The ideological changes of the 2010s have roots in the late 1960s… and even earlier.
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Between 1967 and 1970, the most prosperous and educated generation in human history launched a moral and political revolt against the very civilization that had made its prosperity possible. Millions of young people, especially the college-educated sons and daughters of middle-class families, rejected the authority of universities, churches, corporations, and governments that only a decade earlier had seemed to embody progress itself.
What began as protest against war and racial injustice quickly widened into a comprehensive critique of Western civilization. Within just a few years, a confident industrial society that had seen itself as the moral leader of the free world found its youth condemning it as corrupt, violent, and spiritually empty.
The shock of this revolt was not confined to the United States. From Paris and Berlin to Tokyo and Mexico City, students challenged the moral legitimacy of modern institutions. Similar movements erupted across nearly every wealthy Western nation, suggesting that the American experience was part of something larger: a moral awakening inside the post-war world of abundance.
In the United States, the revolt took a particularly paradoxical form. It was not directed primarily against conservatives, but against the liberal establishment that had dominated American politics since the New Deal. The targets of student anger were Democratic presidents, bureaucratic universities, and the moral complacency of prosperous suburbs.
The young radicals of the late 1960s were, in a sense, the grandchildren of Franklin Roosevelt’s welfare state: its greatest beneficiaries and its fiercest critics. They rose against the technocratic order their parents had built, demanding not a retreat from progress but a purer, more moral version of it.
This was a Cultural Revolution inside the American Left. It overthrew the authority of the New Deal Democrats without abandoning their language of justice, equality, and compassion. The new generation believed that the old liberalism had become hypocritical: too bureaucratic, too hierarchical, too emotionally barren. They sought to replace its institutions with conscience, its programs with moral authenticity, its politics with personal virtue. What had been a political philosophy of incremental reform became, in their hands, a moral crusade for universal liberation.
This transformation was not born of poverty or oppression but of prosperity itself. The children of the post-war boom had grown up in a world without famine, depression, or world war. They had more education, leisure, and personal freedom than any generation before them. Technological innovation—television, air travel, electric guitars, oral contraceptives—expanded both perception and possibility.
Yet this new moral confidence emerged within an older ethical framework. Beneath the rebellion lay an inherited Christian conscience that had shaped Western civilization for centuries. Even as belief waned, its moral grammar—compassion for the weak, equality of souls, suspicion of hierarchy—remained embedded in secular thought.
The educated elite of mid-century America still spoke the language of justice and redemption, but without reference to God. When faith in the divine faded, moral energy migrated into politics. The young did not invent a new ethic; they secularized an old one.
The result was a post-Christian moral faith: a belief that the purpose of life was to
demonstrate compassion,
expose oppression, and
redeem the world through social action and government reform.
The revolt of the late 1960s was not caused by Vietnam or civil rights alone. It was the result of four deeper forces:
unprecedented prosperity,
the size of the Baby Boom generation,
new technologies that enabled a youth culture, and
a Christian moral framework that survived after belief in God had faded.
If you enjoy this article, you should read my From Poverty to Progress book series.
What Happened, 1967–1970
Between 1967 and 1970, the Western world experienced one of the most intense bursts of moral and political activism in modern history: what I call the Cultural Revolution.
At the center of this Cultural Revolution was a generation of young, educated, and prosperous citizens who no longer trusted the institutions that had created their comfort. In the United States, this rebellion appeared first on college campuses, then spread into the streets, churches, and homes of an entire nation. The movement’s slogans summed up its character: moral passion expressed through personal liberation:
“Make love, not war,”
“Question authority,”
“The personal is political”
The first wave of protest was directed at the Vietnam War. Television brought images of napalm, villages on fire, and body bags into American living rooms. For the first time in history, a war fought thousands of miles away became a daily visual experience for millions.
Many young people saw in it not a defense of freedom, as their parents’ generation had seen in World War II, but a grotesque contradiction of everything they had been taught to believe about justice and human dignity. Opposition to the war quickly expanded into a broader moral indictment of American power itself.
By 1968, moral protest had become a way of life. Young people marched not only against war but against racism, sexism, conformity, and consumerism. They rejected the idea that progress meant more bureaucracy, more material abundance, or greater national power.
What many of them sought instead was authenticity: living in harmony with one’s conscience, one’s body, and one’s community. The modern world, they believed, had made people efficient but empty, rich but spiritually dead. They set out to build a new moral culture, one that prized feeling over discipline, and experience over authority.
Music became the movement’s emotional language. Folk and rock musicians—Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Jimi Hendrix—gave poetic voice to alienation and moral revolt. Woodstock in 1969 symbolized the moment when art, politics, and spirituality merged into a single generational identity.
The same technology that had spread television across the world now spread sound: the electric guitar, the portable record player, the FM radio. Never before had moral sentiment traveled so quickly, or united so many. For the first time, a generation could hear itself speak.
Television did for imagery what music did for emotion. It made the struggle visible. Americans watched police attack civil rights marchers, students occupy campus buildings, and soldiers die in distant jungles. Each image carried a moral charge, reinforcing the sense that established institutions were cruel, corrupt, or obsolete. Even those who opposed the protests could not escape their power: the visual experience of injustice became inescapable. What earlier generations would have learned from sermons or books, this generation absorbed through screens.
The revolt was not confined to the United States. In 1968, students in Paris shut down the French university system and nearly toppled the government. Protests swept through West Germany, Italy, Japan, and even Communist Czechoslovakia.
The grievances differed—war, authoritarianism, capitalism—but the moral tone was the same: a demand for authenticity, equality, and self-expression. Across the developed world, a single generation rebelled against the institutions that had raised it, each movement reflecting a shared cultural moment. It was a global moral awakening born of prosperity and education.
In America, this awakening reached deep into personal life. The introduction of the birth control pill allowed women to separate sexuality from reproduction, opening new possibilities for equality and freedom but also new anxieties about identity and meaning. The rise of psychedelic drugs promised expanded consciousness, while also symbolizing escape from the conformity of middle-class life. The counterculture’s embrace of long hair, casual clothing, and communal living expressed the rejection of hierarchy and discipline. Every act of rebellion—from clothing to music to protest—became a moral statement.
Traditional institutions struggled to respond. Churches found their moral authority challenged by a generation that regarded spiritual experience as personal rather than doctrinal. Universities became battlegrounds between administrators defending order and students demanding liberation. Politicians who had once spoken confidently of progress and prosperity now faced a citizenry that doubted both.
