ARE YOU BETTER OFF THAN YOU WERE FIFTY YEARS AGO?

I devote a lot of space to documenting the ways in which the Trendy and the Deep Thinkers destroyed The America That Worked^(TM), supposedly in the interest of Social Progress or Inclusion or something similarly high-minded.

I'm beginning to think I wasn't forceful enough.  Fortunately, others are up to the task.

I start from an unusual place.  Joy Reid, one of the MSNBC stable of conscience-cowboys, issues a predictable virtue-signal in her reaction to Our President's speech Tuesday night.  "Church ... family ... police ... military ... the national anthem ... Trump trying to call on all the tropes of 1950s-era nationalism. The goal of this speech appears to be to force the normalization of Trump on the terms of the bygone era his supporters are nostalgic for."  Put another way: the institutions of The America That Worked^(TM).  Gosh, you'd think that after fifty years of Social Progress or Inclusion or Higher Consciousness or whatever, there would be some emergent understanding of the ways in which we are all Better Persons For It, and Better Off and therefore we miss all those American High traditions about as much as we miss inner-tube tires on our cars.  Evidently, though, there's more at work.  As one Twitter participant quipped, "Vote Democrat. Because we stand against Church, family, police, the military and the national anthem."  There's more piling on at Info Wars (yes, dear reader, consider the source.)  Among those links, there's this reaction by Becket Adams for the Washington Examiner.

Is she under the impression that the desire for strong families and robust church communities is some post-World War II phenomenon? Does she not realize that these things aren't exactly unique to "Leave It To Beaver" era? Millions of Americans enjoyed and advocated for these things long before the 1950s, and they've been enjoying them and fighting for them long since.

Trump isn't doing some sort of retro throwback to a time long passed. He's appealing to almost universally popular issues. How scandalous.

Perhaps this sounded clever in her head. Perhaps this is the sort of thing that passes for trenchant analysis in her apparently cloistered world. But there’s a big world out there, and many of the people in it are genuinely confused by the idea that church and family could be nationalistic tropes.

Indeed, she characterizes church, family, etc., as if they are problematic; as if Trump is trying to use the allure of strong families and church communities to pull the United States back to the dark ages of....back when she thinks strong families and church communities were popular? Uh, okay.

In her bubble, perhaps such things as patriotism and bourgeois virtues are racialized: "To many Americans, being patriotic means being white."  That doesn't have to be the case.  Moreover, to the extent that talking heads racialize patriotism, or bourgeois virtues, or civilization itself, they risk antagonizing people who might otherwise be sympathetic to the unfinished business of the Civil Rights era, or of the Great Society.

You don’t need a University of Toronto study to understand that when you call people who disagree with you a bigot, you just piss them off, and cause them to see “bigotry” as a concept whose only real meaning is to stifle dissent, as “communist” was used in the McCarthy years.

The point is this: if you cannot tell the difference between Ross Douthat and Richard Spencer, you’re not marginalizing Ross Douthat, you’re mainstreaming Richard Spencer.

That's Rod Dreher, at the end of a long essay, and you might be wise to read it in full and follow the links.

That's also too complicated an argument.  There's a simpler way to proceed.  Ask the brain-brothers of Ms Reid to explain, in a hundred words or less, exactly how we are better off than we were a half-century ago, and how deconstruction of the mediating institutions of church and family and patriotism contributed to getting there.

That's not the only good news for today.  Corey Schink enumerates the fruits of fifty years of what passes, these days, for feminism.

Devastatingly low birth rates, high divorce rates, relationship dysfunction, and a war against the biological basis of male-female roles have resulted in the collapse of traditional society. And it can be traced back, in a variety of ways, to the feminist ideologues of the 20th century and the Marxist intellectual environment they emerged from. Like the 'bearded schizoids' of the 19th century, feminist ideologues have poisoned the well of traditional society in order to provoke revolution from within.

Polemical, yes, and yet, what he's asking is whether the human condition is better than it was fifty years ago.

Feminism is only "commanding the world's attention" of late because, for the first time in decades, if not ever, its tenets are being publicly challenged. If the counter-culture seems to have increased in popularity of late, that's only because it has been prompted to kick back, via its dominance of state organs, against the rising tide of 'counter-counter-culture'.

That's part of a longer essay, and there's a lot in it that might better be taken on with great care.  In essence, though, in that invocation of a counter-counter-culture we might be seeing an understanding that the old moderating institutions might have served a purpose, and might better be restored to a state of good repair.