Pseudomorphosis

The standard narrative to explain post-WW2 America is that the nation enjoyed the fruits of victory in the 1950’s, but then lurched into social upheaval in the sixty’s, starting with the election of John Kennedy. As a result, the Boomers get all the blame for the social dysfunction that has been with us for more than 50 years. That is not entirely fair as much of what happened was done by their parents. The disaster of the Civil Rights Movement started in the fifty’s. The Great Society was the early and mid-60’s.

Now, to the people who lived through the fifty’s and sixty’s, it probably felt as if the youth simply went insane and tried to drag the nation with them. Just as we are seeing today, it was the ruling elite that went bonkers, abdicating their duties and letting their rotten kids go berserk in the streets. That is the important part of it though. The late 60’s and early 70’s were a multi-generational war on decency. The youth rampaging through the streets, terrifying the white middle-class, did so at the behest of their parents.

In this regard, the social upheaval we think of as “The 60’s” was a continuation of a moral evolution in the Yankee elite, which started in the prior century. In the 19th century, Yankee reformers had Christianity as a limiting principle. This was largely true into the early 20th century, but then following the Great War, the Yankee elite lost its Christianity. Politics became a religion for Yankee reformers and the nihilism of the 1960’s was the logical conclusion of it. The Boomers have always been a dead end, as a result.

That is the thing that is increasingly clear as we see the death spasms of Progressivism in our age. There is no building on Boomer culture. The 60’s are sold as the great achievement of the Baby Boom generation, but in reality, it was a memorial to the Yankee ruling class. It is why there has been no second act to the 60’s. What we see today looks like a cargo cult, played out by a handful a mentally unstable youth, rounded up from local skateboard parks and heroin dens. It is why the Millennials are just useless whiners.

It is also why Generation Z is developing into something strangely different than anyone has expected. As someone pointed out the other day, this cohort is starting out far to the right of the rest of us. It is not the vapid “muh constitution” style conservatism either. It is a radical conservatism that has not been seen in a long time. They wildly supported the two most anti-establishment candidates on offer in 2016. It is not just a revolt against their parents rules either. It is a reaction to their pseudomorphosis.

The concept of pseudomorphosis is one that Oswald Spengler developed as a way of explaining partially manifested cultures. Specifically, pseudomorphosis entails an older culture so deeply ingrained in a land that a young culture cannot find its own form and full expression of itself. This leads to the young energy and promise being channeled into the old dead cultural forms. Like the animated corpses of a zombie movie, this youth culture hates the body into which it has been forced and rages against it and what made it.

That is what happened to the Baby Boom generation. They burst into the world full of energy, only to find themselves into a fully developed and completed American civilization. The old culture that built it was dying off, but it had been so successful that the civilization it had built was immune to modification by the post-war generations. As a result, all that youthful energy went into the exercise of the power in the existing institutions, but in a self-destructive rage against everything that defined and created those institutions.

What appears to be happening with Generation Z is something quite different from the superficial posing of youth in opposition to their parents. This generation rejects the very core of what they inherited. It is why, like the punks of the late-70’s, they adopt what the existing civilization considers to be their antithesis. It is also why they reject liberal politics and the institutions that spring from it. To the young generation, egalitarianism and the universal franchise are the problem, not a means to addressing the problem.

As is always the case with the young, there is not a well developed culture at this stage, just the void that existing culture should have filled. Since the old Yankee culture has died, something new is evolving with the next generations. Out of necessity and convenience, it will borrow the language and structures of the old culture, but only as raw material for the new. The reason sites like Daily Stormer or The Right Stuff have huge audiences of young white males has little to do with ideology. It is the lack of ideology.

That is what is not so obvious about the so-called neo-Nazi and white supremacist stuff that is associated with the alt-right. These symbols and language clear the field of the old ideology and the old culture that created it. It creates a clearing into which the next generations can build their own culture and their own ideology. That may be why the dying Left has reacted so violently to these relatively tiny groups. They could have ignored the Unite the Right rally entirely and 99% of Americans would never have known about it.

No one likes to be replaced. This is true at the individual level where you see senile old geezers hang around Washington until death. It is true of civilizations. The fire that animated them, the culture that built them, may have gone out long ago, but the people living in their accomplishments will fight to the bitter end. It is why all great empires end in rubble. The old American culture, the one born after the Civil War, reaching its zenith one hundred years later, will end in rubble too, a rubble of their making.

