OPINION:
The ’60s have been with us since, well, the ’60s, a fact brought home to me some years ago when, under the governorship of Scott Walker, the Badger State’s Capitol was occupied and defaced by thousands of leftists opposed to the conservative governor’s policies.
I attended the university just down the street from the Capitol in Madison in the 1960s. I was astounded to learn via a New York Times report that a number of the organizers of the anti-Walker occupation had been leftist classmates of mine in that earlier era. They hadn’t changed; they were still marching and working as assiduously in middle age for the revolutionary utopia they had dreamed of as undergraduate radicals decades earlier.
In the ’60s, they had been students, but they had become professors who had burrowed into and recreated the university in their own image, following leftist guru Herbert Marcuse’s advice that to change America, they would have to seize and remake the cultural and economic commanding heights of American society.
They and many like them had been at it ever since but got their first taste of success in 1968, when those who lived through that turbulent year could sense the fabric of the America in which we grew up ripping apart. Tim Goeglein was only 4 years old back then, but as he grew up in an America that was changing before his eyes, he realized that it had been not just a bad year but a pivotal one in our history.
That realization led him to pen a smart, concise and readable guide for those wondering just how we ended up in the world of 2024. With more than a little justification, he alleges that it all began in 1968. For those of us who lived through the ’60s and experienced the disasters confronting American society that year, it all began earlier. Still, it was certainly in 1968 that one could feel that America was being dragged into a brave but not very comfortable new world.
Mr. Goeglein was born into the America that once was and had the luxury, like some of the rest of us, to grow up in a relatively small town in the Midwest, which even today may be among the last redoubts of working families that were once the backbone of America the leftists of their day and ours detested.
The men and women in these towns were proud of their country and celebrated it on Independence and Veterans Day. They and their children attended church, rarely locked their doors because there was little crime and helped their neighbors in need.
1968 highlighted the left’s attack on religion, family and country. This attack continues to this day and is celebrated by the elites who condemn the values that made America the nation it was to those of us who grew up back then. Those who still cling to those values are today dismissed by the progressive left as deplorables not worth their time.
The old America wasn’t perfect, but the values underpinning America back then are worth preserving and rebuilding. Mr. Goeglein is hopeful that this can be done, and for those who share his hope, his book is well worth reading.
• David Keene is editor-at-large at The Washington Times.
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Stumbling Toward Utopia: How the 1960s Turned Into a National Nightmare and How We Can Revive the American Dream
By Timothy Goeglein
Fidelis Publishing, Sept. 18, 2024
192 pages, $20
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