THE HISTORY OF AMERICA’S FUTURE

I surrendered at three o’clock in the morning after watching election returns for eight straight hours, and fell asleep convinced GW had won but oddly unemotional. Up at six to get my 12 year-old to school and let my wife sleep, I fussed away the morning with newspapers and the computer. Checking Fox again for the umpteenth time at eleven, when the announcement came that Kerry had called Bush to concede I didn’t yell or jump for joy. An emotional dam broke instead, and I just sat and cried my heart out with relief.

America’s future is on track. Cokie Roberts on NPR stated that, more than Iraq or terrorism or the economy or anything else, exit polls showed that “moral values” was the issue of highest concern to voters. Bill Strauss and Neil Howe would not be surprised.

In 1991, these two historian-sociologists wrote a remarkable book. Of all the hundreds of books I’ve read in my life, only a handful are what I call seminal – fundamentally changing the way I look at the world. Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, Ludwig Von Mises’s Human Action, Milton Friedman’s Capitalism and Freedom, Helmut Schoeck’s Envy. To this list I always add William Strauss and Neil Howe’s Generations: The History of America’s Future.

I wrote about Strauss and Howe in The Curse of the Xer’s (TTP, February 5, 2004, currently up in Classics, and providing a capsule summary of their theory). Using their model of generational cycles, I predicted that:

American culture has not disintegrated, we’re not going to keep heading down into a bottomless cultural barrel. We’re in the bottom of a generational cycle that our country has gone through before and will again. Our nightmare of degeneracy will soon be coming to an end.

And so it has come to an end yesterday, November 2, 2004.

A good friend of many years is Paul Weyrich, head of the Free Congress Foundation in Washington and one of the founders of the modern conservative movement in America. For forty years, Paul has fought for a more decent America, and it has been an uphill struggle – not just against the forces of liberal activism, academia, and popular culture that want to trash America and drag her in the mud, but against his own pessimism. Paul always tries to be optimistic, but it’s not easy when you keep losing deep in the trenches of the Culture Wars.

He thought there was a chance for a moral revival with Ronald Reagan – but it was too early. There was the wrong generational setup in the 80s, Boomers still too immature and too much Xer cynicism to overcome. We had to wait for the next great Civic generation to emerge.

You cannot understand the transformation of American culture that is occurring today without understanding that the generation every kid 22 years old and younger in America belongs to (that is, born since 1982) is the same type, the same kind, of generation as the Greatest Generation of World War II (born 1901-1924). This is the generation that will literally regenerate cultural decency in America.

The election of 2004 was the last gasp of the left’s attempt to maintain its stranglehold on American popular culture and moral values. George W. Bush leads a finally-maturing Boomer generation that leaves Clintonian childish perversity behind, with America’s youth demanding clear and decent moral standards. The overwhelming passage of all state bans on homosexual marriage is an indication. A successful assault on Roe v. Wade is now on the horizon.

Yesterday saw far more than the election of a president. We saw the history of America’s future. Paul will never stop fighting, but today he can cast aside the pessimism that has haunted him for so long. America’s Culture War is not over, but the tide of battle has changed.