70 thoughts on “Pseudomorphosis

  1. This is one reason why the Catholic Church has had so many problems. The Novus Ordo in the vernacular is a 1960s production that resonates today about as much as Tommy James and the Shondells. No wonder youth are attracted to the Eternal Mass in Latin with Gregorian Chant. If you want a hoot, see “Change of Habit” (1969), starring Mary Tyler Moore as a with-it, social-worker nun who falls in love with Elvis before he ate too many peanut butter and banana sandwiches.

  2. Good Op-Ed in the WSJ Sunday morning on the blowback to University of Missouri for their feckless behavior during the BLM craziness on their campus.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/mizzou-pays-a-price-for-appeasing-the-left-1503258538

    “As classes begin this week, freshmen enrollment is down 35% since the protests, according to the latest numbers the university has publicly released. Mizzou is beginning the year with the smallest incoming class since 1999. Overall enrollment is down by more than 2,000 students, to 33,200. The campus has taken seven dormitories out of service.”

    The attending blowback to employees (mostly lower level, and probably skewed more towards minorities) was also predictable:

    “The plummeting support has also cost jobs. In May, Mizzou announced it would lay off as many as 100 people and eliminate 300 more positions through retirement and attrition. Last year the university reduced its library staff and cut 50 cleaning and maintenance jobs.”

    This is how you beat back the Progs.

    • Alex;
      Strongly agree. We must break up the Prog’s tax-funded ecosystem to have any hopes of a return to sanity. Don’t have to wait for Gen Z.

  3. I can hardly fault Generation Z for their fascination with reactionary imagery. The WASP elite was never one overly fond of their lower classes. The Jewish elite that superseded them gained power by promising those lower classes a leg-up, but ended up abandoning them for a new class of imported voters. The most charitable reading of their own recent history is betrayal after betrayal.

    That being said, I would caution your optimism. Support for Sanders is the best barometer for how vulnerable your nation is to Leninism, which would be the opposite of a national revival.

  4. I’m not convinced that Gen Z is somehow going to rebuke D.C. and drag the country to some counter-revolution against the counter-revolutionaries who got us into our present messes. I suspect they are anti-establishment, and I don’t blame them given the state of the schools for example which are legal fraud. They’re also old enough to be vaguely aware that the US has more-or-less lost two wars in the last 15 years.

    I suspect they will be the generation of something-for-nothing. Snowflakes 2.0. Crying at the sight of hard work. Telling their often clueless and spineless parents “no” with increasing alacrity and success. And growing up thinking that Socialism means paying taxes for a local police and fire department, which is to say not understanding Socialism at all.

    Where they WILL benefit, at least in theory, is in the “more space / more room” department. The US, even with higher levels of immigration, is going to feel a lot roomier as the Boomers start dying off…bringing with it potentially greater opportunity for jobs, property, etc. Inertial will continue to add total humans to the pot, but a lot of those humans will be old and not much use to anybody…an effect of longer lifespans outweighing large declines in population growth.

    Anyway, too soon to know with the current generation.

  5. Gen Z is now known for the T-shirt that says—Tree, Rope, Journalist, some assembly required….They get it…

  6. Here’s an outrageous thought; what if the hippies of the 60’s were the product of the 1950’s Beat Generation who were lousy with 1st Gen Commies trained by their parents/teachers to hate Capitalism and love Castro/Mao/Krushev . And what if the current Hipster Gen. is simply the product of the same, even more entrenched Leftism with the hatred of the anti-white New Racism mixed in, all fostered by Soros and his Globalist Comrades?

  7. What happens when the irresistible force of a grimly furious anti-progressive Generation Z encounters the irresistible object of a 60% gibs-loving, whitey-hating Hart-Celler American nation?

    I’m guessing more of that rubble.

  8. >> That’s what is not so obvious about the so-called neo-Nazi and white supremacist stuff that is associated with the alt-right. These symbols and language clear the field of the old ideology and the old culture that created it. It creates a clearing into which the next generations can build their own culture and their own ideology.<<

    That's exactly what people don't get; it's no wonder GenZ is rejecting the dominant religious narrative of GenBoomer – the Holocaust – by confronting the former with symbols that represent a radical disavowal of the latter as the current sanctum of western civilization next to slavery and white guilt.

  9. Z Man;
    My experience comports well with your analysis for the boomer explosion in the late ’60s and early ’70s and then stultification starting in the ’90s. I’m particularly impressed by your tracing the thread of elite religiosity turning to secular politics and then burning out.

    Also, the history of mainline protestantism seems to track pretty well with the lag of one generation or so. I just read that the (mainline protestant) ivy league divinity schools are being closing down. This is entirely just and longly overdue since these schools were the leaders in the cultural marxist/feminist takeover of those denominations by attacking even the idea of biblically-based moral and doctrinal standards, much less less enforcement of any. As a result those denominations are now largely dead: Almost as though Christ blew out their lamps as it says he promised to do in Revelation.