The institutions of modernity had created a moral world they could no longer control.
What made this upheaval so powerful was its fusion of moral certainty, personal liberation, and the sheer numbers of the Baby Boom. The young believed they were restoring sincerity and humanity to a civilization that had lost its soul.
They condemned authority not because they rejected morality, but because they wanted a purer, more heartfelt version of it. The result was a movement that combined intense moral conviction with radical skepticism toward institutions—a paradox that would define the Western Left for decades to come.
By the dawn of the 1970s, the movement’s visible unity began to fragment, but its moral assumptions endured. The war would end, the marches would fade, and the communes would dissolve, yet the conviction that moral authenticity was the highest form of virtue remained.
The cultural and political foundations of the modern Left were laid during these years, as the moral energy of the 1960s turned inward, transforming universities, media, and public life. What began as protest became a permanent redefinition of moral authority in modern society.
Why the Cultural Revolution Happened
The Cultural Revolution of the late 1960s did not arise from a single event or ideology. It was the cumulative result of several powerful historical forces acting together—each a direct by-product of material progress. Prosperity removed old constraints, demography gave rebellion scale, technology granted autonomy, and the lingering moral emotions of Christianity supplied the language of righteousness. These five causes, converging at once, created the perfect storm that reshaped the moral life of the modern West.
Cause 1: The Christian Moral Inheritance
Cause 2: Secularization of that Moral Inheritance
The generation of the 1960s inherited the moral emotions of Christianity, compassion, equality, justice, but not its faith. The theology had faded, yet the conscience remained. They still believed that the world could be redeemed, but now through human empathy rather than divine grace. The Christian categories of sin, salvation, and redemption reappeared in secular form as oppression, liberation, and awareness. Their revolt was therefore not a rejection of morality but an attempt to complete it: to achieve Christian virtue without the Church, transcendence, or obedience.
Cause 3: Material Prosperity
Postwar America was the most materially secure society in human history. Typical working-class families acquired a material standard-of-living that far exceeded all but the richest in previous eras. Middle-class families did even better. Rising wages, affordable housing, cheap food, and expanding universities meant that for the first time a generation could live without fear of hunger or unemployment.
When survival is guaranteed, moral attention turns inward—from need to meaning. The young no longer sought security; they sought authenticity, virtue, and moral purpose. The very success of material progress dissolved the old disciplines of thrift, obedience, and restraint that had once held society together. That same material progress also likely played a role in the secularization of the Christian Moral Inheritance.
Abundance and security made youth rebellion safe—and therefore possible.
Cause 4: Demographics
The sheer numbers of the Baby Boom generation transformed youthful discontent into a social force. The Baby Boom, the largest generation in American history, reached maturity and discovered their collective power in universities, music, and politics. Because they were so many, they could create their own culture—complete with heroes, rituals, and moral ideals. Their revolt was not a fringe movement but a demographic fact: a generation rebelling against the civilization that had made its prosperity possible. The scale of the cohort gave moral protest the momentum of inevitability.
Cause 5: Technological Innovation
New technologies gave the Baby Boom generation unprecedented affluence, independence, and a collective voice. Among the technological innovations that made life very comfortable materially was:
Widespread electrification and household appliances (refrigerators, washing machines, air conditioning)
Mass automobile ownership and the Interstate Highway System
Suburban housing construction
Mechanized and chemical agriculture (tractors, fertilizer, pesticides)
Industrial automation and mass production of consumer goods
The jet engine and expansion of commercial air travel
Television broadcasting and advertising-driven consumer economy
Antibiotics, vaccines, and modern public health systems
Other technological innovations enabled the Baby Boom generation to create a separate youth culture, one that was often oppositional to mainstream society:
Television (live news, music, and protest coverage creating shared generational consciousness)
Electric guitar and amplifier (rock music as moral and emotional expression)
Long-playing records and FM radio (cheap mass distribution of cultural identity)
Portable transistor radios and car stereos (personal, mobile music)
Birth control pill (separating sex from marriage and reproduction)
Jet travel and student tourism (exposure to global and countercultural ideas)
Photocopying and affordable printing (underground newspapers and campus pamphlets)
Motion pictures and later color television (visual language of rebellion and authenticity)
Technology that had been created to expand productivity now expanded moral consciousness, giving emotion, empathy, and authenticity a reach that no preacher or politician could match.
A Perfect Storm of Progress and Conscience
When these five forces collided, a moral revolution was very likely.
Prosperity freed people from necessity and the need to focus on rational problem-solving
Demography turned them into a gave them cultural critical mass
Technology enabled the evolution of a separate “youth culture” that was skeptical or hostile to many previous cultural norms.
Christian moral emotion supplied their cause with passion and legitimacy. Its decline enabled a rebellion against it.
The result was a generation that felt both morally chosen and institutionally betrayed—a civilization that had conquered material scarcity but lost its spiritual compass. The Cultural Revolution of the late 1960s was therefore not a departure from Western history but an outcome of it: the moment when material progress itself produced a new moral faith to fill the void it had created.
Why It Was So Unusual in American History
The Cultural Revolution of the late 1960s was unlike anything that had ever happened in the United States. Earlier moral uprisings in American history had always been rooted in faith, hardship, or deprivation. Important political movements that were strongly rooted in Christian morality included:
Temperance Movement (1820s–1870s): Evangelical crusade to curb alcohol as a sin threatening family and virtue.
Prison and Asylum Reform (1830s–1850s): Religious reformers promoting humane treatment and moral rehabilitation of prisoners and the mentally ill.
Moral Reform Movement (1830s–1840s): Female-led evangelical effort to combat prostitution and sexual immorality through conversion and education.
Educational Reform (1830s–1850s): Protestant push for universal public schooling to instill moral discipline and civic virtue.
Peace Movement (1810s–1860s): Christian pacifists advocating arbitration and nonviolence as expressions of divine law.
Abolitionist Movement (1830s–1860s): Christian moral campaign against slavery as a national sin.
Women’s Rights Movement (1840s–1880s): Quaker and evangelical reformers demanding moral and civic equality for women.
Social Gospel Movement (1870s–1910s): Protestant call to apply Christian ethics to poverty and industrial injustice.
Progressive Movement (1890s–1920s): Secularized outgrowth of Protestant moral reform focused on social betterment.
Prohibition Movement (1880s–1930s): Moral crusade for national purification through banning alcohol.
Child Labor and Factory Reform (1890s–1910s): Christian activists seeking protection of children and moral uplift of labor.
