When I was in grade school, I dreamt of growing up. I desperately wanted to escape the oppression I experienced at home. Even then, I realized that this entailed personal responsibility. If I were to be free, I needed to take care of myself. The problem was that I was not sure I was capable of this.
By the time I got to college in the early sixties, the attitude of my peers was one hundred and eighty degrees different from mine. They did not want to grow up. Old people were burned out. They were so embittered by their failures that they were no longer capable of creativity or fun.
The young knew better. College educated and still optimistic, they would grab the fallen banner of social justice and lead the way to a hopeful future. With their youthful idealism intact, they would not settle for half measures. It never occurred to them that their immaturity clouded their vision.
Nor did the young think in terms of personal responsibility. Still making the transition into adulthood, most had not realized the limitations that accompany being accountable for oneself and others. In their unconscious minds, they continued to depend on mom and dad to rescue them from trouble.
This is one reason why the young put so much faith in non-democratic solutions. In their imaginations, an all-knowing, infinitely altruistic government will protect them from every conceivable contingency. It will anticipate their needs without their doing this for themselves.
In my day, the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) epitomized this attitude. Frankly socialistic in their approach, they hoped to reform our democracy by replacing it with a Marxist utopia. Back then, most Americans dreaded Soviet aggression and hence were not prepared to surrender to its ideology.
The SDS had an answer. They would bomb our nation into submission. Exactly how this would work out, they did not say, mostly because they were throwing a temper tantrum. Somehow their unshakable romanticism would save the day.
Enter Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and her merry band of socialists. She too assumes that the older generation failed because it lost its way. Not to worry. Her uncorrupted vision will rescue us. Her very lack of experience will prevent her from being hindered by absurd fears.
Were this the whole story, we would have nothing to worry about. AOC would bang her head against an obdurate reality until the pain got so bad that she desisted. Her want of realism would thus be limited to her own life-space.
That, however, is not the situation. The diaper brigades have multiplied during the last century. The have gone from immature outsiders to untold divisions of quasi-adults. Nowadays millions of Americans celebrate not having to grow up. They don’t want to be responsible and hence they aren’t.
The down side of being the strongest and wealthiest nation on earth is the assumption that this is the natural condition of things. Americans do not have to be realistic about the challenges they face because the arc of history is bending their way. This invisible arc, however, is just another manifestation of imaginary parental protections.
In fact, if we are to survive, we have to be responsible adults. When the flag of the Green New Deal is held aloft, it is not enough to call it “aspirational.” We ought to laugh at its pretentions. Similarly, when junior high school students lecture a U.S. senator about global warming, they need to be taught better manners.
Human history is littered with the carcasses of abortive ideals. Sadly, many doomed dogmas have been tried and caused dreadful damage. We therefore need to learn from these misadventures. The future will not be improved by dreams that are untethered to experience.
So why aren’t we teaching the arrogant young about the miscarriages of socialism? Haven’t enough people been tortured and killed to reveal the folly of totalitarian fantasies? Ignoring these lessons gives us the horrors of Venezuela—which, incidentally, AOC does not admit.
Red Diaper babies do not grow up to be enlightened leaders. Rather, they become disruptive ingrates. So where are the adults in the Democratic Party? Where are the responsible statesmen? In their quest for political power, are they prepared to follow these rash children into perdition?
And what of the rest of us? Has no one grown up? Have our rose-colored glasses blinded us to the dangers of not being responsible for our fate?
Melvyn L. Fein, Ph.D.
Professor Emeritus
Kennesaw State University
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