The New Progressive Family
We carelessly failed to keep an eye on the defeated-but-dedicated cult of communists.
Recently at a college football game, I had a discussion with someone my age. He said, "I just don't get it. What happened to our culture? I used to hitchhike all over town. When I was driving, I eagerly picked up hitchhikers, just to make new friends. We had free concerts in the park every weekend! Now it is scary to even think about picking someone up alongside the road. And concert tickets are all over $100 each! We never worried about mass murder or racial violence. My school was integrated, I went hunting with my Dad, and everyone celebrated Christmas together!"
On the way home I pondered the question, did the Boomer generation squander their inheritance? One answer is Baby Boomers wallowed in the economic perks of the Allied victory over fascism in World War II and the subsequent collapse of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and the Berlin Wall. We carelessly failed to keep an eye on the defeated-but-dedicated cult of communists. We were too busy building fortunes to notice the migration of disenfranchised Marxists to college campuses around the world, where their communist dogma could be distributed under the guise of academic freedom and the intellectual pursuit of social justice.
The heirs of the Greatest Generation defaulted on the difficult and demanding chore of raising and disciplining children and vetting their educators.
Boomers unknowingly put their kids in re-education indoctrination centers for four years and most of them were good students. Now they are leaders in their field of endeavor and to a large degree, Marxists.
The kids of the Boomer Generation spent the majority of their time under the watchful eye of a proxy family made up of TV programs and public education. Both of which promoted progressive theory of moral relativism and collectivist government. The result was to promote peace, prosperity and vacuous intellectualism.
For the past fifty years, our children were treated like sheep. They went out to graze all day, then came home for the night. They got their bedtime stories from David Letterman and MTV. While the parents worked long and hard hours, and more and more women found their mojo outside of homemaking, the kids found a new meaning in life.
They found Progressivism.
Their new Progressive Family was the fellow student, the teacher or professor and the excitement of pop culture and self-glorification.
Their life trajectory was unlike their parents. It revolved around leisure time, self-aggrandizing and chasing celebrity.
The boys would never live the masculine prototype of their fathers. The girls rejected the old housewife stereotype and doggedly pursued their own career path. As the second half of the 20th century passed, the roles of men and women, and of their children morphed into something unexplored. The concept of the nuclear family slowly devolved into the Progressive Family. The schools assumed the role of mother and the local gang, motorcycle club or law enforcement assumed the role of father. Some guys who didn't join a subgroup simply wandered around in a state of confusion. Many of those disenfranchised men are now claiming to be female or are today's Urban Males.
Meanwhile, refugee communists from the wreckage of WWII settled into academia. They found a comfortable home to build a nest of contrarian socialist utopians. They built a cult of self-replicating androids that were capable of using their positions of influence to mold modern youth culture. To spew their collectivist dogma while collecting six-figure, taxpayer-funded salaries. They altered the texts and curricula to paint America as the world's worst exploiters of minorities and the underprivileged. They created an enormous activist army they called Social Justice Warriors.
The young people love this stuff! It fits their mindset, their ambition, and their passion. They quickly adopted a new and dynamic Progressive Family that feeds their need for meaning. It has filled the void left by their broken families, loss of faith, and social and sexual insecurities. It never occurs to them that they are being converted to communism. They have no real-world experience with communism anyway, so why would they?
Modern college curricula reinforce the Progressive lessons of elementary schools, that our children are the most intelligent generation in history and they can be anything or anyone they want to be, and that even if they fail to achieve they are still winners. They are indulged and protected and quietly fed a litany of socialist historical redefinitions. Then they are indoctrinated in condescension, anger and vengeance as a defense system from any opposition.
As children of the internet sharing revolution, it makes sense to them that society should be organized in the same way as Facebook, Pinterest or Instagram. They are the Sharing Generation. They call themselves Progressive and are prima facie examples of the Politics of Consensus, and a queer and present danger to our American political experiment.
This is an excerpt from my 2020 book “The Illusion of Knowledge: Why So Many Educated Americans Embrace Marxism” available at most online booksellers.