When the counterculture becomes the culture, the traditional culture becomes the rebellion. Welcome fellow cultural insurrectionists.
Since the 1960s what used to be traditional American culture has been in cultural descent. Respect for legitimate authority, pride in country, classic gender roles, and logic have been replaced by an emotion-driven racist agenda that embraces cultural Marxism, hatred of nation, and blind fealty to socialist policies. That litany of empirical disaster has become the norm and the status quo.
Yet those who promulgate it see themselves as rebels, especially the young. It seems to give young people a charge, it always has, to see themselves as brave and idealistic warriors against the staid hand of conformity. Just one problem. The Left, and certainly their toddler brigades, are the most conformist robots to come along in generations. These Stepford Socialists are Ward Cleavers compared to past generations and ideologies that made an effort to think past the clichés of the day.
But, still they think they are somehow avant garde. And perhaps they are, if we set the status quo in 1926. No, scratch that. Flappers and the Lost Generation were way more innovative and creative than these automatons. In fact, every American generation seems to have had its actual rebels, except, granted with exceptions, this bunch.
As I told one of them not too long ago, “You don’t get rebel points if everything you believe in gets standing ovations at the Oscars and the Tonys.”
The real rebels, the actual resistance fighters, are the kids who wear MAGA caps on an Ivy League campus. Why? Because they are swimming against the tide and by doing so will get a lot of people upset. Good for them. A kid like Nick Sandmann has more rebellion in his soul than every BDS, Antifa, or Black Lives Matter zombie who ever existed because he dared to fight back against the cultural status quo. The aforementioned goons embrace the leftist status quo and slavishly obey its every dictum.
This will remain the case for the next couple of generations at least, as the Left and its “Long March Through the Institutions” has done its work with methodical thoroughness. It is most pronounced in academia. I personally know college professors who are afraid to voice facts, lest they be fired for not kowtowing to the PC line. Several years ago, when I was a college instructor, the horse manure that had been fed my students in other classrooms was amazing. It took half my time, my ethnicity protected me from reprisals-as did a good department chief, to rid them of foolishness. Only then could they start to learn. Perhaps the greatest accolade I ever received from a student was, “You’ve turned me into a moderate.” So don’t buy the earnest labels of the Left, as they term themselves a Resistance to anything. For the foreseeable future, they will always side with the status quo.