The generalizations about the late 1960s as being when the cultural pivot happened happen to be true

 Neo-neocon has been a blogger I have found confounding to read over the years. She's clearly smart and well-read. She has demonstrated depth in her addressing of many subjects. She commands my respect for being a convert to conservatism. I'm always interested in further investigating someone like that. 

But her blogging style has on more than a few occasions worn me out. She indulges freely in her pet obsessions, particularly ballet and modern dance. I don't care for good cultural observers and polemicists doing that when it's sports, music or even food. Set up a separate blog for that stuff. 

And she's nerdy as hell. She refers to old posts with a steel-trap memory for what she wrote when, and can even refer to sources she linked to in ancient posts. She sometimes comes across like a walking footnote. It gets tiresome. 

But when she nails it, she nails it. Such is the case, in the course of discussing last night's debate, when she - pretty successfully, I'd say - tries to pinpoint the moment in the late 1960s when it really changed:

The decline is in society at large, and I think it started in the late 60s. I was in college then, and I remember it well. It was surprisingly sudden. I started out in a world of rules and curfews and dress and behavior requirements, and then they were almost entirely gone by the time I emerged at the other end. It wasn’t just at school, either. Adults who had never uttered an expletive in public were suddenly eff-this and eff-that.

She's exactly right. Between 1965 and 1969, the guardrails came off.

Books have been written and will continue to be written about why this is so. I may someday write one myself, seeing as how I lived through it. Those were my formative years, in fact. Ages nine through thirteen. The value system my parent were trying to instill in me was no competition for The Beatles and Jimi Hendrix. 

The second, third, fourth-generation fruits of all that were on display last night, from all angles. From the Democrat embrace of progressive notions such as that the climate is in dire trouble, that gender is fluid and white people bear some kind of collective guilt, to Donald Trump's carefree use of vulgar rhetoric and his sybaritic past, we are living out the consequences of what we permitted to happen to our culture during that five-year period.

This must be grappled with at some point, or we will not have any sense of how we might repair the damage.