Tracing Our Problems to the 1960s
Stumbling Toward Utopia: How the 1960s Turned Into a National Nightmare and How We Can Revive the American Dream By Timothy S. Goeglein
(Fidelis Publishing, 192 pages, $23)
Every once in a while, there is a book that, even for the conservative movement, is nothing less than brave. Stumbling Toward Utopia by Tim Goeglein is one of those books.
If we are going to solve the problems of the present and future, we need to take a look back at the road that created those problems to begin with. In the case of current political and cultural morass, that road was paved by the utopian activists of the 1960s, who in their efforts to create what they believed would be a “perfect society,” instead cut a swath of social and economic destruction that has resulted in a rapidly decaying and divided nation.
Stumbling Toward Utopia is a short book but says what it means clearly and concisely, namely that most of the internal issues facing the United States today are a result of the President Lyndon Johnson’s failed Great Society policies of the 1960s and their continuation under President Richard Nixon and other presidents/congresses. Additionally, the counterculture that came from the 1960s and entered the mainstream is to blame for many of the social and economic ills that currently challenge the United States.
During a time when it is fashionable for many to discard at least some social issues in the name of economic expediency, Goeglein is not afraid to tackle social issues in a manner that invokes the late 1970s founders of the New Right such as Paul Weyrich, Richard Viguerie, and Jerry Falwell.
Further, Goeglein establishes the link between social and economic policy and how they intertwine, as clear as the law of physics, on everything from personal happiness, abortion, immigration, marriage, cohabitation, suicide, and the commitment to traditional, fundamental, religious life.
Billions of dollars have been thrown at many of these issues by the federal government, conceived and guided almost exclusively by leftist theory. Yet the problems only get worse.
Perhaps most pointedly, Goeglein illustrates how federal interference in the free market has hurt African Americans and made poverty and illegitimacy, already a huge problem in the black community in the early 1960s, far worse. Perhaps without intending to, anti-poverty programs effectively decimated the place of the father in family life, leading to 70 percent of black youngsters being born into fatherless families, a situation that is now painfully familiar to impoverished white and Hispanic communities as well.
In that spirit, those churches that are thriving are those that most closely resemble biblical orthodoxy, while the Episcopal Church and United Methodist Church, among others, are still bleeding members and are largely kept afloat by their large real estate holdings.
Stumbling Towards Utopia is not filled with policy proposals for the future, but it certainly shows us what has not worked in the past and, indeed, what has made the problems of unemployment, poverty, crime, and other pathologies even worse. It is a most cautionary tale about the 1960s, a decade lionized by the American Left and even many middle-of-the-road Americans.
In today’s conservative movement, there are those who believe we must face these harsh realities and work to, at best, slow the inevitable decline of our civilization. Goeglein disagrees. He doesn’t seek only to slow the decay of society but to reverse it. This he does by showing what America was like when things were generally better for most people; that is, before the time when the Left threw out many of the social values that made America what it was.
Stumbling Toward Utopia describes in detail the contents of the Left’s playbook, delving deep into the writings of the radical Saul Alinksy, Norman Lear, the racist abortionist Margaret Sanger, and others. These are names that the New Right warned about but many on the right today do not study, to the country’s great detriment.
No words are wasted in the book, and while Stumbling Toward Utopia is a short read, it is an effective one. It is, in many ways, a reminder of the primers that were used in the American school system before its takeover by the Left. Sometimes people need a refresher on why they are fighting the good fight, even while in the midst of war. Stumbling Toward Utopia provides this reminder and attempts to illuminate a more hopeful road that will allow us to throw off the shackles of the 1960s.
Goeglein is a critic unafraid to discuss the social problems that so many conservatives seem uncomfortable with, and to locate those problems at the center of our ills rather than on the periphery. Ronald Reagan would have been pleased with Goeglein’s work, and I think the rest of us will as well when studying Stumbling Toward Utopia.
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