SACRAMENTO, CA - For a while now we have pondered the late-in-coming celebration of “the greatest generation.” “Late-in-coming” because the baby boomers of the 1960s’ “youth movement” proudly asserted that they were the greatest generation ever to grace the land of America. Further, the Establishment, and many of their parents, rushed to affirm this proclamation. Time magazine in 1967 went as far as to say that the youth movement “will infuse the future with a new sense of morality, a transcendent and contemporary ethic that could enrich the ‘empty society’."

This was all utter nonsense but few had the courage to say so at the time. The only major political leader to say the youth-movement emperor wasn’t wearing any clothes was--Ronald Reagan.

“The leaders of today’s so-called establishment did not have to listen in a classroom lecture or make a field trip to learn about poverty,” he said. “We lived it in the depths of the Great Depression. The horrors of war are not just a subject for a term paper to a generation that sent its finest young men to fight at Omaha Beach.” Reagan knew all along which was the greatest generation, even if network anchormen didn’t know it until a publishing house came along with visions of fat royalties.

The celebration of the greatest generation represents the foreclosure of the “generation gap” of the 1960s and 1970s. Now, as baby boomers are reaching an age of mature reflection, and their parents are dying off, they are coming to recognize both the emptiness of their youthful pretensions to transcendent enlightenment, and the quiet dignity and grandeur of their parents’ accomplishments in surviving a depression, winning a world war, and building the prosperity of post-war America--all without the self-absorbed preening that is the worst trait of the baby boom generation. The greatest generation acted out of duty and responsibility, words notably missing from the vocabulary of the youth movement.

All of which adds to the clarity and significance of the American mood in the aftermath of September 11. Beyond the obvious comparisons to Pearl Harbor and the Churchillian echoes of “our finest hour,” there is a palpable sense among Americans of the baby-boom generation that here and now is our chance to live up to example of the greatest generation. Even if we don’t have to march off to war in uniform by the millions as our parents and grandparents did, the peculiar character of terrorist war on the home front makes everyone into a de facto combatant. This is why even many liberals are rightly and openly disgusted with the self-loathing Americans (i.e., Noam Chomsky, Susan Sontag, Michael Moore, et al.) who cannot escape from the “blame America
first” mentality.

In the McGovern campaign in 1972, liberals sometimes wore the American flag upside down, and Theodore White reported that “At McGovern headquarters, the word itself, ‘patriotism,’ was a code word for intolerance, war, deception.” That kind of decay has been swept away in an instant. September 11 may turn out to be more than just a turning point for our policy toward international terrorism. It is also turning out to be the moment of redemption for many formerly diffident liberals.

Steven Hayward