Dudes and Democrats
Fred Siegel
When liberalism became conquered by cool
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They paved the way, he rightly argues, for the creation of the contemporary liberal lifestyle of upwardly mobile people who, in their twenties and thirties, are square by day, swingers by night.
Today, we might call them hipsters.
By the time they settle into genuine adulthood, they’re no more capable of defending the bourgeois virtues that propelled their careers than a Communist commissar would be.
But Szalay’s thesis also entails considerable overstatement: the sixties novelists, he asserts, cleaved the ties between economics and culture that Daniel Bell identified in The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism.
A writer less attached to antique Marxist categories would have noted that the split between culture and economy was, in large measure, a matter of unprecedented affluence undermining the self-discipline and social relations that had long buttressed economic prosperity.
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Hip Figures: A Literary History of the Democratic Party, by Michael Szalay (Stanford University Press, 336 pp., $24.95)
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Read more: www.city-journal.org
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Hip Figures: A Literary History of the Democratic Party, by Michael Szalay (Stanford University Press, 336 pp., $24.95)
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Read more: www.city-journal.org
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