This might seem like a bad time to bring this particular thread back up, particularly on a blog that ostensibly deals with historical topics rather than others, although this blog very obviously deals with a lot of things.
And besides that, the November election hasn't happened yet.
And added to that, much of what we'll relate here is completely counterintuitive. . . at first blush. Indeed, at the time we're typing this we're about to elect the most left wing administration in seventy years, protesters backing the most radical agendas imaginable have been out in the streets and their views are now regarded as quasi main stream, and the Pope just made a statement that's clearly contrary to long held Catholic morals and which gave comfort to Catholic radicals like Fr. James Martin, S.J. and left orthodox Catholics, and orthodox Christians in general, feeling betrayed and bewildered.
So you may ask, therefore, are you out of your mind?
Nope.
Having said all of that, we'll launch in. If this topic isn't ripe, and we feel that it is, it will be soon.
But it is ripe.
Let's start by recapping the past four years and where that's taken us, although that four is really only part of seventy really, as we're about to end an era. The Boomer Era.
The Short Term.
During the 2016 election one of the things we wrote about here is that the GOP would have to live with the results of a Trump Presidency. Our feeling, at that time, was that Trump didn't reflect the old conservatism of the GOP but something else, with that something else being a sort of new, alt right, populism. This isn't meant as a criticism although some might take it that way. And frankly our predictions were only partially correct.
In reality, the Trump administration has been exceedingly difficult to define. On some topics it has definitely been conservative in the most traditional and cultural sense. There's been, for example, no administration that was more "pro life" than Donald Trump's, a fact which has caused some people who would not otherwise do so to support him. In other ways the administration has been purely populist.
Personally, as has sometimes been noted, Donald Trump himself has been a strange and unlikely standard bearer for the conservative cause, a rich man with a problematic personal history and a crass personality, rather than a man representing national tradition in the conservative mold.
One thing that seems evident this election season, this pandemic season, and during the Red Summer of 2020 is that Conservatives have done a bad job of defining and advancing conservatism.
It isn't that conservatism doesn't have a set of values, goals and definitions. It very much does. It's more like the post Buckley conservatives have abandoned them for something else, even while still vaguely recalling that they are there. In some ways, therefore, modern conservatism has been a blend of really old conservatism, of the pre Buckley and indeed even Pre Second World War type, combined with a remnant of Reaganism and mixed with populism. That mix might work, but what it lacks overall is a figure who can cogently distill it into a discernible form. Buckley, who would not have agreed with Trump on many things, was just such a man in an earlier era. Such figures as Mark Steyn and Victor David Hanson seem unlikely to fit the bill. Ross Douthat (dob 1979) might be the most likely person to occupy that position, but he clearly is outside of the Trump arena . . .which indeed may very well put him in first position.
What seems clear to me at this point is that following November 3, which is now very close, there's going to be a Republican reckoning. If current trends hold, Joe Biden will be the next President and the Senate will probably be Democratic. There will be a reckoning, we'd note, simply because of the first matter, but there will very much be one if both of those things come true.
Indeed, if they don't, the adjustment period for the GOP will be slower and more measured. Figures like Mitch McConnell and Lindsey Graham who have been significant Republicans in government, but outside of the Administration itself, will be major influencers in what is to come for the party, much as Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer have been over the last four years. That this is the case in the Democratic Party may not be evident as its lurched to the left, but Pelosi and Schumer were a brake on that trend. But for them, the party would now be much, much more left leaning than it currently is and chances are overwhelming that Joe Biden wouldn't be the current nominee. Readers will note that Schumer is out of a position of overall leadership, but Pelosi is not and over the past two years that's been a hugely significant factor in the Democratic Party, which Schumer has participated in.
I doubt very much that Senate Republicans, should the body fall to the Democrats, will be in a similar position. House Republicans have practically been unheard of in leadership matters for the past two years, which says something quite significant.
So where are things headed?
Well lets look back and look forward, as the direction of things may be clearer than it might at first seem.