    I can testify that yankee-derived mainline churches were full in the ’50s an looked like they’d last forever. But I recall even then having a sense that they were just going through the motions, playing defense, under constant pressure to ‘get with it’. We didn’t know then what ‘it’ was but now we know and the results speak for themselves.

    • Popular ’50s culture (movies, books, advertising, the suburban middle class ideal) all suggest to me that there was a lot of “going through the motions” back then. Could it be that our culture went through some sort of collective PTSD from the depression and WWII/Korea and people just tuned out? The stereotypical ideal seemed to be a drinks and dinner party in someone’s home, where everyone had a good time and socialized, but not much was said or done. There might have been a few family photos here and there, but other significant cultural or religious totems and elements just seemed absent on all fronts. But this was all before my time, so I am taking guesses.

      Kind of like today post 9/11 and the crash. Some sort of cultural PTSD.

      • Dutch;
        What the dinner parties did was cultivate friendship. And that was enough. One of the keys to happiness is low expectations, after all. They are probably overrepresented in media of the period*. I think my parents maybe went to one or two a month, tops, and put on one or two a year, tops.

        It was much more of a middle class thing. Blue collar guys went to taverns to socialize, usually not with wives, but sometimes. Bringing your wife (or ‘steady girlfriend’) to a tavern was a good way of upping the odds for trouble.** So it was dinner parties then for blue collar wives too. Or lousy TV.

        But dinner parties are hard to do if both spouses work and kids are in entirely too many weekend activities. So now they’re pretty much an upper class thing: They can afford to hire out the extra labor involved.

        In retrospect, the ’50s were a much more relaxed time. Part of it was a letting out of the breath after the depression and the wars (including Korea). Most adults in the ’50’s had had quite enough excitement in their lives already, thank you very much. So they cherished what looked dull to us ungrateful boomers.

        The odd thing was, though they were fully entitled to brag, they told us basically nothing about those years. So in some sense it is partially their own fault that we were ungrateful. We had no idea what they’d been through. So I’d say that deliberate cultural amnesia is a better explanation for the ’50s than the entirely too overused PTSD.***

        OTOH, many of the men might have been coping with real, hard-earned PTSD and shutting off discussion was their way of coping with it. I have heard many stories about vets finally opening up as they closed with the end of their lives. Don’t know.

        *Easy, inexpensive plot device, like computer-generated car chases now.

        **Nothing like estrogen and alcohol in the air to stir up masculine competition.

        ***During Vietnam, based on WWII standards, we were warned that after 30 days of sustained combat or 60 days of intermittent combat we needed to *start* looking for traces of ‘combat fatigue’, as PTSD was then known. Thankfully, I never a got the chance to find this out for myself. Heartless then or vastly overused now, take your choice.

        • “The odd thing was, though they were fully entitled to brag, they told us basically nothing about those years.”

          You are deranged.
          The Depression, FDR’s war, and Truman’s war were all the direct deliberate result of the Boomers parent’s.
          They slaughtered millions and they are “entitled to brag?”

          What a moron.

        • Those dinner parties and belonging to various fraternal orders were good for building friendships and community.

          Church was another one.

          Something we don’t have today. Instead we have facef**k and shut ins with lots of imaginary friends.

          And what do have for a town center? Not much. The mall is the closet thing.

          We’ve lost so much of the “glue” that kept us together it’s horrible.

          In regards to the Great Depression and WWII(at least those who served in combat) – both were hard on people. Especially the latter. My father and Uncle(D Day vet and still alive) didn’t start talking about the nasty stuff that went on until they were in their 80’s. PTSD was real back then. But you didn’t complain because it doesn’t do you any good. It was doubly hard on the active duty types who know complaining about it was a career killer. When the men went home it manifested itself in different ways.

    • Right on, Al. “Going through the motions” nails it re: 50s era Protestantism. I remember how dressed up I had to be to go to Sunday school. I had felt hats for winter and straw hats for spring. Dresses, and dressy shoes and socks. Dress coat, too. Just saw that an Episcopal church in the mid-Hudson region of NY has a woman rector — and she has a wife! Also, a son who attends college somewhere. Confusing, isn’t it? Do sperm bank fathers get invitations to their offspring’s baptisms? Or was this child the result of a long-ago marriage presumably held in a church, with vows being exchanged “until death us do part,” or until some domestic unhappiness broke the couple up. Then at age 43 or so, the light breaks and Susie decides that she is “called” to be a priest. Yadda yadda. This all has happened in a very short time. I don’t see the Episcopal church being around in 20 years. They’ll blow through all those lovely endowments and these are not being replaced. Old buildings need upkeep, too.

