The Death of the Grown-Up

June 11, 2007
West, a Washington Times
columnist with a hard-line conservative’s interest in culture, sounds a dire alarm over an age she sees marked by the “mainstreaming of countercultural behavior.” An unprecedented reversal of priorities from parents to children has occurred since the 1950s, according to West, allowing for “structural failures that permitted the behavioral revolutions of the 1960s to go forward unimpeded.” To support her case, West draws on sources generally weighted to the right end of the political spectrum, like Robert Bork and Daniel Pipes. Her examination of the social repercussions of a new “youth market” would be better grounded within the context of the transformations in postwar American society, but she focuses instead on the negative aspects of these large and complex changes, without reflecting on her underlying assumptions. In her view, the prolonged adolescence of baby boomers has left America open to an insidious “Islamization” of culture via a misconceived political correctness that can’t recognize the dehumanizing ideology of that religion. West, a vocal purveyor of distrust toward Islamic cultures, lays nothing less than the decline of Western civilization on the American counterculture, making her argument compelling only to those already in her corner.