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Culture War Roundup for the week of May 22, 2023

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I don't think the high rates of gay and trans identification among Zoomers is at all the result of indoctrination (though I think at times policy can reinforce it), I think it's the result of teenagers being teenagers and doing the I'm trying to find myself, maaaaaan thing that many of the now-conservative Boomers did before them, which is what happens in a world focused on consooming and defining oneself.

There is a difference between teenagers now and the Boomers in their time.

As far as I can tell (though I haven't been a teenager for a while so I could of course simply be missing it), there's pretty much no real teenage rebellion. I don't see them doing much that the powers that be aren't supporting and encouraging. E.g. declaring yourself to be something LGBT-esque is supported and encouraged, becoming a climate activist is supported and encouraged, etc etc. It leads me to believe that if the establishment were supporting and encouraging different things, they'd be doing those things instead.

How much "real teenage rebellion" did the Boomers engage in? Rock music was just consooming product which your parents disapprove of, which was always the lamest kind of rebellion. White kids whose daddies could afford lawyers were even less likely to be punished for smoking marijuana then than they are now (the War on Drugs doesn't get going until the 1970's, and was pretty much a racist project from day one). And dodging the Vietnam Draft was pretty much expected if you were middle-class or above - look at the CV of any Boomer politician.

Compared to the Civil Rights movement (which mostly preceded it) and the Gay Liberation movement (which mostly followed it), the hippie counterculture drew far less heat from the Man - probably because it was seen as harmless by everyone except the Southern social conservatives who were already marked as losers. If you are old enough to have boomer parents, do they tell stories of getting into real trouble for hippie-adjacent activities? Or just of engaging in hippie-adjacent activities and feeling transgressive with no real risk (or the only real risk coming from within the counterculture, like being beaten up by the Hell's Angels at a rock concert)? There was definitely a vague sense of alliance between hippiedom and radical black and later gay activism, but not many hippies were going south of the Mason-Dixon line to do civil rights work, and even fewer were going to Pride parades before they were cool.

The only "rebel" community where people from middle-class backgrounds routinely turn up with origin stories involving being harshly punished by parents or authorities is the LGBT one.

How much "real teenage rebellion" did the Boomers engage in?

It depends on which Boomers. Most of them might have had a slightly long hair cut or bought Beatles/Rolling Stones records rather than Mozart/Sinatra records; more commonly, they bought a bit of both, as in the case of my parents.

On the other hand, if we're talking about the US in particular (e.g. France in late 1960s was much more radicalised, and many Czechoslovak Boomers found themselves face-to-face with Soviet invaders) there were plenty of Boomers who risked (and lost) their lives in the things like the anti-Vietnam war movement:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1968_Democratic_National_Convention_protests

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kent_State_shootings

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Student_strike_of_1970

If you get shot by a National Guardsman, you must be doing something fairly transgressive. Of course, most Boomers didn't do anything like that.

the War on Drugs doesn't get going until the 1970's, and was pretty much a racist project from day one

Maybe by the Ibrahim Kendi definition of "racist". The black community explicitly asked for the war on drugs.