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Boomers: The Men and Women Who Promised Freedom and Delivered Disaster

Book by Helen Andrews · 3 quotes · Boomers, Democratic Party, Hollywood

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Boomers: The Men and Women Who Promised Freedom and Delivered Disaster Quotes

“The boomers’ most consequential political legacy may be the biggest irony of all: for all their claims to be the most progressive generation ever, the main result of the boomers’ involvement in politics has been the destruction of the Left. In 1950, the Democratic party polled fifteen points better among those without college degrees, compared with those with them. By 2016, that advantage had flipped to a fifteen-point deficit. The Labour Party in the U.K. has undergone the same transformation, from the party of the working class to the party of the college-educated elite. But if a left-wing party is no longer the party of the working class, what good is it? What left is it?”

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“Little hypocrisies are easy enough to find, and where sex is involved, one finds little else. During a debate in 1970 over whether to introduce coed dorms at the University of Kansas, one male student said that such living arrangements would leave students “free to engage one another as human beings.” “I believe that the segregation of the sexes is unnatural,” another said. “This tradition of segregation is discriminatory and promotes inequality of mankind.” The same high-flown statements were heard at every school where coeducation was introduced, and they all carried the same tacit addendum: any benefit to our sex lives will be purely coincidental. From the moment the Pill became widely available, the effect of the sexual revolution has mainly been to make women more sexually available to men. This hardly even qualifies as an unintended consequence, just an unannounced one.”

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“Yet [Hoggart] could not help noticing that those unschooled slum dwellers were mentally independent in a way that his postwar students were not. His grandmother’s range of cultural reference was narrow and unimpressive, consisting mainly of homespun aphorisms and the Bible, but at least her mind had not been colonized by pulp novels and Hollywood movies. The difference between the old culture and mass culture was like the difference between preparing a meal and microwaving one, and Hoggart’s students had been rendered helpless in teh same way as someone who has never been taught how to cook. The colonial aspect of mass culture was easier for Hoggart to spot because he was British. Mass culture, for England and Europe, was a foreign takeover. But “Americanization” homogenized the home country as much as it did the rest of the globe, sapping the life out of regional subcultures. Before the 1950s, music, theater, magazines, and even radio were all local, to one degree or another. Hollywood movies were not.”

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