In the immediate near term, we'd note, the entire country is going to be taking a big leftward leap. Big.
But only in terms of the national legislature and the executive.
Now, that is pretty big, but at the same time we're about to experience a "conservative" return in the United States Supreme Court following the confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett (dob 1972). That doesn't really mean what people seem to think it does, for reasons we've noted here repeatedly. But it does mean that the Court may be sending things back to Congress and the state legislatures in record amounts. That will mean that both of those institutions will have to act in areas, particularly Congress, where they have not for eons.
What's much less clear right now is whether the GOP misfortune at the national level will translate into a local one anywhere. The Democrats control eighteen state legislatures. Minnesota's is divided between the parties. Every other legislature is Republican, if you include Nebraska, where the majority of legislators are Republicans but where the legislative races are non partisan.
That's a closer split than we might presume. It isn't as if legislators elect Senators anymore, of course, which would make a giant difference at the national level, but the seven state lead that the Republicans now have means that a generally conservative agenda will be in evidence at the state level overall, but barely overall, assuming that lead holds.
The Democrats, however, have targeted thirteen states this election where they think they might be able to flip them, and chances are good that at least Minnesota will go into the Democratic camp. States where the GOP doesn't have a large legislature lead may be vulnerable this election. The GOP lead has only existed since 2010 and therefore it represented a rightward drift, but that all came before the big left surge brought about by the Trump administration.
The reason this matters is this. In Republican states legislation will continue to be generally conservative, but probably less conservative, than it has been in the past. For a state like Wyoming, however, the legislature is probably about to do inot reaction over the next four years.
It won't go into reaction forever, nor will other similarly situated states where there has been an alt right drift, as at a national level things are going to happen that we're not going to like and simply complaining about it isn't going to do anything, nor is pretending that it isn't happening. At first there will be some naive hope that the Court will reverse everything that Congress will be doing, but it won't.
And that will mean that there's a real danger that states that have been having a strong alt right drift are just going to be left out of things. In recent years Wyoming politicians that tacked to Trump's views have been frequently in the national news. But chances are high that the branch of the Republican Party that's strongly associated with Trump's administration are going to be left out of the a re-formed GOP. Politicians that took an independent view in the GOP, such as Liz Cheney did during her last two years, are much better situated to rise in the party.
As part of that the days of platforms that expressed really strong alt right concept that had some appeal to that wing, but not to the base, are likely over. A Wyoming Senator was responsible for the insertion of a plank seeking to "return" the Federal lands to the states even though locals are adamantly opposed to such ideas. Ideas like that are now part of the past.
As part of all of this the GOP, as a conservative party, is going to have to contemplate what its about. Perhaps fortunately for it, what it will end up being about is already a demographic trend that will reform conservatism whether it wants to or not. It's the passing of the bulge in the snake.
Before we get to that, however, we need to deal with society at large.
Or perhaps Boomer society would be more accurate.
The leftward tilt in politics has more than its fair share of young politicians. Still, it's impossible not to notice that is mostly lead by left leaning Boomers who came up in politics following 1968. People like Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer not only feature in it, but still lead it. Joe Biden can't be really regarded as part of it so much as somebody benefiting from the current political tide. Kamala Harris (dob 1964) is, however, in the same demographic as Barack Obama, either an immediate post boomer or a very late term Boomer. Anyone in that demographic, which includes your humble author, can't deny that politic and culture for this gap generation has been heavily influenced by the Boomers.
Now, not all Boomers are left leaning politically or culturally, to be sure. Witness, for example, teh current administration. But the events of the post war era were generally left leaning culturally and became very much so after 1968. Culturally, the events that started off in the immeidate post war really bloomed into fruition and impacted every sector of society. Insertion of libaralism impacted all of the political parties to some degree for awhile, and certainly moved the center line of the center significantly. In the culture the single biggest impacts were the change in the work status of women, something brought about most significantly due to domestic industrialization, and the disastrous Sexual Revolution, somethign that is still being worked out most particularly among the aging boomers who are in charge of cultural definition due to their positions in the world.