      • Dr D;
        I don’t think it’ll take that long *because* of those endowments. What do you think happened to the endowments of those recently closed D schools at Harvard & Yale_? SOMBODY gobbled them up: No credit for guessing that it was Harvard & Yale.

  10. “It creates a clearing into which the next generations can build their own culture and their own ideology. That may be why the dying Left has reacted so violently to these relatively tiny groups. They could have ignored the Unite The Right rally entirely and 99% of Americans would never have known about it.”

    I don’t think there’s any mystery about why the Left has reacted as it has. It’s the same lack of mystery that makes you quickly unemployed if you don’t watch what you say: The Left now controls the important institutions. They do not intend to lose them.

    Again: They do not intend to lose them.

    In this, they are like a careful gardener who does not let weeds get a foothold, or a surgeon who takes care not to let a few few microorganisms turn into a raging infection.

    So with all respect and gratitude to the proprieter here, it is not clear to me that the PC Left is dying.

    • The Left are good at herding any resistance into a corner.
      The resisters carve out a LZ. Do all the work.

      Then the LZ gets rezoned and funded. Nice investment for a condo, or university, or some variation on a base of operations.

      Perhaps a cemetary for those that thought that their kids would benefit from the op.

      Hell, entire continents get cleared and occupied.
      Survivors get to pay taxes for the trouble.

      And educated. So they can target others to do the dirty work.

    • I don’t think the Left is dying either. I sincerely hope I’m wrong, but it looks like they’re gearing up for a clean sweep across the board in the West.
      Of course, eventually the demographic tide will turn and the white Left ( which is pretty much the whole Left ) will be removed.
      For the immediate future the Left is in total control and more suppression of crimethink, and crimethinkers, is coming.

    • “The Left now controls the important institutions.”

      Except:

      1. Those institutions are rapidly becoming obsolete. No-one needs mass media or mass universities any more.
      2. Because they’ve been taken over by SJWs, they’re unable to do the things they were built to do, so they’re no longer important, either.
      3. Most of them are either funded or propped-up by taxpayers’ money, so they can be defunded at any time.

      • Which is why the war will be fought for control of the technology infrastructure–newspapers are nothing–hosting services are everything. For universities the time of the great punishment is nigh, most have no idea how to control costs and once the teat goes dry all those Associate Assistant Vice Deans of Making the Cis-Gendered White Males Toe the Line are going to be in a world of hurt.

  11. Fascism, as an ideology — Giovanni Gentile, not Adolf Hitler — actually works just fine. The Left has tainted the world beyond redemption (as early as 1946, Orwell proclaimed that it only meant “something not desirable), but gussy it up in new language and it’ll work just fine (I still haven’t gotten around to Alexander Dugin’s “The Fourth Political Theory” yet, but it looks like that’s what he’s trying to do). There are a whole bunch of folks Gen Z can take as models — Gentile, Hendrik Verwoerd, Ian Smith, hell, given how pig-ignorant everyone in pop culture is, probably Mussolini himself — that will work. I’m thinking of turning my part of our group blog into “Alt-History” for the kids — folks you’ve never heard of that have answered most, if not all, of your questions. (And no, I’m not endorsing Fascism as an ideal form of government; I think it sucks, but it’s inevitable — or, at least, all the alternatives are much worse — so let’s do this right).

    • Because the communists defeated the Nazis in WW2, they successfully defined themselves as being anti-fascist, and the left has been dining on this lie ever since.
      – One Cʘsmos

  12. Many Baby Boomers reacted in disgust at the empty culture their patents bequeathed to them
    which was artificial and alienated from nature

    Sadly, they turned to Asian philosophies rather than Christendom

    America was doomed from the get go because it instituted a regime intentionally separated from God, the author of all authority

    American religious liberty is practical atheism and even Scalia Tom his decisions based on Locke’s putative tolerance which treated religion as merely opinion and which opinion was subservient to secular positions be law

    The sole way bact to societal sanity and a decent culture is for America to acknowledge that Jesus Christ is King and all – as in ALL- legislation must be in sync with all of His comandemnts

    That does not mean a Theocracy as most wrongly assume

    • I don’t have any problem at all with caeseropapism. It lasted nearly a thousand years in Byzantium, and would’ve lasted longer under better circumstances. Look at our system. Teetering on the brink after what? Just over 200 years? The only republican government to rival Constantinople was Venice. Nearly 1200 years, and their executive served for life under good behavior. Just a hair’s breadth from the same thing. Even alternated between following the Roman vs the metropolitan primacy.

