A longtime friend of mine, Timothy S. Goeglein, who works at Focus on the Family in Washington and is a committed Evangelical, published a book titled Stumbling Toward Utopia, which addresses the question of “how the 1960s turned into a national nightmare.”

Although this book restates positions on “reviving the American dream” that one can also find in the publications of Heritage and other mainstream Republican think tanks, it does make original points about popular culture. Goeglein begins by listing all the bad people who we are told have corrupted our educational system and national culture. Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, Herbert Marcuse, and the rest of the usual Teutonic suspects all make it onto Tim’s list, together with Woodrow Wilson and John Dewey. Here the author may be drawing from Allan Bloom’s Closing of the American Mind, particularly Bloom’s laments about “the German connection” in analyzing the sources of problems that can be found closer to home.

But I’ve come to praise Tim’s book, not to find fault with it. And the most insightful part of this book for me is chapter five “The Entertainment Stumble.” Tim is correct about the downward slope in our country politically, socially, and morally, which began in the 1960s. Indeed, things have been going from bad to worse in certain areas of life ever since. Moreover, what is called “entertainment,” but what is not really that, has played a pivotal role in causing this development. According to Goeglein,

the great purge of many of these highly rated family-oriented programs (like Leave It to Beaver) occurred-starting in the late 1960s and culminating in the 1970s. In place of these classic shows came a flood of new content filled with cynicism, the glorification of evil, and the mocking of others.” These changes have had ominous effects precisely because “television’s greatest power is in its role as the central storyteller for the culture.

Even worse than the destruction of inherited standards of taste, Goeglein observes, was the comedy style of Norman Lear, debuting in 1971, which waged a crusade against traditional social and moral beliefs. The central figure in All in the Family, Archie Bunker, was someone whose creator intended him to be, in Lear’s own words, a “a poorly educated, full -of-himself blowhard—spewing a kind of rancid lights-out conservatism.” Lear, as Goeglein explains, was always pushing the envelope on moral matters, using his tendentious comedy programs to win acceptance for homosexuality and to fight against what he condemned as sexism and white racism. Much to Lear’s dismay, however, many of his viewers (my father was one of them) instead found Archie to be a sympathetic character, who spoke for the country’s silent majority.

A similar transition toward leftist indoctrination occurred in the movie industry around the same time, although here the long-term effects only became perceptible much later. The  industry was taken over by committed leftists, such as Dore Schary, who acquired MGM from the staunch conservative Louis B. Mayer. Also because a new, iconoclastic generation of directors came to determine the content of movies. According to Goeglein, “motion pictures could no longer merely entertain, they had to feature messages to convert the masses to progressive worldviews. And they had little or no concern about alienating Middle America. In fact, several (directors and scriptwriters) reveled in doing so.”

Apropos of Goeglein’s discussion of the “cultural transformation” we’ve witnessed, I would divide the evolution of cinema over the last 50 years into two different phases. In the 1970s and ’80s, under the influence of directors like Stanley Kubrick, there was a growing tendency to feature nudity and sordid behavior in films. But the real transformation of movies into vehicles of moral revolution came later, with cinematic crusades against racism, sexism, and homophobia. Goeglein is, however, right to suggest this change occurred earlier with TV. He is also right to look back for an early example of this indoctrination in Lear’s efforts to shame us by depicting non-progressive Americans as bigoted slobs.

My own general argument about the role of entertainment in radicalizing America is a bit different from Goeglein’s. It was not so much a war against what the left once condemned as neo-Puritanism; something more pernicious led us to our present decadence. It was counter-morality masked as true virtue which caused the stumbling of our culture. Nudity in films is a childish rebellion against an already vanished parental authority; encouraging us to mutilate children as a cure for gender dysphoria is a problem of much greater magnitude. It is the role of moral arbiter that Lear and other providers of entertainment were allowed to assume that has done incalculable harm to our social morality. These cultural poisoners were allowed to chasten us in the name of their revolutionary morality.  

Comparing American entertainment circa 1960 to the anti-white, anti-male, and anti-Christian propaganda machine that succeeded it, makes me think that we have indeed entered a nightmarish twilight zone.