We've written about this before here but one of the real ironies of this current election is that in some ways it's really the end and last gasp of Boomer liberalism, just as the election is also in some ways the end of late Boomer conservatism. Political ideologies that were strongly formed post World War Two are still dominating the discussion on both end of the spectrum. That's about to end, and as it does, what is also coming up behind it is a large demographic change coincident, oddly enough, with the begging of the global decline in the population.
Where we're headed.
The trend was identified some time ago by demographer Eric Kaufman, a Canadian who teaches in the United Kingdom. A well knowna nd respected demographer, he surprised people some time ago by presenting the pretty clear evidence that, coincident with population decline, there's been a giant increase in the percentage of the population globally that identified generally with what we'd regard as conservative or traditional ideals. Bits and pieces of the trend, sometimes attributed to completely disparate factors, have been picked up from other social sciences. In some ways the the world has walked out of the long shadow of World War Two and the Cold War and into a new era. That doesn't mean an era of universal peace and brotherly love, or anything of the kind, but rather a new, and much more conservative, era.
Kaufman noted in his work that the percentage of the population all over the world that identified with traditionalism and conservatism, and even nationalism, is dramatically rising. And much of it is occuring in an old European cultural fashion, although not all of it. Contrary to what American pollsters have noted on a very localized American level, religion is massively on the rise globally. The fastest growing religion appears to be Islam, although there's some doubt on that, but right behind it is Catholicism. Orthodoxy has massively revived in the Slavic East. Traditional Hinduism is on the rise in India.
In individual religious groups, moreover, the trend is even more pronounced. In the United States, for example, a majority of Americans will be Catholics by mid Century. Conservative Orthodox Judaism will make up nearly 1/3d if not 1/2s of American Judaism by the end of the current decade. While "mainline" Protestantism has been suffering in the US as it has increasingly become theologically liberal, conservative Protestants of all types are on the rise.
This is the case in the Catholic church as well, which is overall regarded as theologically conservative but which had a large swing to the religious left in some quarters in the 60s and 70s. Church leaders in the Church today retain a fair number of individuals who came up in this era and who continue to have a mark upon the church, ironically frequently against the views of their younger parishioners who are theologically very well educated and conservative. People form the outside tend to confuse this with the "Rad Trads", which they are not, but the mere existence of Rad Trads shows how much this is the case. Among younger Catholics the line tends to be drawn between the orthodox young and the Rad Trads, which are two conservative camps. Liberals exist, but they're increasingly a thing of the past and tend to be supported in existence only where there are remaining liberals form the 1970s.
Among the Orthodox in the US, at the same time, and evolution has occurred in which the Orthodox communities have moved from having a strong and declining national identity to instead focusing on their Orthodox nature, which in turn has brought in converts from Protestant faiths which have turned liberal. It's also caused some Catholics from very liberal areas to make the move as well.* Overall, however, Catholicism is set to become much more orthodox as older Bishops retire and younger, highly orthodox priests move into their place. As that section of the church has always been well represented, the change will be very swift in the Northern hemisphere when it comes. It's already dominant in Africa and Asia.
A lot of this has to do with a focus in these groups on families in a traditional sense. To put it purely in the US context, but to provide an example that's illustrative globally, the main line Protestant religions have been traditionally white and upwardly mobile, the same demographic in the US which, starting in the 1970s, basically quit replacing itself. If demographics is destiny, as liberals like to proclaim, that's a strategy for demographic death. And its now happening. Overall population in the European world will continue to decline. In the US its population increase is solely due to immigration, which is set in the US at a massively high rate compared to other nations. In both of these instances, however, that amplifies the trend. In most countries where there isn't an ethos that requires a high immigration rate for misunderstood economic beliefs or myths, the overall population will continue to go down while the percentage of those being discussed here, paradoxically, goes up. In the US this is also true, but it's amplified by the immigration of populations from religiously traditional regions.