Settlement House Movement (1880s–1920s): Reformers such as Jane Addams blending Protestant compassion with social service for immigrants and the poor.
Civil Rights Movement (1940s–1960s): Christian-based demand for equality and brotherhood led by Black clergy.
All these grass-roots political/religious movements had been calls to return to God, to restore discipline, or to purify a sinful society. They believed both individual activism and government reform were necessary to do so. The symbol of these reform movement were elegant women in dark or white dresses using overtly Christian terminology and symbology.
The Cultural Revolution of the late 1960s, by contrast, emerged not from scarcity or fear but from abundance and security. It was the moral rebellion of a civilization at the height of its success. And, let’s just say that it did not include a large number of elegant women in dark or white dresses!
The generation that came of age in the late 1960s had no memory of depression or total war. They were the first to grow up in a society of rising wages, steady employment, and nearly universal prosperity. Their parents had fought and sacrificed to build a world of stability and comfort; their children took that stability for granted.
Yet it was precisely this material comfort that made rebellion possible. Freed from economic necessity, the young could treat moral and cultural questions as their central concerns. While earlier generations had also sought moral renewal amid prosperity, none had done so on such a vast scale or with such secular intensity. What made the late 1960s distinctive was that spiritual rebellion became a mass movement among the well-educated, not a revival among the faithful.
Equally striking was the direction of the revolt.
Most social revolutions aim upward, against entrenched elites or oppressive hierarchies. The Cultural Revolution of the late 1960s turned inward, against the very institutions that had made its participants powerful. Its leaders were not the poor or the marginalized but the educated children of the middle and upper classes.
They were students at elite universities, not peasants in the fields. Theirs was a moral rebellion launched from within the establishment itself. It was, in every sense, a revolution of the winners revolting against the very things that made them winners.
This made the movement historically unique.
Never before had the American Left revolted against its own triumph. The New Deal and postwar liberalism had expanded education, social welfare, and economic opportunity. By the mid-1960s, the liberal order seemed unassailable: it had delivered growth, security, and global leadership.
Yet the very generation that benefited most from this order declared it morally bankrupt. They condemned bureaucratic efficiency as dehumanizing, material abundance as corrupting, and military power as immoral. The result was an extraordinary paradox—a moral revolt born from success rather than failure.
It was also the first major American moral revolution without a church, theology, or sacred text. The Great Awakenings had been organized through revival meetings and itinerant preachers; the abolitionists had quoted Scripture as their authority.
Just as remarkable was the generation’s self-awareness. For the first time, a group of young people saw themselves as a distinct moral class, united across a continent by music, television, and shared ideals.
The Baby Boom created a youth population large enough to form a cultural majority of its own. Technological innovation, such as cheap air travel, long-distance telephone calls, national magazines, and network television, allowed this cohort to experience events collectively, from antiwar protests to rock concerts. They did not simply participate in American life; they saw themselves as an alternative to it. The very existence of a coherent “youth culture” was something new in history.
The social context amplified this sense of moral autonomy. By the 1960s, higher education had expanded far beyond the elite, enrolling millions of young Americans. Universities were no longer finishing schools for the upper class but engines of social mobility, and in the process they became the crucibles of a new moral worldview. Students were taught to question authority, to interpret the world through social science rather than theology, and to see moral improvement as the purpose of intellectual life.
When they turned this critical gaze on their own society, the result was not gratitude but moral outrage.
The Cultural Revolution of the late 1960s was therefore doubly unprecedented:
it was the first moral awakening to arise from prosperity, and
the first to occur within a secular framework.
The Cultural Revolution of the late 1960s combined the intensity of a religious revival with the intellectual self-confidence of a technocratic elite. In earlier centuries, moral reformers had sought to align society with divine truth; this generation sought to align it with human feeling. The sacred had been relocated—from heaven to the human heart.
Explanations That Do Not Fit the Evidence
For half a century, historians and commentators have tried to explain the Cultural Revolution of the late 1960s, but most of their explanations confuse symptoms with causes. The familiar stories—about Vietnam, civil rights, or repressive universities—describe what happened, not why it happened. They capture the catalysts, not the fuel. They partyly explain why the revolt began when it did, but not why it spread so quickly, why it took a moral rather than political form, or why it appeared almost simultaneously across the entire Western world.
Vietnam war
The first and most common explanation blames the Vietnam War. Without question, the war was the immediate catalyst of student protest in the United States. The draft turned moral opposition into personal crisis, and television brought scenes of devastation into living rooms every night.
Yet war alone cannot explain the depth or the moral tone of the rebellion. The United States had fought unpopular wars before, and other nations faced similar conflicts without comparable upheavals. The war mattered less as a specific event than as a symbol—proof that the system was hypocritical, that those in power were lying, and that moral conscience belonged to the young.
Most importantly, the Cultural Revolution occurred throughout the wealthy Western world, including in nations that did not participate in the Vietnam war. So it cannot be the entire reason.
Civil rights movement
A second explanation points to the civil rights movement. There is truth in this as well. The courage and moral passion of the Black freedom struggle profoundly inspired white students, especially its language of redemption and equality. Many young activists sincerely believed they were extending the moral logic of civil rights to new causes—peace, feminism, environmentalism, and sexual liberation.
Yet civil rights alone cannot account for the transformation of the entire Western elite. There were parallel movements in nations without America’s racial history, and even within the United States, the center of gravity soon shifted away from racial justice toward personal and cultural liberation. Civil rights provided the vocabulary of moral protest; something deeper supplied the universal appeal.
Most importantly, the Cultural Revolution of the late 1960s happened after the Civil Rights movement had achieved its greatest victories:
Those two acts, two of the most important in American political history, confirmed that the American political system was working.
But immediately after the greatest victory, the spectacular riots of the 1960s began (followed by college protests):
Watts Riot (1965, Los Angeles): Six days of violence following a police arrest; 34 dead, over 1,000 injured — a turning point in urban racial unrest.
Cleveland Hough Riots (1966)
Newark Riot (1967, New Jersey): 26 dead, over 700 injured, massive property damage.
Detroit Riot (1967): One of the deadliest in U.S. history; five days of violence, 43 dead, 7,200 arrested, 1,400 buildings burned.
Washington, D.C. Riot (1968): 12 dead, widespread destruction across the capital.
Chicago Riot (1968): nine dead, more than 3,000 arrests, major damage to West Side neighborhoods.
Baltimore Riot (1968): six dead, hundreds of businesses looted and burned.
