RADICAL CHIC: THE GERITOL YEARS. Roger Kimball: America’s current straits represent the victory of 1960s radicals.

America’s cultural revolution, launched in the late 1960s and never quite stopped, has always been a Janus-faced phenomenon. One face was the Boomers’ euphoric hedonism and disregard for the moral guardrails of tradition and authority — the “revolution” of easy sex and relentlessly bad taste that now defines our aesthetics and cultural arrangements.

The other face was dour and vicious, masking a raw hunger for power under a preening moralism. This side of the revolution could be detected in many countercultural phenomena, not least the juvenile activism and noisy readiness for ­violence that were such conspicuous features of the age.

Today, the revolution is presenting this second face to a complacent America.

In the late ’60s and ’70s, hundreds of bombs were detonated as various radical groups carried out their campaign against “Amerika.” According to The Los Angeles Times, “in California alone, 20 ­explosions a week rocked the state during the summer of 1970.’’

How many will we see in the summer of 2020? Not so long ago, the vicious radicalism of the 1960s seemed behind us. Now it seems to have come roaring back.

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