But viewing this solely as a religious family situation would be in error. In other ways it's clear that a return to traditionalism, albeit modified traditionalism, is now a definite trend. You can see it in all sorts of things, including popular culture.
One of the oddest things I've seen during my adult years is the explosion of food programs. That may seem like an odd thing to note here, but their existence and their evolution is telling in this context.
In the 1970s and early 80s there was sort of an odd theme about how young women didn't know how to cook anymore, and young men never had. There was no such thing as a "Foodie". Young people were presumed to live on Ramen noodles (which are disgusting) until they married, and when they did they go by somehow if they didn't have means. If they did, and were a double income couple ("dinc's"), then sort of the social ideal they ate out. And then came November 1993.
On November 22, 1993, the Food Network began broadcasting. That may not seem significant in this story, but it is. Prior to 1993 cooking shows were regarded as an amusing anachronism of the 1950s, which were seen as a remnant of an image of the 1950s that never was. Never mind that the acme of television cooking, Julia Childs, was actually a World War Two OSS agent whose fellow former OSS husband lost his job during the McCarthy era, she and the entire genre were regularly lampooned by the hip, cool, and persistently left wing Saturday Night Live for years.
Well at some point people quit making fun of the food programs, and for their part, they no longer were what they once were. They were hip, cool and aimed at the young, and full of advice on how to prepare the gourmet dishes they were offering at home. For that matter, not all were gourmet by any means, and one Food Network bastion, Rachel Ray, went from traveling on "Forty Dollars A Day" to preparing basic home meals, like your mother who used to cook for the entire family used to make (assuming your mother did that) in thirty minutes.
None of that may seem like a cultural conservative revolution, but food reflects on the culture and it is. In the early 70s the concept was that the young were getting stoned at Studio 54, and nobody thought of much of the spouse of the Canadian Prime Minster being photographed sitting on its floor wearing a miniskirt and showing too much. By the late 1970s and 1980s dinc's still viewed eating out as the standard and people proudly stated "I never eat at home". Well, by the 1990s they were and by now a staple of the food channels are home cooked meals for a family, often with an ethnic emphasis.
That latter item also is demonstrative of a developing type of conservatism that's being missed. For most of American history conservatism was defined in a WASPish way, except in rural areas of strong other ethnic character. The "Protestant Work Ethic" defined an aspect of American culture and an aspect of "Americanism" was conforming to a certain WASPish ideal. Ethnic communities strove to conform to it. One individual I know whose grandparents were from Armenia noted how they strove to abandon their Armenian identification and to be identified as "Americans", including speaking in a foreign tongue they'd not grown up with. In my childhood many people resented even the commonly claimed ethnic identifiers, like "Irish Americans", and noted they were Americans, not hyphenated anything. My own father, whose father spoke German and English due to his place of birth, and who was half Irish and half German by descent, never identified with either and never made any effort to observe the Americanized Irish national day, St. Patrick's Day (my Canadian born mother, however, certainly observed it, but in a much more traditionally Irish way).
Certainly, of course, "ethnic" food existed, but it wasn't domestic in the way its become and remained often distinctly eating out ethnic. Nearly any town of substance had an Italian restaurant and, at least in this region, one or more Mexican restaurant. Chinese restaurants seem to be universal everywhere. But beyond that, there wasn't much, and not much in terms of restaurants that incorporated those fares into their menu outside of those categories. Our town had a couple of restaurants that were run by Greek immigrants, for example, but you would not have known it but for maybe one or two speciality items on the menu. When I was a kid a German immigrant had a family diner and it did have some items that German Americans would recognize, but there was no particular emphasis on it (and indeed, well into the 70s in some areas emphasizing a German menu might have been a mistake). In big cities ethnic neighborhoods usually had ethnic restaurants, of course.