With the exception of the Free Speech movement in UC Berkeley (my alma mater), all of the large campus protests were after the success of the Civil Rights movement. And they tended to take place in elite public and private universities where the students were the sons and daughters of the upper class. And those universities were supposed to be grooming the next generation of upper class:
University of California, Berkeley – 1964
University of Michigan – 1965
Columbia University – 1968
University of Wisconsin–Madison – 1967
San Francisco State College – 1968
Harvard University – 1969
Cornell University – 1969
University of Chicago – 1969
UC Santa Barbara – 1970
Kent State University – 1970
The stifling 1950s
A third explanation focuses on the repressive character of mid-century institutions—rigid universities, patriarchal families, authoritarian workplaces. Certainly, many young people experienced those structures as stifling. But repression cannot explain why rebellion took a moral form rather than a merely social or political one. The students did not simply demand comfort or self-expression; they claimed to speak on behalf of justice, authenticity, and humanity itself. Their revolt had the fervor of a moral awakening, not the grievances of a social class.
Expansion of higher education
A fourth explanation attributes the upheaval to the expansion of higher education and the rise of a critical intellectual culture. Millions of Baby Boomers entered universities just as academic authority was being questioned. Exposure to philosophy, sociology, and critical theory gave them new tools for challenging established values.
This certainly shaped the movement’s language, but it cannot explain its moral intensity. Academic ideas alone rarely move millions. They must resonate with deeper cultural instincts and unmet moral needs.
New technologies
Finally, there are the technological explanations—that television, music, and mass communication created a global youth culture that magnified discontent. These were indeed the channels through which rebellion spread, but technology is an amplifier, not an origin. It carries emotions that already exist. The same innovations could just as easily have reinforced faith and stability had the moral foundations of society still been intact.
All these interpretations share the same flaw: they focus on events and institutions rather than on the moral and spiritual conditions beneath them. The Vietnam War and civil rights struggles were catalysts, not causes. University repression and television were accelerants, not explanations. What made the Cultural Revolution of the late 1960s possible was a civilization that had lost its moral center while retaining its moral language—a society still fluent in the vocabulary of virtue but no longer certain where virtue came from.
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Historical Parallels
The Cultural Revolution of the late 1960s did not come from nowhere. While in many ways very different, it shared many key characteristics with previous religious revivals and revolts.
Pre-Reformation Christian revivals
Throughout its history, Western Christianity repeatedly fractured under the pressure of moral reformers who accused the Church of corruption and sought to restore purity, humility, and personal holiness.
Montanism (2nd century): An early Christian revival emphasizing prophetic revelation, asceticism, and strict moral discipline over church hierarchy.
Donatist Movement (4th–5th centuries, North Africa): Rejected the authority of priests who had cooperated with persecution, insisting on a pure and sinless church.
Arianism (4th century): Denied the full divinity of Christ, favoring a morally rigorous and rationalized Christianity; condemned as heresy but influential for centuries.
Pelagianism (4th–5th centuries): Denied original sin and stressed individual moral effort and free will as the path to salvation.
Celtic Monastic Reform (6th–8th centuries, British Isles): Promoted austere monastic life, personal piety, and missionary zeal distinct from Roman control.
Cluniac Reform (10th–11th centuries, France): Aimed to restore monastic discipline, celibacy, and independence from secular influence.
Gregorian Reform (11th century, papal-led): Sought to purify the Church by ending simony, enforcing clerical celibacy, and asserting spiritual authority over kings.
Waldensians (12th century, France and Italy): Lay preachers rejecting church wealth and hierarchy while calling for apostolic poverty and vernacular Scripture.
Cathars (Albigensians) (12th–13th centuries, southern France): Dualist sect advocating extreme asceticism and rejection of material corruption within the Church.
Beguinages and Beghards (13th–14th centuries, Low Countries): Lay devotional communities, often female-led, emphasizing mystical union with God outside clerical control.
Franciscan Reform (13th century, Italy): Began as a radical movement for apostolic poverty and humility, later absorbed into Church orthodoxy.
Lollards (14th–15th centuries, England): Followers of John Wycliffe who demanded a vernacular Bible, moral reform, and condemnation of clerical corruption.
Hussite Movement (15th century, Bohemia): Followers of Jan Hus advocating communion for the laity, church reform, and moral purity; direct precursor to the Protestant Reformation.
All of these pre-Reformation movements were attempts to purify Christianity by rejecting the moral corruption, wealth, and hierarchy of the established Church and returning to what believers saw as the original ideals of faith, simplicity, and personal holiness—revolts of conscience that sought direct access to divine truth without institutional mediation.
The Protestant Reformation
Of course, the biggest religious movement in Christian history was the Protestant Reformation (1517–1648): New Protestant leaders broke from the Catholic Church to restore what reformers saw as scriptural purity, personal faith, and moral integrity. Many of the new Protestant churches were early settlers of British North America and the United States.
English Reformation (1530s–1550s) began as a political act—Henry VIII’s break with Rome—but evolved into a distinct religious movement blending Protestant theology with traditional hierarchy. The resulting Anglican Church kept much of Catholic ritual and episcopal structure while embracing vernacular scripture, royal supremacy, and moral reform. Over time, Anglicanism became the defining faith of England’s educated elite, combining personal conscience, national identity, and a moderate, institutional form of Christianity that would later influence the moral tone of the English-speaking world.
The Dutch Reformation was a struggle for both faith and national independence. Influenced by Calvinism, it rejected the hierarchy and ritual of the Catholic Church in favor of a disciplined, scripture-centered Christianity that emphasized moral rigor, individual conscience, and civic responsibility.
Dutch Calvinism became not only a religion but the ethical foundation of the emerging Dutch Republic—linking hard work, thrift, education, and communal discipline to divine duty, and producing one of the most prosperous and morally self-confident societies of the early modern world.English Puritanism (1560s–1640s): Sought to cleanse the recently-established Church of England of remaining Catholic elements and enforce strict moral discipline.
Quaker Movement (1640s–1680s): Rejected formal sacraments and clergy, emphasizing inner light, pacifism, and personal holiness.
Anabaptist Movement (1520s–1560s): Radical Reformation sect rejecting infant baptism, clerical hierarchy, and state authority to build a pure community of believers.
Presbyterianism (1550s–1600s): Reformed Protestant movement rooted in Calvinism and established in Scotland by John Knox; emphasized divine sovereignty, moral discipline, and governance by elected elders instead of bishops, becoming one of the most organized and politically influential heirs of the Reformation.
