Explaining the "Long March through American Institutions"
How Post-Modern Left-of-Center ideologies really captured most American institutions over the last 50 years.
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A generation of observers has described the ideological shift inside American universities, schools, nonprofits, newsrooms, and cultural industries as a “Long March Through the Institutions.”
This slogan was coined by socialist student activist Rudi Dutschke and became a key part of Herbert Marcuse’s strategy for transforming capitalism societies. The slogan deliberately mimicked the Long March of the Chinese Communist Party (1934-35) that became is a key part of its legend. The concept has been extremely influential among New Left activists and has recently been adopted by conservative activists as an explanation for how Post-Modern Left-of-Center ideologies came to dominate so many Western institutions.
The “Long March Through the Institutions” phrase suggests a deliberate project, carried out by coordinated actors with a shared strategic plan. But the historical evidence points to something different.
But before I explain why it happened, let me briefly summarize what happened.
Since the Cultural Revolution of the late 1960s, the United States has undergone a profound cultural, ideological and class transformation that has affected almost all of our institutions (and similar changes have occurred in almost all wealthy Western nations). From the American Revolution until the 1960s, American political, economic, religious, military, and social institutions were dominated by a relatively homogeneous WASP upper class.
After 1970, the American upper class went through transformational changes:
Four-year universities, particularly elite private universities, became the de facto gatekeepers of who could enter this class. University admission tends to sort for intelligence (though not as much as I would like).
Membership in the class by women, Southerners, Catholics, Jews, Blacks, and Hispanics radically expanded, so that now male, church-going Protestant Anglo/Germans are only a small minority within the group.
The upper class expanded dramatically in number. I have found no comprehensive studies of the size of the WASP upper class, but it was certainly less than 5% of the population and probably closer to 1%. Now approximately, 30% of Americans have a four-year college degree.
The class has nationalized and expanded geographically to include all major metros, but particularly to the West Coast. Previously, the WASP elite was far more decentralized.
The class got far more wealthy than ever, largely due to new technologies that earlier generations could not have dreamed of. The material standard of living of a typical 40-year-old college graduate today dwarfs what the top 1% once had.
Mainline Protestant religion has been replaced by secularism or vague spiritualism.
Patriotism has been replaced by cosmopolitanism, and often downright anti-patriotism.
A self-confident belief in progress has been replaced by a post-modern skepticism of or even opposition to progress.
Traditional gender roles have been replaced by something completely different and constantly shifting.
Partisan identification has shifted from Republican to Democratic, particularly in the large metro areas in the Northeast and Pacific coast.
Ideology has shifted from conservatism to varying degrees of Left-of-Center ideology. The percentage who are very Left-of-Center has increased dramatically, particularly since 2010.
This new upper class has dominated the middle and upper-layers of the majority of American institutions (and also the lower levels in some cases. The influence of
The influence of Post-Modern Left-of-Center ideologies is particularly important in the following institutions:
Universities
K-12 education
Media
Hollywood and the entertainment industry
Digital technology industry
Democratic party
Federal bureaucracy and state/local bureaucracies in Blue states.
The transformation that unfolded from the 1970s to the 2010s was not orchestrated. It emerged gradually from demographic waves, psychological sorting, educational expansion, and institutional career structures that, together, shifted the ideological balance of America’s culture-shaping professions.
This essay explains how Post-Modern Left-of-Center ideologies—worldviews emphasizing expressive identity, moral universalism, structural critique, and anti-authoritarian norms—became increasingly influential within American cultural institutions over four decades.
The account follows a simple premise: the “Long March” did occur, but it was not a march in the intentional sense. It was the cumulative outcome of millions of individual choices shaped by:
Material prosperity,
Generational turnover.
Psychological temperament,
Individual educational and career choices
The career ladder as individuals move up within institutions as they age.
The gradual erosion of cultural norms.
Preference falsification and status incentives create institutional tipping points.
What looked like a coordinated ideological advance was, in reality, the emergent result of how people with certain traits and values sorted themselves into particular professions and gradually rose through their institutions.
Material prosperity forms the first causal layer. As economic insecurity receded for large parts of the population after 1970, more individuals had the freedom to invest attention in symbolic, expressive, and identity-based concerns. Prosperity loosened the grip of older moral authorities and gave greater cultural space to interpretive, post-material frameworks. These conditions made the early forms of post-modern left-of-center thinking more appealing, especially to the educated young.
Psychological temperament adds the second layer. People high in openness, verbal fluency, and low authoritarianism are more likely to pursue four-year college degrees and more likely to adopt interpretive, universalist worldviews. The same temperaments are drawn to careers in education, research, journalism, arts, entertainment, advocacy, and other cultural institutions. This is not ideological strategy. It is the predictable outcome of how personality traits channel people into the institutions that produce and transmit meaning.
A third mechanism comes from the structure of career ladders. Individuals usually enter the lower ranks of institutions in their twenties and early thirties, but leadership roles only in their fifties or sixties. This creates a lag in which new ideological tendencies accumulate in entry-level positions for decades before appearing in organizational leadership. Cultural institutions can seem ideologically stable while younger cohorts are steadily reshaping their norms from below.
Finally, the dynamics of preference falsification and status incentives create tipping points. When a sufficient share of educated professionals privately lean toward a new ideological framework, the social rewards for endorsing it—and the penalties for resisting it—shift rapidly. Once the balance flips, institutions can change their public norms in just a few years, even though the underlying demographic and psychological trends have been building for decades.
