WHEN THE ENEMY was Ronald Reagan, the liberals were sitting pretty. Oh sure, they reasoned, he could bamboozle a majority of the country's voters once every four years, but that was because the Democrats nominated such incompetents. Besides, the guy was a former actor.
Liberals never believed that the country was really with Mr. Reagan. Today, it is different. Seventy-three new House Republicans can't all be good actors with friendly grins. Those in liberal circles now suspect that the '94 election had something to do with ideas.
The New York Times is not amused and, indeed, has felt impelled to defend the indefensible. In an extraordinary editorial last weekend titled "In Praise of the Counterculture," the Times (inadvertently) provided a perfect, textbook example of what makes liberals so unpopular.
The Newtonians are attempting to turn the word "counterculture" into a pejorative, fumed the Times. "Only a few periods in American history have seen such a rich fulfillment of the informing ideals of personal freedom and creativity that lie at the heart of the American intellectual tradition . . . The '60s spawned a new morality-based politics that emphasized the individual's responsibility to speak out against injustice and corruption."
Doesn't that sound familiar? Can't you just smell the incense when you read rhetoric like that? A "new morality-based politics"? What was new about it? Has the Times never heard of the abolition movement? Plenty of Americans gave their lives for it. Or what about the Progressive Era? What motivated the reformers who outlawed child labor and established settlement houses? And what about Prohibition? Was Carrie Nation a tool of big business, or was she a moral crusader? The abolitionists, the progressives, the prohibitionists and many more would be surprised to hear that morality entered the political realm only in 1965.
And what was the great moral content of the counterculture? Of what did this "morality-based politics" consist? As I recall, it often amounted to burning the notes of college professors, shouting down speakers with whom a
mob disagreed, engaging in a great deal of sex, glorifying drugs and supporting a brutal communist regime with whom the United States was then at war. Weren't those moral paragons shouting "Ho Ho Ho Chi Minh!" at the Democratic Convention in 1968?
Some former 1960s "activists," having witnessed the tragic results of their "idealism" -- the Vietnamese boat people, the genocide in Cambodia -- have expressed chagrin at their youthful arrogance. Not the editors of the New York Times.
Nor do they seem to understand the terrible social price we have paid at home for the "rich fulfillment of the . . . ideals of personal freedom and creativity."
The '60s were not, actually, a time of particular creativity in the arts. The previous decade was much more fertile. What the 1960s represented was a bacchanal -- mostly for the benefit of men. Men were liberated from their responsibilities to their wives and families. They were liberated from the necessity to act as fathers. The '60s ethos of personal liberation paved the way for the family disintegration that most Americans now agree is the greatest threat facing our civilization.
The good things that came from the 1960s -- such as the civil rights movement -- had nothing to do with the counterculture.
"Would many Americans truly like to imagine a society returned to the dictatorship of the majority culture?" asks the Times. The editorial answers the question in the negative, speculating that even Republicans would not want to give up the Grateful Dead, free abortion and divorce. Leaving aside whether this guess about Republicans is true, we are thus invited to the conclusion that those who advocated drug taking, casual sex and hedonism were part of a "morality-based politics," whereas those who object to the casual elimination of 1.5 million unborn babies each year are not.
What the Times can't see is that we have spent the past two decades trying to staunch the bleeding begun in the 1960s -- the drug scourge, the rise of AIDS, divorce, illegitimacy and crime. You don't have to hate the Grateful Dead to know that the counterculture has been a disaster for, as the kids used to say, "children and other living things."
Mona Charen is a syndicated columnist.