None of that is surprising and all of that would seem to cut against the point. But here is the point. Food Network spends hours and hours per day with programming that shows the viewers how to cook Italian (or whatever) meals at home, "like my mother did", with the idea that you are going to do that. When not doing that, its spending hours and hours per day showing you how to make fast American meals large enough to feed an army, or in at least one case how to feed your presumed big ranch family. To at least some extent, people watching The Pioneer Woman see themselves in her role, the matron of an agricultural family where the men are out working, and she's manning the large capacity and high demand kitchen.
Indeed, riffing from that, television has become fascinated with families in general, and particularly large ones. The Duggars, a giant family living an extremely conservative lifestyle, commanded television viewership for years before one of their sons took them down due to a fascination with procreating that strayed outside of his family fold and which was generally icky. At the same time viewers watched "Kate" and her eight children which wasn't any more interesting other than that she had a bunch of kids at one time. That too fell to domestic discontent, but now viewers can watch Out Daughtered about a somehat whiney husband and his cute but tough as nails wife and their large collection of kinder. None of this really resembles watching the single protagonist in the Mary Tyler Moore Show, or her friend Rhoda, or Maude.
Indeed one such liberal television female of the 70s is emblematic of this transformation in some ways. Valerie Bertinelli portrayed the liberal teenager in One Day At A Time in the 70s, a member of an all female household. Now 60 years old, she's cooking traditional Italian meals on. . . the Food Channel.
Hmm. . .
Of course, careful readers of this august cyber tome will note that we've noted the moral sewer which is television before and declaring, therefore, a cultural conservative revival being reflected in it is problematic. And it is.
But there are several things here to consider. First of all, television reflects back at us as to who we are, but it also reflects forwards as to what the producers are. Hollywood has been a moral sinkhole for reasons of its own since day one, and as part of that its always pitched as low to our baser instincts as possible. Early big film productions were frequently pornographic even by today's standards, a situation that was brought temporarily to heel only by the Film Production Code. Television operated in restraint out of fear of FCC regulation until its boundaries were slowly expanded and broken. Pitching to baser instincts work, as long as people are willing to tolerate them, as people are interested in them.
But non fiction shows that are aimed at something else appeal at a different level, if even to the same people. Food shows and shows depicting families are aimed at something else. That people are interested in sex on television may mean nothing more than than that are interested in sex, although television has certainly been part of the missive change of the Sexual Revolution and the destructiveness that it's brought in with it. Interest in such basics as food and raising kids are aimed at something else and reflective of something going on in the culture.
Even on the small screen elsewhere something is going on, even if it remains, almost by prescription, routinely morally problematic. Having said that the recent film Greyhound may be telling. Taken from the CS Forester novel The Good Shepherd, its notable that Tom Hanks' (who is Russian Orthodox) adaptation is apparently the only Forester novel in which the captain of the ship is outwardly religious, with even the title referring to the New Testament. In Hank's adaptation he definitely is. Elisabeth Shue shows up as a love interest, but in a remarkably understated and traditionally Christian way. The entire movie is one of virtue in the most traditional sense, emphasizing deep personal sacrifice. Greyhound looks like a morality play compared to The Big Red One, even though, in some ways, their underlying theme is extremely similar.
This is also evident in other activities that people are participating in, some of them now amplified by the Coronavirus Pandemic. Hunting, an activity that was decreasing in the 70s and 80s, started to rebound in the 1990s and now significantly has. As part of that women are joining the activity in unprecedented numbers, something that reflects not only a return to the civilization status quo ante, but the way that this topic has evolved, something we'll address more below. Women coming to hunting doesn't reflect a sort of feminist statement so much as it does an interesting conservative evolution. At any rate, this trend was ongoing before, but the pandemic has hugely amplified it, as it is many of these trends.
It's also amplifying gardening, a highly related activity.