The following sections trace this process decade by decade, from the 1970s to the 2010s. The aim is to explain how Post-Modern Left-of-Center ideologies achieved institutional dominance not through planning or conspiracy, but through prosperity-driven value change, personality-based educational sorting, generational succession, and the silent power of status incentives. The “Long March Through the Institutions” is best understood not as an organized campaign, but as the unintended result of how modern societies allocate people, ideas, and authority.
If you enjoy this article, you should read my From Poverty to Progress book series.
You can skip the next two sections if you do not care about definitions and methodology. The narrative starts in “The 1970s” section.
Generation definitions
In the article, I will refer to generations using the following definitions. Obviously, there are important difference within members of each generations, but I think generations are also a useful concept.
The Greatest Generation — Born roughly 1901–1927. Came of age during the Great Depression and fought in World War II.
The Silent Generation — Born 1928–1945. Too young for WWII; shaped by postwar prosperity and the early Cold War.
Baby Boomers — Born 1946–1964. Defined by the post–WWII population boom, industrial growth, and social change of the 1960s–70s.
Generation X — Born 1965–1980. Grew up during economic transition, early globalization, and the rise of personal computing.
Millennials — Born 1981–1996. Came of age with the internet, 9/11, and the 2008 financial crisis.
Generation Z — Born 1997–2012. The first fully digital-native cohort, shaped by smartphones, social media, and political polarization.
Generation Alpha — Born 2013–present. Children of Millennials, growing up in an AI- and climate-conscious era.
Metrics used
The decade-by-decade analysis that follows uses a consistent set of metrics to illustrate how generational turnover, ideological tendencies, and institutional composition shifted from the 1970s through the 2010s. These metrics capture broad structural forces rather than precise year-by-year fluctuations, and they are intended to make the underlying demographic and institutional changes visible without overwhelming the narrative with statistical detail.
Each Metrics Bar presents approximate ranges for several key indicators.
Electorate composition:
The partisanship of college graduates (4-year degrees) during the decade.
The percentage of the electorate by generation shows which cohorts were participating in democratic decision-making.
The percentage of the electorate by ideology captures the relative strength of conservative, moderate, and liberal identification at each point in time.
Institutional Make-up:
The estimates of lower-level institutional roles focus on the young adults, typically ages twenty-two to thirty-four, who entered the cultural professions and began shaping workplace norms. This includes young, college-educated adults entering education, media, nonprofit advocacy, universities, and public administration.
The estimates of middle and upper institutional roles reflect the demographic and ideological character of the people who held real authority, generally ages thirty-five to sixty-four. This group has the most influence on institutions: department chairs, editors, administrators, senior teachers, mid-level and senior public officials.
A separate set of estimates highlights the proportion of individuals within major cultural institutions and their partisan leaning, including separate estimates for:
College Professor
K-12 Teachers
Journalist/Media
Actors/Musician
Non-profits universities (obviously as the occupational slices get smaller, the estimates become rougher).
The composition of the government bureaucracy at both federal and state levels.
Because the underlying data sometimes vary in detail or coverage, the figures presented here are expressed as approximate ranges. I calculated them using ChatGPT using the publicly-available data sets listed in the bibliography , including national surveys, electoral records, census data, and institutional studies. They are designed to capture meaningful trends rather than be precise point estimates, and the underlying sources are listed in the bibliography for readers who wish to examine them directly.
By pairing narrative explanation with structural indicators, the following sections show how Post-Modern Left-of-Center ideologies gained momentum through a long, gradual process of demographic, ideological, and psychological turnover rather than through deliberate strategic coordination.
The 1960s (our baseline)
Electorate:
Partisanship of college graduates: 60/40 Republican (including leaners)
Electorate by generation: Greatest Generation and older cohorts roughly 55–60 percent; Silent Generation roughly 35–40 percent; early Baby Boomers 5 percent or less.
Electorate by ideology: Liberal identification roughly 20 percent; conservative identification roughly 35 percent; moderates roughly 45 percent. And remember that the meaning of the word “Liberal” was very different in the 1960s from today.
Institutional Makeup:
Lower-level institutional roles (ages 22–34): Over 80 percent Silent Generation; remainder Greatest Generation; Baby Boomers not yet meaningfully present. Estimated partisan lean: R+5 to R+10.
Middle and upper institutional roles (ages 35–64): Roughly 70–75 percent Greatest Generation; 25–30 percent Silent Generation; negligible Baby Boomer presence. Estimated partisan lean: R+10 to R+15.
Cultural institutions: Universities, K–12 systems, newspapers, publishing, foundations, public broadcasting, and the arts over 90 percent staffed and led by WASP-origin Silent and Greatest Generations; religious identification was overwhelmingly Mainline Protestant. Estimated partisan lean: R+0 to R+5.
College Professor est. partisan lean: D+10 to D+15.
Still largely Mainline Protestant liberals; New Left influence emerging but small.K-12 Teachers est. partisan lean: Even to D+5.
Unionization beginning; still socially moderate and culturally middle-American.Journalist/Media est. partisan lean: D+10 to D+15.
Actors/Musician est. partisan lean: D+5 to D+10.
Non-profits est. partisan lean: D+5 to D+10.
The nonprofit sector is small and dominated by philanthropic foundations, churches, and civic organizations. Leadership still mostly WASP moderates and centrists.
Government bureaucracy: Federal and state bureaucracies composed roughly of 70–75 percent Greatest Generation, 20–25 percent Silent Generation; nearly all senior roles held by Greatest Generation. Estimated partisan lean: Slightly Republican or moderate (R+5 to R+10).
Read on to see how these metrics transformed over the next 50 years…
The 1970s
Metrics for the 1970s
Electorate:
Partisanship of college graduates: 55/55 Republican.
Electorate by generation: Boomers rising toward one-third; Silent and Greatest Generations forming the majority.
