https://pjmedia.com/eddriscoll/2012/07/23/1962-the-dawn-of-modern-pop-culture/feed/PJ Media is a leading news site covering culture, politics, faith, homeland security, and more. Our reporters and columnists provide original, in-depth analysis from a variety of perspectives.en-usWed, 10 Jun 2026 08:17:32 -0400<![CDATA[In Camelot and the Cultural Revolution, James Piereson wrote that the enormous gap between the stated ideology of Lee Harvey Oswald, President Kennedy&#8217;s communist assassin, and the efforts of liberals to pin the blame on the American right* caused the cognitive dissonance that birthed today&#8217;s modern left. In the first volume of The Age of Reagan, Steven Hayward argued that it was the enormous gap between the stated utopian goals of Lyndon Johnson, Kennedy&#8217;s successor (simultaneously winning the moral equivalent of war on poverty and racism; winning another moral equivalent of war, the space race; and winning a real war in Vietnam), and the failure to achieve the majority of those efforts that caused the left to become cynical, angry and disillusioned. (Of course, the root causes proposed by Piereson and Hayward need not be exclusive to each other.)]]>Mon, 23 Jul 2012 18:43:56 -0400<![CDATA[Ed Driscoll]]>https://pjmedia.com/ed-driscoll/2012/07/23/1962-the-dawn-of-modern-pop-culture-n255770