Wednesday, February 25, 2009

60s revolutionaries now are the establishment

Remember Jerry Rubin? Abbie Hoffman? "Don't trust anyone over 30, man!" Last I heard, Hoffman is dead, and Rubin is in business. Anyway, it's time for the radicals of the sixties, if they are still alive, to wake up and face the music: because now they are "the establishment." If it's still cool to be the cultural dissenters in prophetic opposition to the establishment, their position has been coopted by, you guessed it: traditionalists.

Here's what Robert Bork writes in “Conservatism and the Culture” (A Time to Speak”, ISI Books, 2008, rpt. The Canon, Spring, 2009, p.21):
We are now two nations. These are not, as Disraeli had it, the rich and the poor, or, as the presidential commissions regularly proclaim, whites and blacks. Instead, we are two cultural nations. One embodies the counterculture of the 1960s, which is today the dominant culture. Their values are propagated from the commanding heights of the culture: university faculties, journalists, television and movie producers, the ACLU, and major segments of the Democratic Party. The other nation, of those who adhere to traditional norms and morality, is now a dissident culture.

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