Pietism (1670s–1750s, Germany and Scandinavia): Reaction against formal Lutheranism; emphasized heartfelt devotion and moral regeneration.
The Settling of North America
This all may seem like ancient history and have nothing to do with modern American culture, but that is not true. The original settlers of British North America and the early United States came from exactly these new Protestant churches during a time of their peak religiosity. Indeed, many came to North America specifically for religious reasons.
Each of new new Protestant denominations became the dominant regional religious and moral tradition for one or more North American colonies. Their early cultural dominance shaped regional cultures within America to this day. So the Protestant Reformation had a powerful effect on American culture and each of its sub-national cultures:
Puritanism: Strongest in New England—especially Massachusetts, Connecticut, and New Hampshire—where it defined civic life, education, and moral culture.
Anabaptist Movement: Present in Rhode Island, which offered early religious tolerance, and later in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and the Midwest, where Mennonites and Amish built rural, pacifist communities.
Quaker Movement: Centered in Pennsylvania and New Jersey, promoting tolerance, pacifism, and equality.
Pietism (from Germany and Scandinavia): Introduced by immigrants in Pennsylvania and later spread across the Midwest (Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, the Dakotas), emphasizing personal devotion and moral earnestness.
Scots-Irish Presbyterianism: Strongest in the Appalachian backcountry from Pennsylvania to Georgia, where it fostered a culture of independence, hard work, and moral rigor that deeply influenced the populist and evangelical character of early American frontier life.
Dutch Calvinism: Rooted in New Amsterdam in New York and northern New Jersey, inherited from the Dutch Reformed Church of New Netherland; later strong among Midwestern Dutch communities in Michigan and Iowa.
Anglican Church: Dominant in the southern colonies—Virginia, Maryland, and the Carolinas—as the established church of the planter elite; later evolved into the Episcopal Church.
And the Westward movement carried those sub-national religious cultures across the continent from east-to-west. Settlers from New England dominated the westward movement into the Upper Midwest (along with recent immigrants from Germany and Scandinavia). Quakers and Methodists from Pennsylvania dominated the westward movement into the Lower Midwest. Presbyterians from Virginia dominated the westward movement into the inland South. Anglicans from South Carolina (and their African slaves ominated the westward movement into the Deep South.
The result of all these westward movements created the sub-national cultures that we know today. Each was shaped by a specific Protestant denomination that emerged out of the Reformation.
So European settlers to what is now the United States not only brought the domesticated plants/animals, technologies, skills, organizations of Commercial societies. They brought intensely moralistic Protestant religious beliefs as well.
Great Awakenings
Not surprisingly, the long tradition of intense religious revival continued long after the United States became independent. The Protestant settlers and their descendents established a rhythm long familiar in American history: the recurring cycle of moral awakenings that erupt when prosperous societies lose confidence in the authority of their own institutions. Again and again, when the wealth and hierarchy of established Christian churches dull the spiritual life of a civilization, new movements arise to reclaim moral purity, emotional intensity, and direct access to truth.
The 1960s were not an exception to this pattern—they were its latest expression.
First Great Awakening (1730-55), which many historians believe was a precursor of the American Revolution. This Great Awakening broke the dominance of established churches by teaching that individuals could experience divine truth without clerical mediation.
Second Great Awakening ( 1790–1840), which many historians believe was a precursor of the Civil War. This Great Awakening turned that same moral intensity toward social reform, spawning the great Protestant reform movements—abolition, temperance, women’s rights, and education. Mid-century revivalism fueled the moral crusades that sought to redeem the nation from sin.
Third Great Awakening (1855-1930), which many historians believe was a precursor of the Progressive reform era and the New Deal. This Great Awakening spawned the Social Gospel and Progressive movements of the late 19th and early 20th centuries transformed Christian morality into social policy, treating poverty and inequality as collective evils demanding national repentance.
Across all these movements ran a consistent thread: the conviction that a complacent society had strayed from divine morality, and that the faithful must purify it. Each revival accused existing institutions of hypocrisy and corruption; each promised redemption through repentance and moral reform. These were revolts of conscience, not against Christianity but within it. Their leaders—preachers, reformers, and prophets—called for a return to moral truth, not its rejection.
Back to the 1960s
The Cultural Revolution of the late 1960s followed the same moral pattern but with a decisive difference. It was a revival without theology: a Great Awakening after the death of God. Its leaders shared the passion and language of earlier reformers but not their faith.
Youth demanded purity, empathy, and equality with the zeal of missionaries, yet they grounded those ideals in human feeling rather than divine command. Their sermons were songs, their pulpits classrooms and microphones, their moral authority derived from emotion rather than revelation. The moral structure of revival survived; only the object of worship had changed.
In this sense, the young activists of the 1960s were heirs to a long Christian tradition they scarcely understood. They still believed in sin, though they called it oppression or privilege. They still preached redemption, though it came through awareness and political action rather than grace. They still longed for a community of the righteous, though it was now called “the movement.” The pattern was ancient: moral fervor reborn amid prosperity, purification through protest, and the hope of a new moral world.
But by removing God from that pattern, the Cultural Revolution of the late 1960s broke with every previous American awakening. Earlier revivals had sought to renew a moral order rooted in divine authority; the new one sought to create moral order without it.
Where Jonathan Edwards warned of divine wrath, the students of Berkeley and Columbia warned of institutional oppression. Where the Second Great Awakening had built churches, the 1960s built movements. What had once been expressed as faith was now expressed as politics.
This is what made the upheaval of the late 1960s so revolutionary in the deepest sense. It preserved the moral emotions of Christianity—compassion, guilt, redemption—but severed them from their theological source.
The resulting moral energy had no stable home; it poured into universities, art, journalism, and eventually government. Western civilization had created a new kind of revival: a secular Great Awakening powered by inherited religious feeling but guided by the tools of modern reason and the technologies of mass communication.
Why Worldviews Matter So Much
Every society needs a moral map—an agreed-upon story about:
what is good,
what is evil, and
what gives life meaning.
Human beings are not purely rational animals; the rational mind solves problems, but the non-rational mind decides which problems are worth solving. That deeper part of human nature—the conscience, the imagination, the longing for belonging—cannot be satisfied by reason alone.
The human brain needs a worldview: a set of shared moral assumptions that bind individuals into a moral community and give their actions significance.
