ROGER SIMON: Are Liberals The New Squares? “The minute rebellion goes middle class, there’s nothing less rebellious. It’s all as boring as a Volvo. So we are in an era of desperation. A certain class of people who staked their lives on being cool ever since high school — whenever that was, the sixties, the seventies, the eighties, who knows — are beginning to be confronted with the truth – that their ultra-conventional received wisdom, that which they thought was cool, is a bunch of hooey. (I was one of them, so I know.) . . . What makes modern liberalism the mess that it is today is that it is mainly composed of people who desperately wanted to be cool in high school – wanted to be Abbie Hoffman or Eldridge Cleaver – but never were. Their longing – this need to be Abbie – has clouded their thinking and their ability to perceive reality, placing us all in a mess along with them. Meanwhile, Bob Dylan became a conservative.”
Plus, stating the obvious: “Libertarians are the cool guys.”