- Conservatives were too materialistic.
Reagan-era conservatives, seeing how cynical many 1960s campus radicals became about careers and consumption, assumed that leftist utopianism would not survive the allure of moneymaking. Religious conservatives, in particular, focused their passions on achieving political and legal power, and failed to pass on the faith to the Millennials and Generation Z, who are the most secular generations in American history.
Conservatives did not grasp what Milosz tried to tell us in the 1950s, when he said that Americans misunderstood the appeal of Communism, mistakenly believing that people only turn to it because they are forced to.
“That is wrong,” he wrote. “There is an internal longing for harmony and happiness that lies deeper than ordinary fear or the desire to escape misery or physical destruction.”
The social justice phalanx radicalizing American institutions are taking over in part through force and intimidation. But they are also appealing to the deep desire for a sense of meaning and purpose in the hearts of younger Americans, who have not found it in traditional religion or bourgeois capitalism.
