At nearly every juncture during the 1950s, the dominant liberal establishment interpreted personal and social problems as flowing from one or another pathology of the “closed society”—overly repressive norms, a middle-class culture that disapproved of the unconventional, and an uncritical acceptance of social mores, to say nothing of racism, anti-Semitism, and sexism. As a consequence, most establishment leaders thought we should relax our cultural super-ego, tilting in the direction of change rather than commitment, experiment rather than tradition, permission rather than discipline. Children
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