      • What part of the original Republic – as designed by the founders – actually exists? For more than 100 years the “Republic” has been morphed and manipulated by so-called progressives. There are still quite a few people who call themselves conservatives who haven’t figured this out – yet.

        Garet Garrett had it figured out back in the 1930’s when he wrote The Revolution Was. Why we are this much further along and there are still people haven’t clued into this really points to a complete lack of paying attention IMHO.

        • The American Republic was always as much or more an idea than it ever was a reality. Part of the Christian ethos is to strive for, but never quite get there.

  13. I’m a Boomer. I was 13 in 1968 when America almost broke. Tet, MLK, and Bobby’s assassinations. It was tough year to live through, nightly news was “always” bleak. I agree that we Boomers never stood a chance. The early Boomers were 18 in 1964 and started really trying to change things once they got into college and fed off all the energy of so many like minded people on campus. They were against the War, wanted freer sex, abortions, equal rights, etc. Looking back now, why was that so Sinister? Why- is that I see that the MIC is real. Eisenhower’s great gift to us was to say that publicly. They want constant wars and large defense budgets. If somehow the Vietnam war had been wrapped up by 1966 or 1967, as was in our ability, I truly feel the 60’s would have turned out much differently. The thing is, the MIC wanted it to go on as long as possible. Hard to win when the deck is stacked against you.

    • The MIC is one thing, but they don’t set policy. To me, dig deeper, and I put blame on the U.N. minded folks ( League of Nations ) who are always wanting to meddle. WWII and it’s aftermath was a huge experiment in nation-rebuilding ( with the Marshal plan ) and scripting international affairs like never before. And I think that mindset was VERY enticing to a lot of folks. Just as progressives will never leave you alone and you will be made to care, that mindset of “change” and new and if only we try hard enough we can do things!.. It all rolls together in my book. Not nefarious as much as human egos and desire for control and money.

    • AZP;
      The role of the Vietnam War is critical to the boomer explosion but not for the reasons most cite. It created a corrosive cynicism in us early boomers (I got 10 years on you) because of elite self-serving incompetence. They wanted to play maestro, dialing the military violence up and down in the service of pretty obviously stupid globalist political theories. And yet they wanted to exempt their own sons using crass local political corruption at the draft board.

      If you went in the military (as I did) it was hard to not feel the fool sometimes. If you skated using your family’s $$$ and connections it was hard not to feel like the punk you were, deep down. My peers and I actually had more respect for those who fled to Canada. They actually were willing to take an open stand and pay a price for it (nobody knew then that Carter would would amnesty them all).

      And the punks, unsurprisingly, had to justify themselves by blaming ‘the system’.

  14. For nearly half a century now, DC politicians have run up an enormous bill and then kicked the can down the road with the expectation that some future generation is going to pay for it. The current generation of young people understand that they are on the bottom level of this Ponsi scheme and the day of reckoning is fast approaching. The simple fact is that they cannot earn enough to pay for this insane spending binge, and they would rather fight than become indentured servants to the elite class.

  15. I take the view that the WWII generation had largely defeated poverty at home and the external enemies in war. Then what? A bit of an existential crisis there. When some of the kids rebelled, it was a combination of “well, at least they won’t need to deal with the things we did, it is all going to be OK”, along with “what are they going to come up with?”, asked in a spirit of curiosity. When you return from your Odyssey, you play out your personal life’s string and talk about the old days.

    Vietnam and the bomb also gave a sense of foreboding, which means that the WWII generation knew they didn’t have all the answers, unintended consequences and all. Humbling.

    The boomers set out on their own personal Odysseys but didn’t really have anywhere meaningful to go to or meaningful things to accomplish. Nihilism walks in the door and makes itself at home.

  16. What I’ve noticed is that the people who attack a culture most viciously are the children of those who created it. Those who created it won’t attack it for the simple reason they know how hard it was to build, and they’re proud of their accomplishment. Look at the pedigree of the parents of wretches like Jane Fonda, the Weathermen, and (it pains me to say this) look at a great writer like Robert Graves (“I Claudius”) whose war memoir’s title (“Goodbye to all that”) pretty much sums up how hundreds of years of custom and culture can be jettisoned in a fit of pique (E. Michael Jones wrote a lot about the role of homosexuality in bonding spies and subversives together, and the children of the elite in England get a lot of chances for buggery in the public boarding schools, where the process starts).