Electorate by ideology: roughly one-quarter liberal, one-third conservative, remainder moderate.
Institutional Makeup:
Lower-level institutional roles (ages 22–34): primarily Boomers, with some Silent holdovers. Estimated partisan lean: D+0 to D+5.
Middle and upper institutional roles (ages 35–64): overwhelmingly Greatest and Silent Generations. Estimated partisan lean: R+5 to R+10.
Cultural institutions: still dominated by older WASP-origin professionals. Estimated partisan lean: Even to D+5.
College Professor est. partisan lean: D+15 to D+25.
Post–Vietnam liberalization; younger Boomers entering academia.K-12 Teachers est. partisan lean: D+5 to D+10
NEA/AFT unions expand; moderate but trending left.Journalist/Media est. partisan lean: D+15 to D+20.
Watergate-era ethos and rise of investigative journalism.Actors/Musician est. partisan lean: D+10 to D+15.
Cultural liberalization accelerating; Hollywood becoming more uniformly Democratic.Non-profits est. partisan lean: D+10 to D+15.
Expansion of social services, early advocacy groups, and public-interest law organizations creates a modest liberal tilt.
Government bureaucracy: majority Silent and Greatest Generations, with Boomers entering junior roles. Estimated partisan lean: Close to balanced (D+0 to D+5). Environmental and social welfare agencies tilt left; defense, Treasury, and agriculture tilt right.
The 1970s were a transitional decade in which the cultural foundations of the old WASP establishment weakened, even as the full consequences of that shift remained largely invisible. The United States emerged from the Cultural Revolution of the late 1960s with new expectations about personal identity, moral authority, and the role of institutions.
Yet the people running universities, newsrooms, school systems, foundations, and bureaucracies were still mostly drawn from the Greatest and Silent Generations, whose values had been shaped by the Depression, World War II, and mid-century civic Protestantism.
Impact of personality on education
The Big Five Personality Traits, the most widely supported psychological theory of variations in human personality, provide a clear framework for understanding this shift. Relative to earlier generations, Boomers scored higher in Openness to Experience—a trait associated with curiosity, creativity, receptiveness to new ideas, and comfort with abstraction.
Openness is the strongest Big Five predictor of pursuing a four-year college degree. Of course, Intelligence is also a key determinate. Boomers also scored higher in Agreeableness, including empathy and concern for social harmony, traits linked to prosocial and reformist attitudes.
By contrast, they scored modestly lower in Conscientiousness and in certain components of Extraversion associated with respect for authority and group hierarchy. These personality differences mattered because they made Boomers more receptive to emerging expressive, interpretive, and identity-oriented frameworks that would later develop into Post-Modern Left-of-Center ideologies.
Impact of personality on ideology
These same traits predict ideological orientation. High Openness and high Agreeableness correlate strongly with self-identifying as liberal or very liberal, while high Conscientiousness correlates with conservatism. Although Boomers in the 1970s were more liberal than older cohorts, only about one-quarter identified as Liberal or Very Liberal. Their psychological profile pointed toward future ideological change, but in the 1970s the influence of these tendencies was muted.
There were also significant class-disparities based on ideology. About 30-35% Baby Boomers with four-year college degrees self-identified as “Liberal.” Among Baby Boomers without four-year college degrees, only about 18-20% of self-identified as “Liberal.” These percentages remained surprisingly stable for the next 50 years. What changed is that Baby Boomers gradually composed a larger and larger percentage of the electorate.
Impact of personality on career choice
Career sorting by personality strengthened this generational divide. Individuals scoring high in Openness and Agreeableness and lower in Conscientiousness disproportionately selected careers with expressive, interpretive, or communicative demands:
teaching,
social work,
journalism,
publishing,
arts, and
nonprofit advocacy.
These sectors reward verbal reasoning, empathy, and symbolic analysis—precisely the psychological strengths found more commonly in this generational cohort. Meanwhile, individuals higher in Conscientiousness and lower in Openness gravitated toward business, engineering, manufacturing, or the military. The effect was a slow but steady concentration of high-Openness, high-Agreeableness Boomers in cultural institutions.
This process was entirely non-deliberate.
Boomers did not coordinate ideological takeover campaigns; they simply made educational and occupational choices that matched their psychological temperament. But as the number of college graduates expanded, these choices began to shape the lower levels of institutions, creating subtle shifts in workplace norms even though leadership remained stable.
Boomers still too young to have an impact on institutions…
Two structural forces limited the political and institutional impact of early Boomer liberalism. First, Boomers voted at significantly lower rates than older adults. The Silent and Greatest Generations cast most of the ballots in elections during this decade, and their ideological balance kept national outcomes centered on mid-century norms.
Second, institutions are hierarchical. Boomers filled the lower ranks—interns, assistants, junior teachers, graduate students—but the middle and upper tiers remained dominated by older generations. No matter how distinct the younger cohorts’ values were, institutional authority was still held by people whose worldviews had been shaped by the Depression, World War II, and the early Cold War.
But that would change in the coming decades
In retrospect, the 1970s formed the foundational decade of the emergent Long March Through the Institutions. High Openness and Agreeableness drew Boomers into universities and cultural professions; their relatively higher liberalism created ideological potential energy; their lack of institutional authority muted its immediate impact; and their private beliefs remained hidden under older leadership. The demographic and psychological seeds of future institutional change were planted, even though almost no one could yet see the pattern.
1980s
Metrics for the 1980s
Electorate:
Partisanship of college graduates: 60/40 Republican
Electorate by generation: Boomers rising toward roughly forty percent; Silent and Greatest Generations still a substantial share.
Electorate by ideology: modest increase in liberal identification among younger adults; overall balance still center-right.
