We need a shared dream with a powerful emotional draw — an ideal so beautiful that it grabs you by the soul, captures your heart, and never lets go.
And the older among us have seen an example of such an ideal — a beautiful vision that transformed our nation so wondrously that MAGA has been tirelessly trying to obliterate its accomplishments for 55 years. Its very existence became one of MAGA’s very oldest and undying grudges.
The Hippie Movement and the Sexual Revolution.
Its compelling beauty and idealistic allure gave rise to an entire genre of popular music, the natural foods industry, liberation from rigid conformity, and gave us the environmentally conscious ideals and goals that still guide many of us today.
It’s no wonder that the mere mention of the Counterculture burns MAGA scalps to a blackened crisp to this very day.
What Happened?
Quite simply, cowardice: a deep-seated fear of making any full-throated defense of it, stemming from a culturally ingrained Puritanism that persisted even among some of the Counterculture’s own participants.
Beginning in the late 1980s and accelerating into the 1990s, the Left — or at least the Establishment Left — began giving in to and appeasing right wing Puritanism, believing that repudiating Sexual Revolution ideals was the path to remaining relevant and electable.
Remember the great Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders? President Bill Clinton, a Democrat, fired Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders in a shockingly cowardly move simply because she stated a very plain and simple fact about human sexuality: masturbation is perfectly normal, healthy, and maybe ought to be mentioned as a stigma-free option in sex education classes.
What could be controversial about that? It’s entirely true. Yet President Clinton, ever the capitulating coward that he was, fired the so-called “Condom Queen” simply for stating a simple biological fact.
The Race Toward the New Victorianism Was On
After the Clinton years, most of the Left was now striving to one-up the Right in a contest to see who could be the biggest prudes. The “#MeToo” movement railroaded and ruined the lives of men for innocent remarks in elevators or playful photos from one’s past. Reality check: it was not a grope. Look at the shadows.
The Left has won the neo-Puritan contest. Sex-negative feminism has drowned out sex-positive feminism. The Left is now more uptight and Puritanical than the Right when it comes to the sight of human skin.
In the 1970s, the popular slogan was “the human body is beautiful, not indecent.” Today, the Left acts as if Melania Trump having posed nude is a damaging mark against her character. Melania’s character may have its faults, but posing nude isn’t a factor. Similarly, the Left treats Ghislaine Maxwell’s posing nude on the beach as a newsworthy example of her evils. No. Ghislaine Maxwell is guilty of plenty of evils, but being nude on the beach isn’t one of them.
Today some wonder why is Gen Z so sex-negative. Part of it is surely due to the fact that all sex-positive content and messaging had been driven out of the media 30 years ago. They literally have never been exposed to sex-positive messaging in mainstream media.
The Next Powerful, Passionate and Compelling Movement
The details of it remain to be seen, but whatever takes shape, it will be because an idea whose sublime and overpowering beauty will have recaptured the soul and dreams of a country. History may not repeat its 1970s self but it is likely to rhyme, and we can accelerate the process simply by creating beauty in an ugly world and seeing what takes off.
Beauty is the disinfectant for hate and ugliness. MAGA hates beauty and hates everything that is beautiful.
So, go and create beauty, sowing beautiful ideas wherever you go, and sooner or later, something among them will seize the hearts and souls of Americans — again.