  17. I think this analysis about “The 60’s” is quite ingenious. However, I differ with regards to Gen Z. The problem with analyzing Gen Z is that they are still too young for anyone to “call it” on their political world-view. If you define the Millennials as those born of boomers, say born between late 70’s and late 90’s, the earliest Gen Z’s are just coming out of high school. The bulk of Gen Z’s, those born of the Gen Xer’s, are still children with a growing percentage of them just entering high school. They’re too young to have formed any political opinions.

    I do agree that Gen Z’s attitudes towards the Millennials will be similar to that of Gen X’s towards the boomers. It will be a sort of “have to make my life on my own” cynicism, similar to that of their Gen X parents.

    • “They’re too young to have formed any political opinions. ”

      Maybe you should listen to what the Gen Z kids are saying.

      Doesn’t take long to ‘form political opinions’ when you’re forced to be a minority in a mixed school in your own country.

  18. Great article! As one who grew up in a progressive household it didn’t take long to ultimately reject the politics because the argument for it didn’t “square.” But it was later, and to my dismay, I realized that it is a religion. It is perhaps that realization that pushed me to the right, to the Republican party. But, then again, the realization came that they were the party of appeasement (and Democrat corroboration). Today, that “home” is here, with people like The Zman, among others. And my skepticism of government in every area couldn’t be greater. My suspicion is this personal story of transformation is not that unique. My hope is that we embark on a second, more “enlighted” era.

  19. “Just as we are seeing today, it was the ruling elite that went bonkers, abdicating their duties and letting their rotten kids go berserk in the streets. That’s the important part of it though. The late 60’s and early 70’s were a multi-generational war on decency.”

    I think our concepts of history differ, Zman. You believe that the “totality” is too complex for someone to control and, hence, history consists of incidents that are out of our control and these incidents shape subsequent events. I believe that there is evil in this world and it strives for control. And, yes, there is much out of our control, like weather patterns and astroid impacts. But physical control is not difficult to achieve, if certain conditions are met. Those conditions begin with financial control. Once this is achieved, political, educational, religious, and media control follow quickly. As far as the 60’s and youth, I was there. I remember watching the media’s presentation of the “organic change” in our culture as it unfolded. And, of course, the change was always “progressive” and “righteous”. Why, the young were changing the world for the better because they were not constricted by “prejudices” and “biases” that older generations believed in. This is the way the 60’s were sold. But, like I said, I was there. Any propaganda that we remember about the 60’s was isolated to college campuses, certain urban areas, and “rock concerts”. The “inevitable” change was promoted using a very small percentage of the youth and presented as representative of the whole. The old were presented as unenlightened and backward, the young as enlightened and somehow in touch with cosmic powers that were guiding mankind toward a golden age. As the old pushed back, the elders were presented as over-reacting and showed how foolish they were when presented with “the right side of history”. As the narrative unfolded, more and more young people started to actually believe the propaganda and the next generation of voters was formed.

    That was just the window dressing for the the change that was going on in the background. We participated in the greatest transfer of wealth and power in history, with casualties in an invisible war conducted by means that didn’t involve the actual conflict that history always associates with wars. The economy was maintained and new circuses were provided, along with the bread necessary to keep the hoi polloi content with their lot. One of the reasons it worked is because it was directed at Whites, the posterity of the West. Once commonsense barriers were removed, barriers like segregation, sexual mores, and social cohesion, the Whites gradually become just another segment of the population. The laws and the courts were perverted to remove power from the posterity and the vision presented to the masses was “utopia” once the old order was changed. The only question remains is will the posterity do anything about it, or will we be slaves in Egypt for 200 years until we cast off our bonds. Interesting times, but not much gives me optimism about the result.

  20. The toolbox of social media did not exist as a filter for MSM progressive propaganda, allowing the culture to be shaped by false narratives. Those days are gone, but not forgotten.

  21. The bait store I used to use is out of business now. The wife of the man who owned it used to be the secretary of a university department head. One day she was lamenting how the quality of the people in her old department had deteriorated severely over time, wishing the old guys were still there. I had to remind her that the old guys had chosen their replacements. A strange look came into her eyes.

    The above is an alternative take on things to the Gramscian formula that I don’t think it is in total opposition to. Yes. I don’t think we all of a sudden had a bunch of Marxist kids jump out of the woodwork. Remember, the 1930’s were the heyday of American Communism. A lot of those dignified old guys who used to run the departments in the fifties and early sixties already had communist sympathies whether they showed them or not.

    The boomers probably didn’t have all that many commies available to March through the institutions in a ratio above previous generations, but because of the size of the generation, and the fact that their academic predecessors had a predisposition to preferring them, they were able to have an impact that outstripped their numbers.