Institutional Makeup:
Lower-level institutional roles (ages 22–34): now predominantly Boomers, with early Gen X beginning to appear. Estimated partisan lean: D+5 to D+10.
Middle and upper institutional roles (ages 35–64): Silent and late Greatest Generations remain the majority of leadership. Estimated partisan lean: R+0 to R+5.
Cultural institutions: growing presence of Boomers in junior university faculty, journalism, nonprofits, and K–12 roles. Estimated partisan lean: D+5 to D+10.
College Professor est. partisan lean: D+20 to D+30.
K-12 Teachers est. partisan lean: D+10 to D+15. Professionalization and education schools shift left.
Journalist/Media est. partisan lean: D+20 to D+30.
Actors/Musician est. partisan lean: D+15 to D+20.
Non-profits est. partisan lean: D+15 to D+25.
Boomers enter nonprofit advocacy and social-services roles. Anti-poverty, public-interest, and environmental nonprofits proliferate.
Government bureaucracy: Boomers expanding in junior and mid-level positions; senior roles held by older cohorts. Estimated partisan lean: D+0 to D+5. Slight Democratic lean among rank-and-file, Republican lean in senior strata.
The 1980s marked the point when the demographic changes set in motion during the 1970s began to reshape the lower ranks of American cultural institutions. The Baby Boomers, now entering their late twenties and early thirties, were the dominant age group in universities, journalism, education, social services, arts organizations, and many corners of the expanding nonprofit sector.
Yet the authority structures of these institutions remained rooted in the Silent and Greatest Generations, whose values reflected mid-century civic norms rather than the expressive, psychologically open orientation more common among Boomers.
A broader conservative political climate also shaped the 1980s, driven partly by the aging of the Baby Boomers and partly by a national reaction to the cultural disruption of the late 1960s and 1970s. As Boomers moved into their thirties and early forties, many of those with stable professional careers grew more cautious, more invested in institutional stability, and more sensitive to economic concerns. This mellowing effect, common across cohorts as they age, tempered some of the ideological experimentation of their youth.
At the same time, the country as a whole responded to the perceived excesses of the previous decades—urban disorder, radical activism, inflation, crime, and cultural fragmentation—by embracing a more conservative political direction under Ronald Reagan and the Republican party. This conservative turn did not eliminate the personality-driven sorting taking place within cultural institutions, but it created a political environment in which the younger, more liberal tendencies of high-Openness and high-Agreeableness Boomers remained largely constrained from wielding broad institutional influence.
The Big Five Personality Traits continued to shape educational and career pathways in ways that gradually altered professional composition. High Openness to Experience and high Agreeableness remained the strongest predictors of four-year college attainment and, within the college-educated population, the strongest predictors of self-identified liberalism.
Individuals high in these traits were also more drawn to professions that reward communication, analysis, and symbolic interpretation. As a result, universities, media organizations, arts institutions, and nonprofits increasingly attracted and retained individuals whose psychological profiles aligned with the early stages of Post-Modern Left-of-Center ideologies.
The Left starts to dominate universities
The first institution to transition were universities. Junior faculty, graduate students, and early-career administrators disproportionately came from the higher-Openness, higher-Agreeableness segment of the Boomer generation. Boomer academics brought with them not only more liberal views on race, gender, sexuality, and national identity but also a psychological comfort with interpretive frameworks that emphasized social construction, identity narratives, and critical perspectives on institutions.
From 1970 to 2010, universities became dominated by Democrats and the Left through a combination of personality-based career sorting and generational turnover. Individuals high in Openness to Experience—the Big Five trait most strongly correlated with liberalism, intellectual exploration, and affinity for abstract ideas—were far more likely to pursue graduate study and academic careers.
As the number of PhDs expanded in the 1970s and 1980s, cohorts with this psychological profile entered academia in large numbers, gradually displacing the older, more moderate scholars from the Greatest and Silent Generations. Because academia rewards verbal analysis, critique, and theoretical interpretation, it naturally reinforced the preferences of these high-Openness cohorts.
Institutional incentives and professional structures accelerated this ideological consolidation. Academic hiring, tenure decisions, and prestige gradients increasingly centered on fields that leaned left—humanities, social sciences, and education.
Within these disciplines, paradigms associated with Post-Modern Left-of-Center ideologies gained ground beginning in the late 1970s, especially in literature, sociology, anthropology, and cultural studies.
Graduate students trained under these frameworks entered the profession in the 1980s and 1990s, reproducing the same worldview in new cohorts. Over time, the ideological composition of faculty shifted sharply left, not because of coordinated political strategy but because of the personality types who choose that profession.
By the 2000s, the combination of personality sorting, generational replacement, graduate-program reproduction, and professional incentives produced a professoriate that was overwhelmingly Democratic in identification and strongly influenced by Post-Modern Left-of-Center ideologies, setting the cultural direction of American higher education for the decades to come.
And K-12 education
From 1970 to 2010, K–12 education gradually shifted toward Democratic and Left-of-Center dominance as personality-driven career sorting intensified. Individuals high in Openness to Experience and Agreeableness—traits strongly correlated with liberal and reform-oriented worldviews—were disproportionately drawn to teaching, which offered expressive work, social engagement, and prosocial mission.
By contrast, individuals with more conservative-leaning profiles, associated with higher Conscientiousness and lower Openness, gravitated toward business, engineering, trades, or military service. As the share of college graduates expanded and the teaching profession became more credential-driven, the personality composition of the teacher workforce increasingly reflected the psychological traits most associated with liberal identification. This generational inflow of high-Openness, high-Agreeableness cohorts created a long-term pipeline effect that shifted the ideological center of gravity inside schools.