Worldviews matter because they organize collective life. They tell people who “we” are, what “we” value, and why “we” are better than those who do not share our beliefs. They make individuals feel moral and purposeful, but they also define who belongs and who does not. A common moral vision is what allows large groups of people to cooperate, sacrifice, and trust one another. Without it, societies lose their moral vocabulary—they can still talk about justice, compassion, or truth, but those words lose coherence.
In earlier centuries, religion provided that shared moral order.
The Christian Moral Background
For nearly two millennia, Western moral life had rested upon a Christian foundation. Even when faith wavered, its ethical structure endured. Christianity had shaped the moral instincts, vocabulary, and emotional habits of the West so deeply that they remained long after belief itself weakened. By the mid-20th century, most Americans still lived inside a moral framework they no longer consciously recognized as Christian.
At its heart, that framework was built on several enduring ideas.
The first was the moral equality of all souls before God—a revolutionary principle that gradually eroded ancient hierarchies of birth and power.
The second was the belief that sin, not ignorance or poverty, was the source of human suffering, and that moral improvement required repentance and discipline.
The third was the conviction that compassion and service to others were divine obligations.
Together, these ideas formed a moral universe where every individual mattered, moral effort was meaningful, and virtue had eternal significance.
American society, though religiously diverse, inherited this moral structure almost intact. The Puritans of New England built entire communities around the pursuit of holiness and moral order. The Anglicans of the South translated duty into hierarchy and public virtue. The Quakers infused moral conscience with pacifism and equality. Even the more radical sects—Anabaptists, Pietists, Methodists—all carried forward the same moral grammar: sin, repentance, moral striving, and service to others. Each revival or reformation deepened the moral expectations of ordinary believers, reinforcing the idea that moral progress was both possible and required.
The great achievement of Christianity was to unite moral emotion with metaphysical certainty. It did not merely command virtue—it told people why virtue mattered. The authority of God anchored morality in something absolute.
A person’s moral worth did not depend on wealth, status, or popularity but on right conduct before the divine. This produced the most stable moral civilization the world had ever known: one that could discipline the powerful, dignify the humble, and inspire sacrifice for distant strangers.
Christianity offered a clear moral grammar: sin and redemption, humility and grace, the sacred and the profane. It gave both elites and common people a common language of virtue, self-restraint, and duty. Even when individuals doubted its theology, its moral categories still shaped how they thought about right and wrong. That is why Western societies could endure enormous political and economic changes without losing moral cohesion—because everyone still believed, at some level, in the same moral universe.
Secularization of Institutions
By the early 20th century, the moral world that Christianity had built was quietly unraveling. Scientific progress, industrial expansion, and the trauma of two world wars weakened the authority of religious explanations.
The universe no longer seemed orderly or purposeful; history no longer appeared guided by Providence. Churches remained powerful social institutions, but their moral authority had become cultural rather than theological. They baptized, buried, and married the nation—but fewer people believed they spoke for God.
Among educated elites, theology gave way to psychology, ethics, and the social sciences. Seminaries became schools of moral philosophy; pastors became counselors; sin became maladjustment. The moral instincts of Christianity survived, but they were detached from their transcendent source.
Justice, equality, and compassion remained noble ideals—but now as secular virtues, no longer divine commandments. The moral grammar endured; the vocabulary was the same. But its meaning had changed.
This was the moral condition of mid-century America: a civilization still fluent in the language of virtue but uncertain of its origin. Americans spoke of human rights rather than sacred worth, of equality rather than grace, of self-expression rather than repentance. The moral emotions remained Christian, but the faith that had given them coherence had faded. It was a conscience without God—ready, perhaps even eager, for a new revelation.
Nowhere was this transformation more evident than in the great institutions that once carried moral authority. The universities, the press, and the mainline Protestant churches had long served as the conscience of the educated class.
Yet by the 1950s, these institutions had lost confidence in the supernatural and placed their faith instead in procedural reason—what might be called moral technocracy. Theologians spoke of “values” rather than truth; journalists of “objectivity” rather than virtue. The shared assumption was that reason could substitute for revelation, that progress itself could stand in for Providence.
This shift produced a paradox. Institutions built upon Christian ethics still acted as if those ethics were self-evident, even as they denied the beliefs that sustained them. They continued to speak of justice, dignity, and duty but no longer believed in any transcendent source for those ideals. The result was a growing moral vacuum: a society still shaped by Christian moral expectations but increasingly unsure why those expectations should be binding.
By mid-century, the American elite lived in a kind of moral half-light—still guided by the habits of faith but deprived of its certainty. It was a civilization whose institutions had kept the vocabulary of moral order while losing the grammar. Into that twilight world stepped a new generation, raised in prosperity, educated in secular institutions, and emotionally trained to seek meaning through empathy rather than obedience. When they rebelled, they were not rejecting morality but trying to rebuild it.
The Revolt Against the New Deal Democrats
The Cultural Revolution of the late 1960s was not a rebellion against conservatism. Modern conservatism was at that time a minor force. The dominant force in American politics 1932-1968 was the Democratic party. New Deal Democrats dominated the Presidency (except Eisenhower), US Senate, US House, Governors, State legislatures, and big city governments.
In the 1960, the New Deal Democrats were the Establishment.
The New Deal Democrats defined morality in practical terms. Their liberalism was managerial, institutional, and empirical. It measured virtue by results—by rising wages, falling poverty, expanded education, and the promise that government could make life fairer without destroying freedom. It was pragmatic, patriotic, and cautiously optimistic, trusting that progress came through steady reform within existing institutions.
The Cultural Revolution of the late 1960s was a rebellion within liberalism itself. The young activists of that era were the children of the New Deal Democrats—raised in the moral confidence of the welfare state, educated in universities built by the GI Bill, and surrounded by the prosperity their parents’ policies had created. Yet they turned with fury on the very order that had made their lives possible.
But by the late 1960s, that model no longer satisfied a younger generation that demanded moral purity rather than pragmatic compromise. The bureaucratic liberalism of the New Deal seemed spiritually hollow—too comfortable with inequality, too deferential to authority, too compromised by power. The young wanted moral perfection, not managed progress. They demanded that society not merely reduce injustice but redeem itself.
Central Moral Dilemma of the Left
This rebellion revealed what I have called The Central Moral Dilemma of Left-of-Center ideologies: an irresolvable moral conflict between:
What the Left-of-Center deems to be their prime moral goal (Equality), and:
What the Left-of-Center has actually achieved and what it can possibly achieve in the material world.
