After the anti-Vietnam War turmoil of the late 1960s and early 1970s, Midge Decter wrote an outstanding book called Liberal Parents, Radical Children detailing a generation gap between young militants demanding an end to the Vietnam War  with a quasi-Utopian challenge to the “establishment” and their standard-issue liberal, mostly Democrat parents who did not call American troops “war criminals” nor did they blame America first for every ill in the universe.

When the war and the draft ended, the protests subsided and even stalwarts of the protests like Senator Eugene McCarthy and David Horowitz, editor of the radical magazine Ramparts and now editor of the conservative FrontPage, announced their support for Ronald Reagan.

Other protesters then turned their sights on community organizations and councils, the academy, and the media, but nothing has prepared parents and the general public for the present outpouring of support for Hamas terrorists and hatred for Israel among students.

As Victor Davis Hanson has stated: 

The sheer madness that has gripped many elite universities since October 7 and the butchery, rape, torture, and mutilation of some 1,000 Israeli civilians by Hamas murderers have shocked the public at large.  Campus craziness is, of course, nothing new. But quite novel for campuses was the sudden jettisoning of prior campus pretenses. Universities have brazenly dropped their careful two-faced gymnastics to reveal at last -- unapologetic, proudly, and defiantly -- the moral decay that now characterizes American higher education.

Noah Rothman adds: 

Younger Americans, aged 18 to 24, disagree with their elders. This demographic is split almost down the middle when asked if the slaughter of senior citizens, the rape of young women, the murder of children, and the immolation of whole families in their homes was justified. Indeed, a slight majority of respondents in this age group said the butchery could be “justified by the grievance of Palestinians.” What’s more, only a bare majority of this demographic backs Israel in this conflict. Forty-eight percent said they side not with Palestinians but explicitly with “Hamas” in this war.

But why blame only the media and the academies? Who are the parents?

That’s a rhetorical question. I know the parents. They are smug hypocrites who vociferously defend affirmative action but pay expensive tutors to give their own kids a leg up. They parrot trendy views on gender, cancel culture, trigger words, pronouns, and perceived offenses. They favor open borders, defunding police, bail reform across the board, and sanction the violence and arson occasioned by the death of George Floyd. They’ve ignored the drumbeat of rising anti-Semitism and support overtly racist organizations like Black Lives Matter. They ignore the turpitude of those who pervert truth and history by denying American exceptionalism and vie with their offspring on all liberal cant and demand for “flexible” history, science, and biology.

The Jews among them are called self-hating but that does not fit. They are self-loving with their preening. They see themselves as an aggrieved minority which rises above others with their empathy for both sides of every conflict and every issue. They curb all debate and dissent in their loathing of Donald Trump and Bibi Netanyahu while ignoring racist genocides throughout the world. They are mildly troubled by anti-Semitic leftist legislators and commentators because they “know where they are coming from.”  But now that the rising tide of global antisemitism is lapping at their toes, they are alarmed but blaming conservatives. Zero insight.

Midge Decter wrote:

“One need subscribe to no school of thought beyond that of the plainest common sense to be aware that the behavior of the members of my class and generation as parents has had the greatest bearing on your behavior as our children.”

“We refused to assume, one of the central obligations of parenthood: to make ourselves the final authority on good and bad, right and wrong, and to take the consequences of what might turn out to be a lifelong battle.… We allowed you a charade of trivial freedoms in order to avoid making those impositions on you that are in the end both the training ground and proving ground for true independence. We pronounced you strong when you were still weak in order to avoid the struggles with you that would have fed your true strength. We proclaimed you sound when you were foolish in order to avoid taking part in the long, slow, slogging effort that is the only route to genuine maturity of mind and feeling.”

Will the parents of the ignorant brats who rally on elite campuses even confront and scold them for complicity in promoting evil? Another rhetorical question. 

Image: Ted Eytan