I do know that the generation before mine became neocons -- and neoliberals, and Reagan Democrats -- and, as a generation, lost any shred of idealism and drive they ever had.It does seem to be a bizarre phenomenon. But I always remind those who weren't there that it wasn't really an entire generation of hippies, yippies and motley protesters. Where I was at, we were a real minority. Yes, the great big middle may have been a little less apathetic and ignorant than they are now -- I'll always remember one of my women's residence dorm-mates, she of the blue eye shadow ("we" didn't wear makeup, remember), sticking up her hand in the meeting to vote "yes" to a campus strike, and me asking in astonishment, "Jeannette, what are you doing?", and her saying "I've had enough of this shit". Blew me away. But basically, there was still a great big middle, and there were still the business boys on campus, and the rednecks off.
Nonetheless, it does seem that in the US there was a rather violent swing to the right in that generation. This is a great article about it:
http://erg.environics.net/news/default.asp?aID=456Nearly 20 years ago, my colleagues at Environics in Toronto and CROP in Montreal began a study of Canadian social values. In our first survey of Canadian values in 1983, we asked Canadians if they strongly or somewhat agreed or disagreed that: "The father of the family must be the master in his own house." We posed more than 100 such questions to respondents that year. Our intention was to track these 100 items over time, dropping some, adding others; we hoped we'd measure what was important to Canadians or what was changing in our values and perspectives on life.
The "father must be master" question has become legendary at Environics. We love it because it measures a traditional, patriarchal attitude to authority in our most cherished institution: the family.
... Every year thereafter a smaller proportion of Canadians agreed. By 1992, the year before Kim Campbell became our first female prime minister, only 26 per cent of Canadians still said dad should be on top -- a drop of 16 per cent in less than nine years. Our colleagues in France had been tracking this question since 1975 and they, too, were finding the same kind of systematic decline in the preference for patriarchal authority. So, too, in other European countries.
Nineteen ninety-two was the first year we began conducting social-values research in the United States, the world capital of individualism and egalitarianism, of civil rights movements and affirmative action (remember, an American was the first to deflower the feminine mystique). We speculated that the United States would be ahead of Canada and France on this trend.
We found to our surprise that 42 per cent of Americans told us the father should be master, while 57 per cent disagreed and 1 per cent had no opinion. The gap between the two countries was a substantial 16 per cent.
And the US figure
rose to 48% in 2000, while the figure everywhere else dropped.
It's an interesting barometer of social values (the whole article is worth reading, for instance to see how attitudes break down based on age, sex, education etc.). There's another there, about Canadian boomers:
http://erg.environics.net/news/default.asp?aID=489And yup, I don't know why it happened. Hell, even good old Canadian hippie Neil Young supported Reagan.
Of course, I have my own notions about the effect of Vietnam, and the lessons that simply were not learned. The war ended not because people in the US believed it was evil, or because they wanted to adopt a posture of engagement with all those "others" out there in the world rather than of imperialistic imposition of US notions and pursuit of US interests ... but because they just didn't want their boys coming home in bags. No shift in consciousness or
prise de conscience, heightened awareness, of anything.
Retreat into self, collectively and individually.
What to do in practice? Hey, don't ask me! It ain't utopia up here either, after all, so obviously I/we don't have *all* the answers. ;)
But actually, my best advice is simply: learn. Take an interest, and engage with the novel and the foreign and the different. (I don't mean to imply that you or anyone doesn't do that -- but honestly, it isn't exactly a leading feature of the USAmerican psyche and culture, at both the individual and collective level, and progressives are not immune to the ethnocentricity effect.) When you do that, you can't help but gain greater perspective for looking at what you already know, and maybe even seeing ways of doing something about what needs done.
In any event, it can hardly hurt. And it can work at a very basic level: taking an interest in what really makes the people you want to influence tick, at the person-to-person level, can provide insights (not just to you about them, but also to them about you) that may help to answer the question of how to change their minds.
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