Unionization further accelerated the Left-of-Center shift. By the mid-1970s, the National Education Association (NEA) and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) had become powerful national organizations with clear alignments in the Democratic coalition.
Collective bargaining created incentives for teachers to view educational issues through the lens of public-sector labor politics—funding, staffing ratios, benefits, and workplace autonomy. Over time, the union infrastructure not only supported Democratic candidates but also transmitted progressive policy priorities into local school systems.
Teachers who might have been moderate were gradually socialized into left-leaning professional identities through union messaging, conferences, publications, and political mobilization. This institutional alignment gave the Left a stable organizational anchor in the education system decades before Millennials arrived as students.
The transformation was completed through the professionalization of teacher preparation and the Leftward shift of university education schools. Beginning in the 1970s and accelerating through the 1990s, state legislatures adopted teacher-certification requirements that funneled nearly all prospective teachers through education schools, many of which had embraced Post-Modern Left-of-Center frameworks in curriculum theory, multicultural education, gender studies, and critical pedagogy.
Licensing rules forced would-be teachers to absorb these frameworks as part of their professional training. As Baby Boomers and early Gen X professors came to dominate Education departments, they institutionalized progressive pedagogical models and identity-centered approaches as professional standards.
By 2010, the combined effects of personality-driven career sorting, unionization, education-school ideology, and state-mandated credentialing had produced a K–12 workforce overwhelmingly aligned with the Democratic Party and influenced by Post-Modern Left-of-Center ideologies, shaping the worldview of Millennials and preparing the ground for the institutional tipping points of the 2010s.
and other cultural institutions
Similar patterns emerged in journalism, entertainment, and the growing nonprofit advocacy sector. Young reporters, editors, and producers tended to score higher in Openness and lower in Conscientiousness relative to the general population, a profile associated with broader interpretive worldviews and greater skepticism of traditional sources of authority.
In the nonprofit world, expanding philanthropic funding created new opportunities for advocacy-oriented work that attracted individuals with strong prosocial motivations and expressive moral orientations. These employees were not consciously engaged in any coordinated ideological project, but their presence gradually shifted the tone, priorities, and assumptions of the institutions they entered.
Despite these early shifts, the political impact of Boomers remained limited for structural reasons. Though they were becoming a larger share of the electorate, turnout among younger and middle-aged adults lagged behind older voters. Silent and Greatest Generation adults still cast a disproportionate share of ballots, preserving the center-right electoral balance of the era.
Likewise, institutional authority remained anchored in older leadership. The Boomers’ psychological profiles and ideological tendencies were growing more visible at lower levels, but the power to set policy, curriculum, editorial standards, and bureaucratic norms still rested with supervisors whose assumptions had been forged long before the cultural shifts of the 1960s.
Birth of diversity, multiculturalism and gender studies
This decade also saw the early emergence of institutional norms that would later align with Post-Modern Left-of-Center ideologies, though often in modest or symbolic ways.
Diversity programs appeared in universities and corporations, mostly limited to compliance and recruitment.
Feminist scholarship expanded, though it remained a niche within academia.
Early multicultural ideas circulated in education schools and textbook development, but adoption was inconsistent and uneven.
These developments reflected the increasing influence of high-Openness cohorts entering the workforce more than any strategic agenda. Their presence introduced new frameworks, but older leaders still filtered, moderated, or constrained them.
Preference falsification
As Left-of-Center Boomer professionals move up the organizational ladder, this created a clash between the values of Pre-Boomer middle- and upper-level leaders and the Boomer lower-level. Openly rebelling against your boss is not a good career move and likely to produce results, so most Boomer professionals kept their more left-wing views to themselves.
Preference falsification expanded, producing an institutional environment that appeared more ideologically stable than it truly was. Younger faculty, journalists, teachers, and administrators often held views more progressive than their environments allowed them to express comfortably. Because the leadership class was older and more traditional, younger employees often adopted cautious public postures. This created the impression of ideological continuity even as the underlying beliefs of the professional base were becoming more varied.
In retrospect, the 1980s represent the decade when the Long March Through the Institutions began to take detectable shape—not as a planned march, but as the result of personality-driven educational sorting, generational inflows into cultural professions, and the quiet ideological divergence of younger employees. The institutional leadership remained anchored in older generations, but the professional pipeline feeding into these organizations was shifting in ways that would manifest more visibly in the decades to come.
1990s
Metrics for the 1990s
Electorate:
Partisanship of college graduates: 51/47 Republican.
Electorate by generation: Boomers now the largest share; Gen X rising; Silent and Greatest Generations declining.
Electorate by ideology: slowly rising liberal identification among younger adults; overall electorate still leaning center-right.
Institutional Makeup:
Lower-level institutional roles (ages 22–34): majority Gen X, with younger Boomers in supervisory roles. Estimated partisan lean: D+10 to D+15.
Middle and upper institutional roles (ages 35–64): increasingly Boomers but still substantial Silent Generation presence. Estimated partisan lean: D+0 to D+5.
Cultural institutions: growing concentration of high-Openness, high-Agreeableness cohorts in universities, media, nonprofits, and arts organizations. Estimated partisan lean: D+10 to D+20 (this institutional start to clearly tilt to the Left).
College Professor est. partisan lean: D+30 to D+40.
(Major campus liberalization; humanities and social sciences heavily left-of-center.K-12 Teachers est. partisan lean: D+15 to D+20.
Diversity and multicultural education gains ground.Journalist/Media est. partisan lean: D+25 to D+35.
Major newsrooms now overwhelmingly Democratic in surveys, but ideal of objective fact-based journalism still lingers.Actors/Musician est. partisan lean: D+20 to D+25.