The older liberals had lived within that tension. They accepted that Equality could only be approximated, not achieved—that trade-offs were inevitable, that human difference was real, and that utopia was impossible. The new generation could not accept those limits. Having grown up in prosperity, they mistook the elimination of hardship for the elimination of tragedy. They came to see the continued existence of inequality not as a social fact but as a moral crime.
The generational cycle
Thus began what might be called the generational cycle of the modern Left. Each new cohort of believers “discovers” inequality, declares it intolerable, and condemns the previous generation for moral failure. They insist that the only reason equality has not yet been achieved is that earlier genreations of reformers did not care enough, did not try hard enough, did not spend enough money, or were sabotaged by hidden enemies—the rich, the corporations, the patriarchy, the racists, the imperialists, or the Establishment. Having named the villains, they mobilize to finish the moral work their elders supposedly abandoned.
Their reforms, revolutions, and regulations rarely bring Equality any closer, because the goal itself is metaphysical, not material. Yet despite repeated failure, the moral structure of Post-Modern Left-of-Center ideology endures. Each generation teaches its children that inequality is evil, that moral people must oppose it, and that one’s goodness is measured by one’s commitment to that struggle.
Twenty years later, the cycle begins again.
This cycle functions like a secularized version of the Great Awakenings: a recurring moral revival that renews the emotional power of faith but not its humility. Where earlier Christians sought holiness through repentance before God, modern progressives seek righteousness through opposition to injustice. Both satisfy the same moral craving—for purity, belonging, and moral certainty—but the latter operates entirely within the material world.
The Post-Christian Left that emerged from the Cultural Revolution of the late 1960s thus inherited the emotional intensity of Christianity and the historical pattern of its revivals while surrendering the belief that once restrained them.
Moral inheritance of the 1960s
This is the moral inheritance of the Cultural Revolution of the late 1960s. Its young idealists did not create the Left’s moral dilemma—they revealed it. They were the first American generation to treat Equality not as a political aim but as a test of righteousness.
Their revolt against the New Deal Democrats replaced the pragmatic morality of results with a new moral identity grounded in intention. The ultimate proof of virtue became not what one accomplished in the material world, but what one professed to believe about it.
The irony is that this revolt marked the triumph, not the rejection, of the New Deal’s success. Material progress had eliminated the old enemies of liberalism—poverty, hunger, illiteracy—and left only moral ones.
A generation raised to expect progress everywhere turned that expectation inward, toward the soul of society itself. What emerged from that transformation was not a new economic order but a new moral faith—one that retained the Christian passion for justice while discarding its humility, limits, and forgiveness.
That faith was Post-Modern Left-of-Center ideologies.
Ideologies are replacing religions
Over the last 500 years there have been many developments that have undermined religious observance:
As a result of the violent religious wars that dominated Europe from 1520 to 1648, the Treaty of Westphalia clearly defined limits on religion
The discovery that the Earth was not the center of the universe
The discovery that humans evolved from ape ancestors.
Science has gradually shrunk the domain of religion explaining the natural world. Many intellectuals of the 18th, 19th, and early 20th Centuries thought that we were replacing religion with science, logic, and reason. They believed that an Age of Rationality was replacing an Age of Religion.
However, the psychological needs that religions served did not go away. Science, logic, and reason apparently cannot fulfill that need in enough people to matter. Instead, religion has largely been replaced by ideology in wealthy Western nations.
But when belief declines while moral language remains, a civilization becomes unstable. The conscience survives, but it no longer knows what it serves. The result is what mid-century America faced: a generation raised to believe in equality, justice, and compassion, but taught by secular institutions that there was no transcendent truth to anchor them. The vacuum created by secularization did not abolish moral instinct—it unmoored it. The same moral energies that once built churches, schools, and missions were now searching for new objects of faith.
For the last 150 years, we have seen a gradual decline in religious observance, particularly in wealthy Western nations. Ideology, particularly Post-Modern Left-of-Center ideologies, is increasingly replacing religion among college-educated people in Western nations.
Worldviews matter so much because they are not optional. Humans as a group cannot imbrace pure rationality and science When one non-rational world view collapses, another rises to take its place.
The Cultural Revolution of the late 1960s was precisely such a moment—the birth of a new moral faith within a society that no longer believed in the old one. What had once been expressed as Christianity would now be expressed as politics, psychology, and social justice. The result was not the end of morality, but its transformation.
The Birth of a Post-Christian Moral Faith
The Cultural Revolution of the late 1960s produced not merely a new politics but a new faith. Its emotional structure, language, and rhythm followed the oldest pattern in Western moral history—the Christian cycle of sin, repentance, and redemption—but translated into secular form. To understand why it felt so powerful, one must see it as the latest in a long series of moral revivals within Christian civilization, reborn after Christianity itself had faded.
For nearly two thousand years, Western societies had lived inside the Christian moral universe. When corruption or complacency dulled belief, reformers arose to purify it. From the Cluniac and Franciscan reforms to the Reformation and the Great Awakenings, each revival accused the established order of hypocrisy and sought to restore a purer moral truth. The Cultural Revolution repeated that same pattern—but in an age when the old Church had lost its authority.
The result was a revival without revelation: a moral awakening that replaced divine grace with human empathy.
The youth of 1967–1970 inherited Christianity’s moral grammar but not its theology. They still believed in sin, now renamed oppression; in repentance, now called awareness; in salvation, now achieved through social justice; and in redemption, now collective rather than spiritual. The equality of souls before God became the equality of persons before society. Compassion was no longer obedience to divine command but proof of one’s moral identity.
In short, the Christian conscience survived—but it began judging the world without reference to God.
Faith, the State, and the Outsourcing of Morality
One of the most revealing continuities between Christian history and modern Left-of-Center ideologies is the tendency to outsource moral responsibility to institutions. In Catholicism, moral action is mediated through the Church: believers express virtue by obeying and supporting a moral hierarchy that acts on their behalf. Protestants, by contrast, see salvation as a personal calling—each individual must live virtuously, but not necessarily seek to reform society through politics.
The modern Left mirrors the Catholic model. Its adherents demonstrate moral virtue not primarily through individual charity or sacrifice, but through public support for government action—programs, regulations, and redistributive policies that express collective compassion. The act of voting for or publicly endorsing moral policy substitutes for the act of personal moral labor.
In this sense, the modern welfare state functions as a kind of secular Church, a moral institution through which virtue is exercised vicariously.
This idea did not arise by accident.
