1960s America was a hotbed of revolutionary sentiment. The sexual revolution, civil rights, Johnson’s Great Society: these were all movements that fundamentally changed what America is and what it values today. Those revolutions have achieved cultural dominance, and the principles they championed have gained the status of unquestionable orthodoxy.
One of those unquestionable principles is that revolution is a good in and of itself, that it is necessarily a good thing to overthrow an old order and usher in a new one. Young Americans are taught from a young age that youthful rebellion is good, and that young people ought to be free to rebel against the established order.