(Industry clustering in Los Angeles, New York magnifies Democratic tilt.Non-profits est. partisan lean: D+25 to D+35.
The Clinton-era nonprofit boom, expansion of philanthropy, and the rise of “professionalized activism” create a strong Democratic advantage. Younger Boomers and Gen X staff the sector, both more liberal than same-age cohorts earlier.
Government bureaucracy: Boomers expanding into mid-level roles; Silent Generation remains significant in senior positions. Estimated partisan lean: Democratic-leaning overall (D+5 to D+10).
The 1990s combined:
A very large portion of the electorate for the Greatest and Silent generation.
Dominance of the Greatest and Silent generation among the upper ranks of institutions, but they were gradually aging out…
Baby Boomers moving into their middle-age and family-building phase.
The coming of age of the last generation not raised within a world dominated by Baby Boom institutions and value: Gen X.
The 1990s marked the moment when college-educated Baby Boomers first achieved broad institutional dominance within American cultural life. For the first time, the same generation that had participated in the Cultural Revolution of the late 1960s now controlled classrooms, editorial rooms, human-resources offices, foundations, arts organizations, and university departments.
Their rise represented not a coordinated movement, but the natural outcome of demographic turnover and the career ladder. It was also the decade when they began transmitting Post-Modern Left-of-Center Ideologies to the young Millennials entering adolescence and early adulthood.
Yet the worldview they transmitted to Millennials was not identical to the one they themselves had embraced in youth. By the 1990s, many college-educated Boomers were parents and mid-career professionals. Their personalities remained high in Openness to Experience and Agreeableness, traits that correlated with the interpretive, skeptical, and egalitarian sensibilities underlying Post-Modern Left-of-Center Ideologies.
But the Boomers lived experience had moderated the more rebellious impulses of their youth. Parenthood, mortgages, responsibility, and the passage of time had softened their relationship to radical critique. They remained open-minded, questioning, and receptive to new interpretations of identity and morality, but they were less inclined toward revolutionary rhetoric or maximalist conclusions about religion, patriotism, gender roles, or the notion of historical progress.
This generational anchoring was central to the ideological character of the 1990s. Boomers were still deeply shaped by the America they grew up in—a country that still believed in:
civic religion,
broad national unity,
progress as both a reality and a moral goal, and
relatively stable gender norms.
Even college-educated Boomers who embraced Post-Modern Left-of-Center Ideologies did so through the lens of a society that retained economic optimism, institutional continuity, and widely shared cultural reference points. Thus, while they taught a more interpretive and identity-sensitive view of society, they did not take it to its furthest implications, nor did they wholly abandon the older frameworks they had inherited.
Gen X rules!
Gen X occupied a distinct position in this landscape. Gen X has two key characteristics:
We were much smaller in size compared to the Baby Boom generation. This meant that we have had much less influence on American institutions and culture. We are also smaller than the following Millennial generation.
We were the last generation raised in a world not yet shaped by Baby Boomer institutional control.
I can identify with Gen X because I am one (hence the “We” above). I have always believed that I have lived my entire life “in the backwash of the Baby Boomers.” Baby Boomers reshaped the nation, and us Gen X made do with what were given. Gen X are surfers on waves created by the Baby Boom generation.
As the last generation raised in a world not yet shaped by Baby Boomer institutional control, Gen X adults carried forward many of the civic and cultural assumptions of pre-1960s America. They were also shaped by economic instability, family disruption, and a cultural environment steeped in skepticism rather than idealism.
As a result, they were generally less liberal than the Boomers at the same age. Roughly 18–20% of Gen X adults described themselves as “liberal” or “very liberal”. By the 2010s–early 2020s, that had risen only to about 23–26%, i.e., an increase of at most 5–8 percentage points.
And just like Baby Boomers, there is a significant class divide among Gen X. About 30-35% of Gen X adults with a four-year college degree self-identify as “Liberal.” Among Gen X adults without a four-year college degree, only 18-22% self-identify as “Liberal.”
Their psychological profile, while still high in Openness relative to the Greatest and Silents generations, leaned more toward personal autonomy and guarded individualism than toward collectivist moral visions. This made them less receptive to the more universalist strains within Post-Modern Left-of-Center Ideologies and helped moderate institutional outcomes during the decade.
The Central Moral Dilemma of the Left
The 1990s also expressed what I call the Central Dilemma of the Left: an irresolvable moral conflict between:
What the Left deems to be their prime moral goal (Equality), and:
What the Left has actually achieved and what it can possibly achieve in the material world.
The means by which supporters of Left-of-Center ideologies “resolve” the conflict is to ignore Results and clutch more tightly to their moral goal. This tactic, however, does not resolve the dilemma, it merely evades the dilemma.
College-educated Boomers, whose values were grounded in moral universalism and fairness, confronted widening economic inequality, persistent racial and gender disparities, and the limits of policy solutions. The gap between left-wing aspirations and social realities broadened.
In this environment, Post-Modern Left-of-Center Ideologies offered an explanation: group differences in outcomes were usually evidence that someone, somewhere, had done something wrong. The moral logic pointed toward the idea that disparities must arise from historical or structural injustice rather than from biology, culture, geography, individual choice or other potential causes
This framework proved easy to teach to young Millennials, who entered adolescence in a world already shaped by Boomer-led cultural institutions. But because Boomers remained partly anchored in the norms of the America they had grown up in, they rarely pushed this explanatory framework to its extreme conclusions.
Baby Boomers emphasized injustice and structural critique but stopped short of proclaiming that all institutions were illegitimate or that all traditional norms were mere oppression. Their skepticism was genuine, but so was their attachment to certain stabilizing assumptions.
