The Unraveling of American Culture Didn’t Start in 2022:

It’s Been Going On for 50+ Years

In 1965, the Boomer generation, opposing their parents as generations often do, quit having babies. My generation, usually called “X,” is one of the smallest in American history.

It was the height of the women’s movement, and women were becoming aware that having babies young made them dependent on men, and destroyed their earning power.

The U.S. post-Boomer fertility rate plummeted in 1965, as women went to work and many households became two-earner families. I was born 2 years later.

The Boomers, whether you knew it or not, narrowed the gap between traditional gender roles. (Just in case you think that started with the Millennials — it didn't! They just put it on steroids.)

My mom didn't get the memo, and didn’t even believe in birth control. (More likely, she rejected the new social norm, being deeply committed to a conservative religion that rejected the trending social norms and encouraged very large families.) (It was conservative at the time, anyway — now in 2022, my youngest sister-in-law calls the religion we grew up in “The New Woke Church.”)

And I'm the first of 8 children born in a time in history where feminism was nascent, restaurants and apartment complexes often banned children, birth control options became plentiful, and the nation became almost hostile towards children.

Women who stayed home and had babies were seen by many, for the first time in American history, as inferior.

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The Cult of the Adult

Social commentary dubbed the 1950s The Cult of the Child, but the 1970s were The Cult of the Adult, where children were seen as passé, a burden on scarce resources. Children were even bad for children themselves.

Less time was spent on kids than ever before. “Latchkey kids” were a new phenomenon.

At the beginning of this era in the 1950s, more than half of American women thought one should stay in a bad marriage for the sake of the children. At the end of the era, only 1 in 5 thought so.

Education began to fret over "self-esteem," which later became the "Participation Trophy" so many jokes are made about. Schools began emphasizing feelings over reason. 

Children spent half as much time on homework as their parents had, and grade inflation soared. (This has only gotten worse: 20 years ago, 65% of American adults had not read a full-length book since high school. I currently know several students graduating high school or college without ever having read an adult-length book.)

Most of my commentary in this editorial is from a pivotal book by Strauss & Howe called The Fourth Turning, documenting how a major “social turning” occurs every 20 years here in the United States, and at the end of 80 years, an entire regime change occurs, usually by force.

My main point, though, is that the societal forces that now seem a grotesque parody didn't start 10 years ago. We've been moving in these directions for a long time. 

We’re Not in Kansas Anymore

Now we find ourselves in a space where a certain U.S. congresswoman refuses to name the gender of her baby until the child decides her gender. According to one survey, 43% of New Jersey’s 7th grade girls “identify” as something other than “a girl.”

Twenty-seven years ago, I spent 90 minutes in a grad-school classroom (my whole grad-school experience was “woke” before “woke” was a word), defining together the word “family.”

What was left on the chalkboard at the end: "A group of people who live together and choose to love each other." I sat there, silent, in shock — 8 months pregnant with my second child, feeling like an alien who had landed on another planet. 

Individualism came into vogue, and in the 90s, the Culture Wars began with niche groups everywhere, and suddenly there was no such thing as "public opinion" on what kind of country, culture, or people we were.

Three battlegrounds emerged: (1) Multiculturalists vs. Traditionalists; (2) Media Secularists vs. Evangelicals (think Murphy Brown vs. Dan Quayle); and (3) Public Planners vs. Libertarians. 

They all agreed on one thing: The institutional order was not working, and was not worth defending. 

Americans turned cynical.

The issues YOU may hate about modern popular culture (most of the "woke" devotees have left my public-figure platforms) aren’t new. Nor are the divisions and cultural divides. They're just worse.

The Next Stage Isn’t Pretty

I’ve given you the “Cliff’s Notes” of the cultural swings of the last few generations, but Strauss & Howe wrote their book over 20 years ago, and they actually claim that after the “fourth turning,” there is always a massive war, which can be “cold” or “hot.” 

Strauss & Howe predicted that the next one would happen between 2005 and 2025, at the end of the current 80-year cycle, which has recurred throughout American history. (The previous cycle culminated in the 1940s, with World War II.) 

By all indications, we are at the end of that “fourth turning” that these social analysts predicted. With societal breakdown reaching epidemic proportions, a recession that is probably just in its beginning stages, and the heavy globalist push toward digital control — it appears to me that we may be fully IN that war.

Earlier this year, for instance, over 1,000 Utahns descended on the capitol several times in support of a medical-freedom bill, filling 6 overflow rooms (which had never happened in Utah history), while the House and Senate deliberated and decided to ban vaccine passports in a supermajority, thereby bypassing the woke governor. 

(Unfortunately, the Senate vote was stopped by the bill’s sponsor, Rep. Curtis Brooks, after the pharma-sponsored leadership of both House and Senate arm-twisted him for hours behind closed doors, mentally breaking him until he withdrew the bill he’d fought for, for months.)

It’s Up to Us

The Fourth Turning talks about how one person or one movement can be the impetus to stop a destructive societal force from progressing. 

The onus is on you and me, my friends. We have to push back on digital passports and other mechanisms of control, or we’ll have tremendous difficulty turning back once our access to public life, travel, banking, social services, and even having a job, are determined by whether an app shows red, green, or yellow.

The magnitude of these control mechanisms is something the authors of The Fourth Turning never saw coming as they wrote this pivotal book in 2001, at the dawn of the internet.

We must say no to extensive required schedules of pharmaceutical injections and other tyrannies …

Because our children are almost bizarrely compliant with government and shifts in popular culture, in response to our horror at the same, and they are very committed to collectivist ideals of “the greater good” at the expense of the individual, possibly in large part due to public-school indoctrination campaigns. 

This is another phenomenon that Strauss & Howe couldn’t have predicted, since they wrote The Fourth Turning as the Millennials were just being born. In fact, every single thing they projected Millennials would turn out to be, is completely false. They couldn’t have factored in how the internet and social media would change life as we knew it — and radically, for that age cohort.

Which doesn’t mean that their premise that based on history, we have a revolution coming, isn’t true.

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