector and Non Profit Jobs, you name it…
This has been true ever since the first female chimp put out a Will Blow for Bananas Sign on her tree trunk.
The only question is whether the dominant approved modes of such transfer are Eu- or Dyscivic.
The old institutions e..g. Marriage / Regulated Concubinage worked well for thousands of years — Lindy Effect. I am less confident about more recent innovations and their effects on civilizational stability.
For those with Rose-tinted Glasses: Look around at female behaviour today in the teens to 30s age group. Female Nature is eternal. It’s just that they don’t get to fully express themselves in every age.
OnlyFans, anyone?
Here’s some hyped up stuff about a Boomer Boomtown. Looks like the Old Dears are letting it all out shamelessly. More proof that it’s innate 😛
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9147745/Inside-Utopian-Disneyland-retirees-belies-sinister-underbelly-racism-orgies.html
Thanks for the pop anthropology. I’m sure we’re all enlightened by it.
Beeblebrox has some issues beyond Evil Brown People.
I prefer to watch the reruns here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X6I_dKUYyI4
Beeblebrox:
Hevertee, hevertee, and blonderboos to you (from the kitchen.)
A+D, just to clarify, the passages cited in my comment refer to Haffner’s post on the Weimar Republic era (which he observed personally), not to 1964. The *analogy* is to 1964.
A+D, just to clarify, the passages cited in my comment refer to Haffner’s post on the Weimar Republic era (which he observed personally), not to 1964. The *analogy* is to 1964.
You said:
Were the good aspects of both Weimar and the 1960s inevitably linked to the bad things that happened later?
re: Farmer Jones in “Animal Farm” (referenced by VDH)
Everyone, but especially people on the left, should watch the documentary “Mr. Jones” about the Holodomor in Stalin’s Soviet Union.
Why you should watch “Mr. Jones”:
https://switchelphilosopher.blog/2020/08/26/why-you-should-watch-mr-jones/
Unmasking the cult of Stalin:
https://switchelphilosopher.blog/2020/08/29/unmasking-the-cult-of-stalin/