The most extreme version of this is the agrarian "homesteading" movement, featuring a definite misuse of the word. Strongly rooted in a sort of agrarian ideal, it's been it the works now for probably a decade. While its easy to find information regarding it in the US, it's spread to Canada as well and is also going on in Europe where young farmers have returned either to old farms owned by their families or purchased small farms that production farmers are no longer using as part of larger units. During the recent economic downturn in Greece, a long term and systemic problem, it was particularly noted that young people whose grandparents had last been on family farms were going back to them, effectively skipping an entire generation in the process in sort of an Agrarian "Okay, Boomer" moment. The situation in France has been similar, but with a longer generational gap involved.
Women, it should be noted, have been part of the last several items in a way that they were not in earlier eras. Certainly women gardeners are nothing new, but women agrarian farmers in their current roles are an evolution from prior eras. Women hunters and fishermen are at all time high rates in human history, which should show that what's occured, in some ways, is that feminism has cycled through the left and come back out, in this form, on the right.
This is also true of careerism.
The entire story of women in the workplace has been really badly done. As we've noted here before, it was never really the case that women worked during World War Two, suddenly were acclimated to work and then came the "Women's Liberation" movement. Rather, as we've maintained here, the advent of domestic machinery in the 20th Century reached a critical point following the Second World War which made women's domestic labor surplus to the households and freed them for other employment, which they took up pretty rapidly. That was coincident with the Second World War's employment of women in the emergency, but that had also occurred to a remarkable extent during the First World War as well.
What did occur is that a group of social movements, some of which had roots at least as far back as the 1910s, benefitted from this and to some extent co-opted it. Feminism as a movement didn't have its origins in the 1960s and 70s, but rather in the Suffrage movement that dated back to the 1860s. The suffrage movement was split all along between radical and focused elements, with the focused element (the majority) really focused singly on the vote. Radical elements, however, resembled later feminist to a large degree, but in ways that were of course central to their times. By the 1910s the more radial elements had broken into other causes, with perhaps Margaret Sanger's birth control movement being the most notable. Generally understood later on to be a woman's cause, Sanger's movement had a strongly racist element in that she was fearful of the growth of the African American population. Nonetheless, the movement gave an early indication on how women's causes were either being developed or other causes were co-opting existing women's movements.
In the 1960s this expanded into a radical feminist alliance with what effectively was the pronography industry following the introduction of pharmaceutical birth control Playboy, introduced in 1953, taught that all women were big boobed, easy, dumb, and sterile. With the introduction of pharmaceutical birth control radical feminist allied themselves partially with pornographers, and indeed Cosmopolitan was semi pornographic, in order to argue the easy part as an attack on marriage. The concept at the time was that with rising female employment, something that had been a year by year feature of the 20th Century since its dawn, an era had now been reached in which marriage could be eliminated or redefined to exclude much of its traditional aspects, and therefore they pushed the "easy" and sterile parts of the Playboy myth, if not the big boobed and dumb parts (Coso women were think, barely dressed, and smart in their portrayals).
With this came the real push in careerism that was otherwise already occurring post World War Two.
Prior to World War Two a majority of American men didn't graduate from high school, although the situation was approaching parity with those who did. A majority of American women by 1940 did, but a large percentage still did not. My father and his siblings, all of whom were in school during World War Two, did graduate from high school but my father's father had not and in fact had not even attended it. My mother, like my father, was a college graduate but interestingly not a high school graduate as she'd been taken out of school at age 16 to work. It's important to note that all of these people were highly intelligent. It's the situation that was different.
One of the differences is that was that work was generally grasped by the majority of people as something they needed to do to support themselves and their families. Often the economic quality fo work was judged in that fashion. Statements at the time, and even into my teen years, about the need to "get a good job to support a family" were common. I never heard, the entire time I was growing up, about anyone needing a good job in order to buy nice things or go on vacations. Rich people were not despised but they also were not really quite envied the way that they later were.
