Nation of Rebels

A few quotations from Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter's Nation of Rebels, which are all the more revealing because they come from men decidedly on the left of the spectrum (though, in their terminology, they belong not to the "ameliorative" rather than the utopian "transformative" left).

"Consumerism always seems to be a critique of what other people buy . . . so-called critique of consumerism is just thinly veiled snobbery, or, rose, Puritanism."

On the message of the film American Beauty: It's "simply not possible to be a well-adjuted adult in our society . . . the alternative [to perpetual adolescence] is to 'sell out,' to play by the rules, and thereby to become a neurotic, superficial conformist, incapable of experiencing true pleasure."

Instead of seeking to improve the lot of the working poor, the counter-cultural Left has redirected "the concern for social justice . . . into an increasingly narcissistic preoccupation with personal growth and well-being." In place of the drudge work of traditional liberal politics, counter-cultural lefties pursue a more exciting agenda: "Doing guerilla theater, playing in a band, making avant-garde art, taking drugs and having lots of wild sex certainly beat union organization as a way to spend the weekend."

In an Atlantic interview, Heath made this observation about Leftist rebellion: "rebellion is a very good way of setting yourself apart from the masses, whether it's by being cooler or morally superior or just better informed than other people. It's a search for prestige in the most basic sense. . . You can see the almost unassailable sense of superiority that's associated with the vegan, organic-vegetable-shopping, back-to-the-land, Guatemala-handcraft-wearing, anti-globalization activists. They clearly think that they're better than the people who do not share their system of values. So, because other people don't like being characterized as brainwashed cogs, they wind up promoting competitive capitalism."

The subtitle of Heath and Potter's book is "Why Counterculture Became Consumer Culture," and their fundamental answer is: The counterculture "did not sell out. Hippie ideology and yuppie ideology are one and the same."

posted by Peter J. Leithart on Saturday, November 12, 2005 at 05:04 PM

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