In retrospect, this generational layering gave the 1990s a distinctive transitional character.
Boomers held authority and interpreted social reality through the lens of Post-Modern Left-of-Center Ideologies, but their interpretations were tempered by their upbringing.
Gen X entered the lower and middle ranks carrying a mix of skepticism and continuity.
Millennials, particularly those raised within college-educated families, absorbed Boomer moral and ideological frameworks but did so without the cultural anchors that had moderated the Boomers themselves.
The decade thus became the hinge point: a moment when the early diffusion of Post-Modern Left-of-Center Ideologies accelerated, but before later generations would radicalize the implications of those ideas in the 2010s.
2000s
Metrics for the 2000s
Electorate:
Partisanship of college graduates: 48/50 Democratic (first time Democrats are larger, but barely).
Electorate by generation: Aging out of the Greatest generation. Boomers still the largest share; Gen X rising; Millennials beginning to enter the electorate.
Electorate by ideology: noticeable increase in liberal identification among younger college-educated adults.
Institutional make-up:
Lower-level institutional roles (ages 22–34): early Millennials and Gen X. Estimated partisan lean: D+15 to D+20.
Middle and upper institutional roles (ages 35–64): dominated by Boomers, with some Gen X in mid-level positions. Estimated partisan lean: D+5 to D+10.
Cultural institutions: strong Boomer control of universities, K–12 systems, major media, nonprofits, and foundations. Estimated partisan lean: D+20 to D+30 (Strong professional-class alignment with Democrats; high-education clusters in blue metros).
College Professor est. partisan lean: D+40 to D+50.
Strong liberal majority across most fields; conservatives rare outside business/engineering.K-12 Teachers est. partisan lean: D+20 to D+25.
Education-school ideology strongly left-leaning; younger teachers mainly liberal.Journalist/Media est. partisan lean: D+30 to D+40.
Actors/Musician est. partisan lean: D+25 to D+35.
Progressive cultural politics become industry norm.Non-profits est. partisan lean: D+35 to D+45. Growth of the foundation world, international development, environmental advocacy, and identity-based nonprofits.
Government bureaucracy: Boomers in most senior roles; Gen X in mid-level positions; Millennials entering junior administrative jobs. Estimated partisan lean: Clear Democratic lean (D+10 to D+15).
Childhood of Millennial generation
In this section, I will focus on the upbringing of the Millennial generation to explain why they embraced Post-Modern Left-of-Center ideologies more than any other generation in American history. It was this embrace that set the stage for the Great Awokening in the 2010s when the Millennial generation came of age.
For the first time in American history, a substantial share of children grew up in neighborhoods, schools, and households dominated by college-educated parents—primarily Baby Boomers whose values had been shaped by both the Cultural Revolution of the late 1960s and the economic optimism of the 1980s and 1990s. In these environments, Millennials absorbed Post-Modern Left-of-Center Ideologies not as radical ideas but as the normal moral vocabulary of educated American life.
College-educated Boomers, now firmly established in the professional class, served as the principal transmitters of these worldviews. Their psychological profiles—higher in Openness and Agreeableness than earlier generations—made them receptive to interpretive, egalitarian, and identity-conscious frameworks.
But Boomer professionals still retained deep cultural anchors from the America of their youth:
a residual respect for progress,
an assumption of national cohesion,
a broad sense of civic decency, and
a belief in the possibility of institutional reform rather than institutional abandonment.
When they taught their children, they emphasized fairness, tolerance, anti-racism, gender equality, and empathy. Yet they communicated these values through a tone shaped by mid-century norms: confident, optimistic, and still broadly patriotic.
For Millennials raised in these households, Post-Modern Left-of-Center Ideologies were not encountered first in universities. They were first learned at home.
In affluent, college-educated suburbs in the Northeast Corridor and the West Coast—children were socialized into a moral framework that saw society through lenses of identity, structural inequality, and the moral imperative to reduce suffering. They saw the moral assumptions of Post-Modern Left-of-Center Ideologies as “Being Nice” and “A Decent Person.” They had no idea that those ideas were backed by ideological assumptions about the role of government in society.
Schools reinforced these values through early multicultural curricula, anti-bullying campaigns, character education programs, and narratives emphasizing diversity and inclusion. Across K–12 systems dominated by Boomer teachers and Boomer-trained administrators, the moral assumptions of the late 20th century reformist Left became institutionalized as the normative foundation for children’s education.
Contradiction between ideals and reality
But the 2000s also confronted Millennials with a glaring contradiction. Millennials grew up hearing a consistent egalitarian message:
society should treat everyone fairly,
differences in outcomes are unjust, and
historical injustices must be corrected.
Yet the material world around them did not resemble the idealized moral landscape they were taught. Economic inequality reached new heights. Racial disparities persisted in schools, neighborhoods, and criminal justice. Women achieved significant professional gains, but wage gaps and occupational differences continued. Gay and lesbian individuals saw growing acceptance, but legal recognition lagged, and cultural conflict persisted. Millennials internalized the moral obligation to seek equality while simultaneously witnessing unequal outcomes across almost every domain.
This contrast hardened into a generational experience.
College-educated Boomers, who had grown up in a more cohesive society, could interpret inequality as a complex product of history, economics, and institutional inertia. Millennials did not share that context.
To Millennials, the real world looked like a direct contradiction of the moral principles they had been raised with. They heard egalitarian ideals at home, at school, in media, and in community institutions—but the empirical reality of persistent inequality, especially along racial, gender, and sexual lines, seemed like evidence that someone, somewhere, had failed to achieve the justice that adults insisted was possible.
This shaped a distinct generational psychology, particularly among Millennials born and raised in the affluent neighborhoods of major metro areas on the Pacific coast and Northeast.