All of that started changing after World War Two but it really took into the 1970s and 80s for it to really get rolling. The generation that started the 1970s off singing Taking Care Of Business was digging Wall Street by the 1980s. Entire professions have ultimately come to be entirely money focused the way they never were before. As an example, in the 1910s and 20s it was common in mid sized cities and even in large towns for a physician to start a private hospital as sort of a community focused charitable and humanitarian endeavor. By the 1930s communities everywhere had taken over those institutions. Now, the government owned ones are being taken over by for profit companies. We've reprivatized, but now with the same focus.
Starting about a decade ago, however, Boomer employers started to notice that the generation just entering work had a much different focus on work. They were no longer that dedicated to it as an end all and be all. Large numbers of the entering generation were willing to drop out of work for long periods of time just to "experience things". Alternative work situations sprung up. As noted already on the discussion on agrarian returnees, many young, and well educated, members of society dropped out of traditional work situations entirely.
This lead to the quasi myth of the "slacker". To some extent this image has some validity as some members of the youngest work age generation came to give up hope of productive lives in an economy that's become increasingly urban and alien to human impulses. And the reduction in the societal expectation that couples marry and undertake the responsibilities that come along with that has lengthened childhood, particularly for men. But all throughout society the careerist goals and focus that existed into the 1990s has really declined and is almost dead among younger generations.
With women, this means that the lie about people finding "fulfillment" in their work, something promised by feminist, has been fully exposed. Almost nobody finds fulfillment at work. Now very few believe that and the discussion about that as an aspect of employment has vanished.
We're just on the cusp of this development and where it leads is hard to discern. To an extent, however, it returns people to a more traditional way of looking at work.
Also more traditional is the return of domestic situations which had seemed to vanish forever.
In 1981 when I graduated from high school it was the case that some high school colleagues were leaving their parents homes immediately and forever. This view is one that had come up in the 60s and 70s. But prior to that, as we've discussed before, it was uncommon. Men usually remained in their parents households until they married, or if they didn't, they usually had what they viewed as temporary living arrangements that were necessitated by work or school. Women exhibited this to an even larger degree. By the late 60s this was changing and a new world, imagined as glamours, came in. This was reflected to a degree in entertainment in such films as The Apartment from 1960, which depicted two young, unmarried, people who had living arrangements reflective of the period. Protagonist C. C. "Bud" Baxter has an apartment, in a building which we learn is otherwise generally urban and middle class (his neighbor is a married physician). The female protagonist, Fran Kubelik, is living with her sister and brother in law and engaged in an illicit relationship with the senior figure at her office.
Citing a movie might seem to be bad form, but that 1960 depiction is telling in many ways. Baxter is of an age at which in an earlier era he might be like the male figures in It's A Wonderful Life, living at home if they're not married. Kubelik isn't living at home, but the female protagonist is living with her married sister. She's also engaged in an illicit sexual affair but is not negatively portrayed in the film for it. Her last name, Kubelik, is one of strong ethnicity (Czech) and her brother in law is a blue collar taxi driver. Without really mentioning it, its subtly suggested that Kubelik isn't really fallen, and the budding romance between the WASP Baxter and the almost certainly Catholic Kubelik will work out.
We can read a lot into that, and The Apartment isn't regarded as a risque film by any measure. It stands in blistering contrast, however, to Marty, which portrayed a much different set of urban realities just five years earlier in 1955. The male protagonist is an aging blue collar meat cutter who wants to get married. He lives with his mother. The female protagonist is an aging school teacher who also wants to get married. Marty, when introducing his situation to her, emphasizes that he can likely buy the butcher shop where he works. Both of the characters are Catholic. A more recent treatment of the same themes is presented in the recent film Brooklyn, which is set in the same locality in the same era and basically treats all of the same issues identically.
