The Death of the West: How Dying Populations and Immigrant Invasions Imperil Our Country and Civilization

by Patrick J. Buchanan

Third, 1960s television could convey the tactics and triumphs of campus radicals and urban revolutionaries instantly to their peers. And the medium, now matured, no longer the fifties fiefdom of Howdy Doody and Matt Dillon, could not only transmit the new ideas, it could reinforce them by creating new visual realities. The fourth indispensable element was Vietnam. If the war meant sacrifice, bloodshed, perhaps death, the Woodstock generation wanted no part of it. What Marcuse offered was intellectual cover for cowardice, a moral argument for malingering, a way to dodge the draft while feeling superior to those who went. The “real heroes” of this war, said Senator Fulbright and New York mayor John Lindsay, are in Canada. The message fell upon receptive ears in the Ivy League and not only there. Finally, the old American establishment was broken on the wheel of Vietnam—the war that liberalism launched and could not win— and its moral authority was shattered in the eyes of the young. The path to power was thus opened to the political vessel of the counterculture, the McGovern campaign of 1972, among whose most enthusiastic workers was young Bill Clinton, the pride and paragon of the Woodstock generation.