DIFFERENT UNDERSTANDINGS OF WHAT A STATE OF GOOD REPAIR IS.

I'm old enough to remember the closing days of The America That Worked^(TM).  I was home from school eating lunch when I heard that JFK was shot.  At the same time, I was launching my academic career during the era that Ross Douthat understood as his good old days.

Noah Smith, the economics writer for Bloomberg and an edge-of-Generation-Xer (born in 1980), offered the beginnings of [an analysis of contemporary conservative ideology] last week on Twitter. The formative world of Gen X, he pointed out, was one of Republican dominance in presidential politics, evangelical revival in American religion and diminishing social conflict overall. “Xers grew up in a nation that was rapidly stabilizing under conservative rule,” he writes, suggesting that many Americans now in midlife associate the G.O.P. with that stability and the subsequent trends pushing the country leftward with disorder and decline.

To Smith’s list of Gen X-ian distinctives I’d add a few more: the conservative influence of John Paul II’s papacy for Generation-X Catholics, the seemingly positive trendlines on race relations (visible in polls of African-Americans as well as whites) from the 1990s through the early Obama years and the effects of the Reagan and Clinton economic growth spurts, which enabled my generation to enter adulthood under more prosperous conditions than the Great Recession-era landscape that hobbled millennials.

A critique of Gen X conservatism that started from this framework wouldn’t accuse my cohort of nostalgia for the racial or religious landscape of the 1950s; we don’t remember it, and we don’t want it to return.

On the other hand, they're aware at some level of the chaos that accompanied the end of the American High.

Generation X enjoys a certain bourgeois realism about what sustains human societies, what choices in your 20s will make you happiest in your 40s, that’s absent from the very-online progressivism of the young. There is an emotivism and narcissism that millennial liberalism and boomer liberalism seem to share, and in strong doses it’s poison for institutions. The ironic communitarianism of Gen-X conservatism probably isn’t the perfect antidote, but it may be all we’ve got.

And Gen X conservatives come by their hostility to emotivist liberalism honestly, because many of us grew up amid its wreckage. “Xers have little collective memory of either instability or liberalism,” Smith suggests, but that part of his analysis is wrong. To grow up in the ’70s or ’80s was to come of age just after liberalism’s last high tide, and to see evidence of its failures all around — from the urban blight and ugliness left by utopian renewal projects to the adult disarray and childhood misery sowed by the ideology of sexual liberation in its Hefnerian phase.

Americans younger than us have seen a lot of elite failure in the last 20 years, much of it conservative or centrist, and the idea of voting Republican, let alone for Trump, because of liberalism’s dangers seems to many of them absurd.

But what Generation X conservatives remember is not a distant past, nor an unlikely future. Their Trump support may be a folly, but their concern for what comes next is earned.

Yes, and there are a few of their next-elders (too young to have ridden that first, Hefnerian, wave, too old to have become the first latchkey kids) who see in this death tussle between the freaks and the straights that we call electoral politics who see echoes of those earlier failures of liberalism all over the contemporary political scene.