“The parents of the greatest generation wanted their children to have the advantages they never had. And in giving their children everything they wanted, the frugal, self-disciplined, sacrificial generation of World War II produced the spoiled children of the 1960s—the Clinton generation. Ironically the generation that came to revile capitalism was produced by the largesse of capitalism. “
Dinesh D’Souza’s new book, “America: Imagine a World without Her,” on which his upcoming movie of the same name will be based, is out today.
Below is an excerpt in which D’Souza explains his theory that the fundamental war that will determine America’s future is between the American spirit during the tumult of 1968, and the American spirit at America’s founding in 1776.
The dividing line between these two core ideologies in his view is embodied by the children of the “greatest generation,” and the members of the “greatest generation” themselves.
According to D’Souza, the victors of this ideological battle will determine whether the country survives and thrives, or instead commits national suicide.
How did we get the 1960s? One is tempted to locate the ideological roots of this era in the 1930s. The expansion of the welfare state that President Lyndon Johnson termed the Great Society seems to have originated in President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal three decades earlier. It is true that FDR made some radical speeches that repudiate the principles of the founding. While the Founders considered the government to be the enemy of rights—several provisions of the Bill of Rights begin, “Congress shall make no law . . . “—FDR insisted that the government is the friend and the guarantor of rights. While the Founders regarded economic liberty as a basic right, FDR justified the curtailments of economic liberty for some in the name of economic security for all. Even so, the New Deal’s actual programs were relatively modest, and they were a response to an emergency situation, namely the Great Depression. According to historian David Kennedy, FDR feared that after the Depression America’s economy might never grow again; he viewed the pie as fixed, and his redistribution programs were based on what turned out to be a false assumption. I am not blaming FDR: many reasonable people in the 1930s believed that capitalism had failed, and that something new had to be tried.
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