America's Seismic Cultural Revolution

A massive, silent cultural revolution has changed America

Excerpt:

It happened without a Summer of Love, without Timothy Leary, without a groovy anthem or a shaggy new national look. In the past decade or so, there’s been a silent revolution in American culture, one at least as profound as the ’60s upheavals.

... Compared to just a few years ago, we have a completely different set of ideas about what constitutes acceptable behavior. As Caitlyn Jenner puts it in her new reality show, “I’m the new normal.”

We’ve hardly taken notice of it, because it happened in people’s minds instead of in the streets, happened in ordinary people instead of in the elites and the punditocracy.Consider America circa 2002: Not that different from today, seemingly. A time traveler who spent a few hours walking around your town then and now might have a difficult time filling a small notebook with observations about what’s changed. Maybe there are more Starbuckses. And what happened to Blockbuster Video? Yet support for gay marriages to be treated the same as straight ones went from 39% just nine years ago to 60% today, according to Gallup.

As recently as 2010, a clear majority opposed gay marriage. Today, a large majority support it. As for the broader issue of whether gay and lesbian relationships are even morally acceptable, only 40% said yes in 2001. Today that number stands at 63%.

... What caused all these changes? It’s hard to say. Older Americans are dying off. Popular culture not only deals with homosexuality approvingly, but has added more and more gay personalities to the mix.

... Americans are simply, broadly, more tolerant of others who are unlike them. As a general trend, that’s heartening. On the other hand, what comes along with this mass departure of moral judgment from public life? Let’s say we grant that it’s morally acceptable to smoke weed. Is it morally acceptable, then, to spark up a joint every day at lunch? Sure, as long as you’re not endangering others. It’s still not terribly wise, though.

... Increasingly, we don’t want to judge others for anything, even if what they’re doing is destructive. But is being non-judgmental the same as granting tacit approval, even support?

Comments: Image source of Easy Rider is Flickr. A good book on the kind of change we are seeing is The Intolerance of Tolerance

Obama's truth problem and "the butterfly in Peking"

WSJ: The Postmodern President - The challenge is finding anything his campaign says that is true. Excerpts:

President Obama spent his formative years in academia, so he's no doubt familiar with postmodernism, the literary theory that rejects objective reality and insists instead that everything is a matter of interpretation and relative "truth." At any rate he's running the first postmodern Presidential campaign, now organized almost exclusively around allegations about his opponent that bear no relation to the observable universe.

... The most important document of this new approach to politics may be this week's now famous TV commercial in which a man on camera accuses Mitt Romney of killing his wife. (The man's late wife, not Ann.) The spot features a Missouri steelworker called Joe Soptic, who recounts how Bain Capital bought his plant and eventually closed it, costing him his job and health benefits. "A short time after that," he says, Ilyona Soptic was diagnosed with cancer. "I don't know how long she was sick and I think maybe she didn't say anything because she knew we couldn't afford the insurance."

... So Mr. Romney is to blame because of decisions he didn't make at a business he didn't run that may or may not have set in train a series of random unconnected events many years apart that included Ilyona Soptic's illness.

Even more culpable is the butterfly in Peking that flapped its wings and forever altered the course of history. At least the Obamateers didn't suggest that Mr. Romney was the direct biological cause of her cancer. Perhaps they are saving that charge for October, given that a routine Democratic theme is that Republicans are in favor of killing people.

After all, the most substantive liberal critique of Paul Ryan's budget is an ad depicting his stand-in literally flinging an old lady in a wheelchair off a cliff. The other day Nancy Pelosi said the GOP believes there should be "no government role" in food safety and "They do not want to spend money to do that." Therefore the Republican Party is "the E. coli club" that Ms. Pelosi implied wants to poison children.

... The same pattern tessellates across the entire Obama campaign, from former White House counsel Bob Bauer's insinuation in July that Mr. Romney is a "felon," to the Tax Policy Center's white paper that makes up tax details that Mr. Romney has explicitly disowned, to hanging economic claims on the preposterous analysis of a columnist no one has ever heard of, to the President's serial genuflections about Mr. Romney's "sincere beliefs" that neither he nor any other normal person actually hold.

Comment: I suspect that the link is behind the Wall Street Journal paywall but the above quote provides the sense.