    In other words, no baby boom, no Gramsci.

    • TP Doc;
      Can confirm. At my U in the mid ’60’s many of the old guys were ‘masonic commies’, i.e. they had hidden common, if ill defined, aspirations and a general agenda that they communicated with each other by verbal secret handshakes, no doubt at facility parties. So it’s no wonder that they populated their departments with likeminded boomers.

      Not all of them were masonic commies , of course, some even had fought in WWII. But they knew who each other were. I recall the core group actually held by-invitation-only salon’s in the classical French tradition. At the time I didn’t see the point so I didn’t resent not being included. Later on I realized that they were selecting and grooming (and I explicitly mean in all senses of that word) their successors. Since the academic circles were much smaller then, personal recommendation mattered a whole lot as to whether one got into a prestigious grad school and so could then enter the charmed circle of academia. So the ‘lucky’ salon invitees would be admitted to the guild somewhere, if not exactly there.

      As an added indicator, I recall being collectively denounced at our 20 year class reunion by our then class advisor for how we had lost the plot of the revolution we had been groomed to carry out. 1966 – 1972 were *not* supposed to be about sex, drugs and rock & roll, according to him.

      • There’s a tendency to groom candidates for things from early on in many fields. I remember one resident who was picked out for a prestigious fellowship, it seemed, even before he had begun residency. He was smart enough. But ended up not being all that efficient in the OR. After he’d been in practice about 20 years an anesthesiologist told me that they didn’t watch the clock in his cases; they checked the calendar.

        Just looked at the “new faces” at my old university hospital. All white women and foreign born minority men with one foreign minority woman and one white guy.

        Now you see why it’s “refugees welcome” by domestic women. It’s not just about sex, it’s about hegemony. Who do you think is going to dominate the institution? Meek minority men just happy to have jobs in America? Or white women backed up by HR departments made up of more white women?

        Get ready for the medical matriarchy.

        • Interesting insight…kneecapping the strongest competition. And if you can do it with a sense of moral righteousness, all the better.

        • I see this every day at the VA … the entire roster of residents is foriegn born — India, Africa and Asia only. The men among them clearly beta males. And the VA administrative bureaucracy is without question a matriarchy … not becoming one, it already is. I’ve seen NO traditionally masculine males within the administrative bureaucracy. They are all Femen — non-threatening to the females. There is no direct communication or action that could be construced as threatening by anyone — just not allowed. In fact, it’s actively discouraged and trained out in the acculturalization programs developed and run at these institutions. Feminism is truely a “zero-sum” game — they advance, and to do so, they shut out any male who makes them uncomfortable, competes to strongly or well, or who is perceived as unable or unwilling to knuckle under to the matriarchy. And the admin men do.

          Now, there ARE some traditionally-behaving males — but they livei n the hard medical specialties, and even they understand the they have to keep the masculinity out of public view. They tend to be the docs, and even some of the male nurses. Out in the facilities management, and maintenance, you have the guys who served in the enlisted ranks in the military — the VA is not predominately staffed by former military. They tend more to what we used to recognize as male by behavior and interests — trucks, hunting, sports etc. But they too are carefully and constantly indoctrinated.

          Yes, this area of the govt is clearly a matriarchy.

          • addendum: the entire roster of residents, by the photo they post on the floors, and what I’ve seen on the floors, is entirely foreign born ….

      • At my U in the late ’70s, there was zero idea of any larger meaning to life whatsoever. The age of Jimmeh Carter was hunker down, and have a little party here and there, if you feel so inclined. Translated, get stoned out of your skull. The faculty, too, at my “semi-elite” school had nothing meaningful to say about anything. I felt like we were all living the desperate lives of the Australians in Shute’s “On The Beach”, waiting for the end to arrive.

        Reagan came in the door as a bright light of possibilities for a few of us. For most, it was a sign that the end times were about to conclude in an atomic cloud.

        Our ’82 graduation ceremony was a formal celebration of the philosophy of Winnie the Pooh, something about joyfully grabbing all the honey out of the honey tree. Seriously. Looks like we took that one to heart.

  22. “That may be why the dying Left has reacted so violently to these relatively tiny groups. They could have ignored the Unite The Right rally entirely and 99% of Americans would never have known about it.”

    Maybe some, but since the leftist media needed something to replace the dying Russian Hoax cycle, they went right back to their bread and butter – Racism! That’s why the likes of CNN and the rest of the fake media shifted so effortlessly from RUSSIA to RACISM! They didn’t miss one 24 hour cycle of bashing by switching tactics to smear Trump.