Resolving this conflict
Millennials raised in affluent neighbors in major metro areas of the Pacific coast and the Northeast had a choice:
Reject the ideals they were taught and embrace reality
Reject reality and hold on tighter to their ideals.
Many college-educated Millennials concluded that the ideals they were taught were correct, and therefore the world must be deeply wrong.
The central dilemma of the Left—between its moral aspiration for Equality and the limits of what can be achieved in the material world—landed on Millennials with a force that their Boomer parents never experienced.
Boomers could critique injustice while maintaining confidence in institutions.
Millennials saw the same injustices as signs of institutional betrayal.
The decade thus created the psychological and moral conditions for the next stage of the Long March Through the Institutions. Millennials entered adulthood expecting society to match their moral education.
When they encountered institutions that fell short of those ideals, they interpreted the mismatch not as a structural challenge but as a moral failure. This interpretation would shape their response once they entered the workforce in the 2010s and encountered the older, more restrained form of Post-Modern Left-of-Center Ideologies inherited from the Baby Boomers.
Preference falsification
Not that everyone came to the same judgement that it was the world was deeply wrong. Many, perhaps even the majority, saw through the claims of moral idealism and judge that it was the Post-Modern Left-of-Center Ideologies that were incorrect and immoral. And many Millennial youths from working-class families did not come into contact with this world view. Much of their childhood was fairly similar to previous generations.
But among Millennials raised in college-educated families and living in college-educated neighborhoods, there was an intense pressure to conform. Those Millennials learned that openly questioning the contradictions between egalitarian moral teaching and unequal real-world outcomes carried social risk.
Inside college-educated households, schools, and youth culture, there was a clear status hierarchy around moral expression. Expressing strong egalitarian commitments made one appear compassionate, enlightened, and aligned with the ethical expectations of the professional class.
Expressing doubt, however—even mild doubt—risked signaling callousness, insensitivity, or a lack of moral sophistication. Many Millennials noticed that the world did not match the ideals they had been taught, but preference falsification kept them from voicing these concerns. It was easier, and socially safer, to repeat the moral language of Post-Modern Left-of-Center Ideologies than to question why persistent disparities existed despite decades of massive government spending.
The structure of Boomer-led institutions reinforced this silence. Boomers themselves believed in fairness and equality but still interpreted social patterns through the cultural frameworks of the America they grew up in. Their institutions—universities, nonprofits, media outlets, and school systems—had not yet embraced the more uncompromising implications of the Millennial worldview.
As a result, Millennials sensed they could not openly challenge the contradictions between egalitarian ideals and unequal outcomes without appearing disrespectful, uninformed, or morally suspect. Status incentives therefore discouraged critique from below. Individuals concealed doubts not because they lacked awareness, but because openly articulating those doubts carried social costs in environments where moral signaling was increasingly tied to professional identity. These pressures preserved a surface-level consensus even as unresolved contradictions accumulated inside Millennial political psychology.
It was not until the 2010s when the contradictions within Post-Modern Left-of-Center Ideologies exploded into the rest of society and the effects of teaching an entire generation this world view became evident to all.
Hence the Great Awokening after 2010. While there were short-term causes of this new Great Awakening (social media, in particular), the most important reasons came from the trends identified in this article.
Bibliography
Here is the data sources that I used in calculating the metrics listed in this article. Keep in mind that the exact numbers are far less important than the general trend.
U.S. Census Bureau – Decennial Census & American Community Survey
Age structure, educational attainment, workforce composition, generational cohort sizes, occupational categories.
https://www.census.gov/data.html
U.S. Census Bureau – Voting and Registration in the Election Reports
Turnout and registration by age cohort (1972–2020).
https://www.census.gov/topics/public-sector/voting/data/tables.html
Current Population Survey (CPS) – Annual Social and Economic Supplement (ASEC)
College-degree attainment by age and cohort; occupational and industry distribution.
https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/cps.html
General Social Survey (GSS) – NORC at the University of Chicago
Ideological self-identification (POLVIEWS), religious affiliation (RELIG), educational attainment, cohort comparisons.
https://gssdataexplorer.norc.org/
American National Election Studies (ANES) – Time Series
Ideology scales, turnout by age, generational patterns in liberal/conservative identification.
https://electionstudies.org/data-center/anes-time-series-cumulative-data-file/
Pew Research Center – Political Typology & Ideology Trends
Generational ideological composition, education-linked ideology patterns, secularization.
https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/datasets/
Pew Research Center – Religion & Public Life Data Explorer
Decline of Mainline Protestants, rise of “Nones,” generational religious change.
https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/data-explorer/
Gallup – Party Identification & Ideological Identification Time Series
Long-run trends in liberal, moderate, conservative identification.
https://news.gallup.com/poll/15370/party-affiliation.aspx
National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) – Digest of Education Statistics
College completion trends, K–12 workforce demographics, postsecondary staffing.
https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/
Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS)
Faculty demographics, administrative staffing expansion, higher-education employment structure.
https://nces.ed.gov/ipeds/
Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) – Occupational Employment and Workforce Data
Sector composition, cultural-profession growth, government workforce age/education profiles.
https://www.bls.gov/data/
Office of Personnel Management (OPM) – Federal Workforce Data
Age distribution and educational attainment of federal civilian employees.
https://www.opm.gov/data/
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Michael,
I have been wondering why you haven’t weighed in on the last few posts Kling has written on his Substack specifically on your writing?
re: "About 30-35% of Gen X adults with a four-year college degree self-identify as “Liberal.” Among Gen X adults with a four-year college degree, only 18-22% self-identify as “Liberal.” " typo...one of these must be 'without a '