It reflects the influence of the German Idealist philosopher Georg Hegel. Hegel saw the State as the instrument through which God (or Reason) realizes Himself in history. Hegel also established the notion that the state embodies the ethical spirit (Sittlichkeit) of a people.
Hegel saw history as a rational process in which human freedom gradually becomes realized through the development of self-consciousness, societies, and political institutions. The dialectic is the mechanism by which this unfolds: contradictions within ideas or social forms generate their own overcoming, leading to higher, more coherent stages. The state is the institutional embodiment of this rational freedom—where individuals recognize their duties and rights through participation in ethical life (family, civil society, and state).
God, for Hegel, is not a personal deity but the Absolute Spirit—the rational structure of reality itself—which becomes self-aware through human consciousness and historical development. All these elements interlock: the dialectic drives history, history embodies the unfolding of freedom, freedom becomes actual through the ethical state, and this entire process is the self-realization of the Absolute (God).
Hegel had a massive influence on Karl Marx, whose philosophy of Dialectical Materialism was a deliberate attempt to transform Hegel’s Idealistic Dialectic into a science-based historical materialism that explained all of human history and could be used to prove that the Hegalian end state was according to the law of history. Marx believed that societies pass through modes of production (e.g., feudalism → capitalism → socialism) as part of an inevitable development rooted in material conditions, not purely ideas.
Thus both conceive of a “march of history” — an ordered progression with a direction and purpose — but Hegel emphasizes ideas and freedom, while Marx emphasizes material conditions and class struggle.
Hence the common view on the Left of:
The March of History
Being In Favor of/Against History
Modern progressives, often without knowing it, inherited this metaphysical faith in the redemptive role of the State. The result is a moral order where goodness is measured not by what individuals do, but by what the government does in their name.
This institutionalization of virtue completes the moral evolution that began in the 1960s. A generation that had lost belief in divine salvation transferred its longing for moral purpose to politics. In doing so, it fused the Christian structure of faith-based action with the secular machinery of the modern state—creating a new moral religion of public policy, in which compassion is expressed through power.
Legacy
The Cultural Revolution of the late 1960s did not end when the protests stopped. Its followers grew up, entered the professions, and carried their new creed into the commanding heights of culture—universities, journalism, entertainment, and eventually government.
Over time, what began as a youth counterculture in the late 1960s became the dominant world view within Western institutions in the 21st Century. The Post-Modern Left-of-Center ideologies that had first taken shape on campuses came to define the moral language of the educated class throughout the Western world.
The older establishment that had guided American life for more than a century—the conservative, Protestant, and largely Republican elite—gradually lost its authority. In its place arose a new professional class defined not by ancestry or denomination but by education, moral sentiment, and cultural values. Its members were more diverse, more secular, and more cosmopolitan, yet united by a shared belief in empathy, equality, and authenticity as the highest virtues. This new elite became the moral and cultural heir of the 1960s generation, shaping what counted as virtue across the Western world.
The Democratic Party reflected this transformation.
Once a coalition of Southern populists, ethnic workers, and pragmatic reformers, it evolved into a moral-cultural alliance dominated by college-educated professionals. Its policies shifted from promoting economic growth and opportunity to expressing moral solidarity with the marginalized.
The Democratic party shifted from defending the interests and values of the American working and middle-class to defending the interests and values of the American college-educated professional class. That professional class deliberately cultivated ties to those they deemed marginized: women, racial minorities, immigrants, and gays in order to create an electoral majority.
Government social programs for the marginalized became vehicles of moral identity, and politics itself became a form of collective conscience. The measure of virtue was no longer practical improvement but moral intention—proof that one cared about the right causes and spoke the right moral language.
This transformation spread beyond the United States. Across Europe, Canada, and Australia, center-left parties underwent the same evolution, exchanging the language of labor and production for that of empathy and inclusion. The moral structure of the Christian conscience—the need for sin, confession, and redemption—persisted but migrated into secular institutions.
Universities became the new pulpits; journalism the new catechism; bureaucracy the new priesthood of virtue. What had once been the mission of the Church—to guide souls toward moral purity—became the mission of the educated class to purify society through awareness and reform.
The result was a paradox: a civilization that had abandoned Christianity but could not escape its moral psychology.
The modern West retained the Christian impulse to moralize the world but lost the theology that had once tempered it. It built:
systems of justice without forgiveness,
compassion without humility, and
moral passion without restraint.
But is it really a religion?
Quite frankly, I do not know. Post-Modern Left-of-Center ideologies have many common characteristics with religions, but they are missing a belief in God (at least not inherently within the world view).
I really do not care whether you think of Post-Modern Left-of-Center ideologies as:
One new religion
A set of many new religions
A secular religion
A secular world view
A set of ideas that activates the same part of the human brain as traditional religions do
The functional equivalent of a religion.
An ideology with strong religious overtones
While I do not diminish the importance of the distinctions listed above, I do not really care which you adopt. I am not even very sure myself. They all make sense somewhat, and yet none are totally correct.
The key factor is that throughout the the wealthy Western world, college-educated professionals have replaced traditional Christian religions with Post-Modern Left-of-Center ideologies as their dominant world view. And because that groups dominates the middle and upper ranks of virtually all Western institutions, that world view is for all practical purposes an Established World View in the Western world (in the same sense of Established Churches).
And it is an Established World View that is increasingly being challenged from below and from the Right. Where this Established World View once seemed dominant, cracks are beginning to show.
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See also my other articles and podcasts on Ideology:
Why Ideologies Threaten Progress (Part 1 of 3-part podcast series)
Why ideologies fail (podcast)
Descent into a man-made Hell: Understanding modern Totalitarianism
If you enjoyed this article, you should read my From Poverty to Progress book series.
The good news is that they will all be dead in 20 years (unfortunately, so will I.) A similar phenomenon exists in China, there is a cohort of very entitled people left over from the cultural revolution--often former red guards and the like. I have heard many middle-aged Chinese say that China will be a civilized country once that age group dies out. In contrast to the US, Chinese senior academics are people who suffered during the cultural revolution, so they did not pass that attitude and ideology along to the next generation. In the US, current senior academics, and their hand-picked follow-on generation, were the red guards during the American cultural revolution.
The quote from de Tocqueville is great. It shows the difference between an authoritarian government and authoritarian governance. It should be supplemented with James C. Scott's "Seeing Like a State." The new technologies offer little hope that we will be able to escape a totalitarian state (no matter how the leadership is chosen).
I enjoyed this immensely. Thank you.