July 12, 2023
'60s Denialism: Affirmative Action's Last Ditch Defense
By
Jack Cashill
As with many semantic corruptions, the left started it. They trivialized the term "denialism" by applying it not to the denial of a real tragedy, but to skepticism about an imagined climate doomsday. I would like to rehabilitate the phrase a little bit, if I could, by applying it to the denial of an historic phenomenon as real as the Holocaust and potentially as tragic.
I refer here to the havoc wrought by the 1960s. Havoc came in many forms: the zeitgeist shift that undermined personal responsibility, the programs that undermined the family, and the social upheaval that glorified casual sex and single parenthood.
Only by denying the fallout from the 1960s did Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson make even the illusion of sense in their recent dissents on the affirmative action cases before the Supreme Court. After a year of research for my new book,
Untenable: The True Story of White Ethnic Flight from America's Cities, I know all too well the audacity of that denial.
To be fair to the '60s, the effects of this progressive mind virus had begun to surface in the previous decade. As early as 1957, for instance, Stephen Sondheim was satirizing it in his lyrics to West Side Story's "
Gee, Officer Krupke." The psychiatrists, social workers, and judges who believe that "society" has played the young gang-bangers "a terrible trick" all come in for a deserved ribbing.
But there was nothing funny about what was to come. Almost unnoticed, a labyrinth of soul-crushing social programs was taking root and would soon be institutionalized by the Lyndon Johnson administration under the rubric of "The Great Society."