    Any gathering of more than one white person anywhere in the country now is practically being labeled a Neo-Nazi march or KKK rally, with the media saying its all Trump’s fault and that he has not denounced them since yesterday.

    • But I totally agree, you ignore haters and don’t give them a platform to speak, nobody knows and their message is lost. That’s why the media is again showing themselves fake news and proving Trump right again about the Alt-Left hate and violence.

  23. Liberals tend to like the idea of the social contract, but to them that means more daddy government. I believe Gen Z will rediscover that Christian morality is or was the social contract that binds the West together, the absence of which results in nihilism, which many thinkers have described.

    Ive been an atheist all my life but i get that Christianity tends to work, even if you just act as though you believe. From the commies to the Libertarians, ive yet to see a secular replacement for it that doesnt lead to anarchy.

    • Good point, Ryan. I remember working on a construction site back in the day that had a rather unashamed Christian superintendent. He told new hires that “you don’t have to be a Christian to work here, but you’d better act like one.” They got the message. We once lived in a nation full of people who got the message.

    • My late Dad always said “fear of the Lord has delivered tenfold more souls into heaven than love of the Lord”.

      Fear works.

      The sad truth about our species is that when an appreciable number of our fellows start getting the idea that there is no eye in the sky, if nobody out there is keeping score of our transgressions, that there will be no hellfire roasting our eternal souls, then things turn to shit for EVERYONE pretty damned quickly.

      Look at the pandemonium within the modern Democrat party. Things are turning to shit pretty quickly for the party that boos at God.

  24. Short version. Gen Z realizes that all the Progressive silliness that, we as Boomers, inflicted on them because it really cost us nothing and gave us good “feelz” is a shit sandwich for those that have to actually live it.

    • I’m a little older than Generation Z, but much younger than the Boomers, and for me there’s nothing quite as disgusting as seeing a grown white man Chris Matthews’ age fawning over black people whenever he interacts with them. I just want to slap the shit out of him and shout, “Where are your balls, white man?!” Occasionally, though, he or Brian Williams will get conservative tourettes and accidentally say something true, but that’s why the lesbian handler Rachel Maddow is there with the cage and the cattle prod to administer electric shocks if a white man accidentally finds his balls in her presence.

      • Unfortunately, I have Chrissy as a “vacation neighbor” for the summer and do run across him occasionally. Think the only black people he runs across in the normal course of life are the nice Jamaican ladies running the counter at Gliddens seafood. Otherwise he lives in his little Chevy Chase/Nantucket bubble. Ex camera make up he does have the look of a very serious drinker.

    • What galls the chit out of me is that when you try to disabuse them of these notions they automatically go politically correct on you. When I talk about reverse discrimination on the white man my parents literally go Trent Denton (or whatever that asshole’s name is) and accuse me of being a fascist red neck.
      (This is why it pays to read guys like Chateau Heartiste – when my mom accused me of being a racist/fascist/sexist/hatey-hate-hater …- I called her a “fat old grey haired shit-lib” and she almost had a stroke! My dad damn near had one too because he couldn’t stop laughing). It isn’t only Gen Z that is seeing the right of it. A lot of us Gen X and very tail-end boomers CAN see the forest in spite of the trees.

      • I’m a Boomer and I’ve known this situation is completely insane for more than 30 years. But you’d have better luck talking to a tree than most of my generation, and most of Gen-x too…..

      • i love gen zyklon, I’m a tail end boomer, the most self absorbed generation ever. Luckily saw through their shit early, i think it was having kids myself and recognizing the degeneracy of the drugged out hippies and the threat of their shit to my babies. By god And with the help of a amazingly red pilled wife we raised three successful warriors for the white race. they are giving us white grand babies now. i have been one lucky SOB and i know it.
        you keep it up young man thank you and god bless you.

      • Don’t fool yourselves – there are a bunch of us old Boomers who watch these trends with great satisfaction as we saw the folly of the left as it was forced upon us. Hope for our country is what I see

    • ‘…all the Progressive silliness that, we as Boomers, inflicted on them because it really cost us nothing and gave us good “feelz”’

      Who the F is “we”? Speak for yourself. I participated in inflicting zero prog anything on anyone. I’ve been trying to wake people up (admittedly on and off) for nearly the past 30 years, to no avail. We haven’t all been asleep or too busy watching sports or lining our pockets (“free-riding”) to notice the truth and try to do something.

      Until very recently moved one wanted to hear it. I am sure of this. Sounds like you have no idea how frustrating it’s been.

      • Lighten up Francis. I’m speaking in averages. In the distribution curve, you or I represent the right side tail. Unfortunately, the “fat middle” is exactly as I describe. Keep up the good work though…

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