The first two points Damien made in "A Few Random Thoughts" actually brought to mind something I've thought about but haven't fully formed into an idea. That is, to what extent is American history in the post-war period really nothing more than the life story of the baby-boomers as a generation? From naivety and rebellion in the 60s and early 70s, to struggle and self-doubt in the 80s, to prosperity and achievement from the 90s to today it seems the classic story line of an upper-middle class person played out through an entire generation.
Shifting gears just a bit, for those interested in a glimpse of 1970s paternalism, I would recommend watching the Coleman-Mondale debate in 2002. You might remember that year Norm Coleman was running for the United States Senate against Paul Wellstone. The race was quite close when, two weeks before the election, Senator Wellstone was killed in a plane crash in northern Minnesota. The democrats replaced him on the ticket with former Vice-President Walter Mondale. The day before the election, Mondale and Coleman debated on national television. Mondale came off as a relic of the 70s that stood in stark contrast to a more modern (though certainly not ideal) candidate. His government-as-provider positions were of an earlier generation and had not gone through the smoothing process that most liberal democrats on the national stage suffer from today. Unfortunately for Mondale, his rough edges proved to be his undoing.
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Scott makes some great points, although I think his baby boomer analogy suffers from a decade lag: I mean that surely by the 80s American foreign policy was not plagued by self doubt, and perhaps in our own day we are experiencing the fruits of Clintonian abandon in indulgence of the pleasure of our hegemony.
To Mondale's credit, he now admits that in his 1984 debate with Reagan, where Reagan had that great line about how he would not use his opponent's youth and inexperience against him (thereby undercuting the Mondale subtext argument that Reagan was too old), that in fact at that moment he knew that he had lost the election. But I agree entirely with Scott that Mondale represents an unreconstructed liberal.
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