Looking at it from a personal angle, my father left home for the first time, to live, when he went to the University of Nebraska. He then entered the Air Force. But when he got out of the service he returned home and lived at his mother's home (his father had died a decade prior) until my parents married. My mother, on the other hand, had entered the work force during World War Two due to economic desperation in her family in Quebec. She boldly moved out to Alberta at the invitation of an uncle who had employment for her there, and who wanted to try to separate her from the situation in Quebec which he felt was one of low prospect. At some point, and I"m not sure where, she lived with her sister, who also had left home and was working. She came to the United States to be a bridesmaid for another sister in Denver, over the objection of her uncle, and then came to this town as it had work, taking a basement apartment where the upstairs was occupied by the owner and her husband.
Now, we find, press reports that are full of the "new" trend of adult children returning to their parents homes.
This was going on before the recent Coronavirus pandemic, we should note, although there are now lots of news stories emphasizing it in that context, as its increased it. But this isn't a "new" phenomenon in real terms, but a return to a prior living standards, as noted above.
Some of this is due, we'd note, to the bulge in the snake phenomenon we've noted before. World War Two brought about a change in living conditions, although it took some time to fully manifest, as it forcibly separated a lot of young men from their households and it demanded the employment of a lot of young women. When the generation that fought the Second World War was sending its kids to school in the 1960s, in a lot of ways it was sending them away. This didn't seem that odd to them, as they'd been displaced young, and a generation that had been forced to enter the adult world before its time naturally, if highly imperfectly, saw that as the norm. The Baby Boom generation that had experienced that did as well, although they recall it imperfectly.
In reality we now know that people in their 20s fit into nearly another age related class than other people, or actually do. They're definitely not teenagers but they don't really have the reasoning faculties that pertain to adulthood in the same fashion that adults do. If they don't resemble teenagers in their thinking they often don't resemble adults of just a few years later either. Part of the massive disruption brought about by the 1960s reflected that as not only was it a time of great social change and cultural change, but the very young were being forced into it.
Since some point in the 1990s the same age demographic has taken themselves back out of that arena in large measure. Part of this is that they're simply smarker, and older if you will, than the same age group was in the 1960s and 1970s. It's created some interesting conflicts as the Boomer generation has continued to assume that life for it is as it was for them, in the 2020s, even though a lot of their generational decision making was horrifically bad.
At any rate, as this has played out, individuals in their 20s and 30s have found themselves moving back in with their parents. A lot of those parents are either very late stage Boomers or post Boomers themselves. The Boomer generation has reacted with some horror and surprise to this, and indeed, I've personally been told by one 1969 high school graduate that sending children far, far away to from their homes is part of the necessary experience of university. Maybe it is, or isn't, but if it is, it' ssomething that seems to reflect the view of those who went to university in the 60s, 70s and to some extent in the 80s. And a lot of that has to due with how people view work, which we've addressed above. Suffice it to say, however, that if the purpose of going to university is to get a "good job" and then pursue that job at all costs, well that's one thing. If its for something else, and may even be ancillary to your life, it's something else. That will impact a lot of a person's approach to these topics.
Not everything is changing, of course, and we're also not saying that Chesterton's observations about "going back" are coming into fruition, at least not in full. But some of going forward involves going back, and cultures are plastic and sticky. We've been living through an unprecedented era of history that goes back to the 1930s and present to our very day. The generation that came up in the 30s and 40s is still in power, but it very rapidly will cease to be. The ones taking their seats at the table are generations that have lived in the wake of the history of the Boomers and who have, in varying but large degrees, but unhappy with it. As the country is about to take a big jump to the political left, the evidence is that they're already looking for the exit to the right.
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*While guessing is premature, my guess is that Pope Francis recent statement on same gender "civil unions", made after we started this thread, will cause a small move from Catholicism to Orthodoxy among some Rad Tad Catholics, although it would be a bit ironic as what Pope Francis is suggesting appears to be an accomodation to the current civil reality, albeit one that's clearly extraordinary problematic from a Catholic perspective and one which requires correction. It's ironic in that the Orthodox did the same thing many years ago in regard to divorce and remarriage, which Orthodoxy tolerates up to three times in some instances.
