As an aging, leading edge baby boomer who remembers the Vietnam/Watergate era as the most intense period of my life, I’m struck by the sagacity of James Taranto’s “Iraq and the Liberal Baby Boomers.”

I began this blog on September 16, 2004, with a post titled “Vietnam, Iraq, and America’s Future.” Here are the first two paragraphs:

Vietnam. Its been almost 30 years since the American withdrawal, but here it is again, and as divisive as ever. For this aging baby boomer who protested but didn’t serve, the mere mention of the word brings back a flood of mostly but not entirely nightmarish memories. Credibility gap. Generation gap. Quagmire. Love it or leave it. Hard hats. Freaks. Hippies. Yippies. SDS. Weather Underground. Boston Moratorium. March on Washington. Chicago Democratic Convention. Mayor Daley. Police Riot. Chicago Seven. Tet Offensive. Martin Luther King. Bobby Kennedy. Clean for Gene. George McGovern. Pentagon Papers. Kent State. Cambodia. Nixon’s Secret Plan. The Silent Majority. Watergate. And on and on and on . . .

Oh, I almost forgot the good part. Like me, my friends had started or would soon start graduate school. But graduate student draft deferments were eliminated, so, like me, they dropped out of school and found a way to avoid becoming cannon fodder. While we differed in the extent of our alienation from American society, we had a common enemy: our government. Neither before nor since have I felt so close to so many people. To top it all off, we, and millions like us, were right about Johnson and Nixon. They were both liars, and Nixon was a tyrant. Boy, did we feel vindicated when he was forced to resign from office. My generation saw through all the lies long before our parents and grandparents. We changed the world.

Later in the post, I said this:

As I said before, my generation’s opposition to the war in Vietnam changed the world. Unfortunately, many of my age-cohorts have failed to recognize that the world is a vastly different place than when they were chanting “Hell no, we won’t go” and the most radical of them were saying “Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh, NLF [the National Liberation Front] is going to win.” It’s as if they’ve been waiting all these years for an opportunity to again march in the streets.

[ . . . ] Some members of my generation who opposed the Vietnam war (intervention in support of a tyrannical government) and now oppose the Iraq war (intervention in opposition to a tyrannical government) consider the US to be a “rogue state” that’s a greater danger to world peace than Saddam’s Iraq, Iran, and North Korea. Now in their 50’s, a goodly number of my age-cohorts occupy senior positions in academia and the media, and are therefore positioned to influence the perspectives of younger Americans.

Their influence on the national mood causes me grave concern.

If you keep my words in mind, you’ll understand why I’ve decided to post all of Taranto’s words, which now follow.

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In an essay on CBS News’s Web site, the network’s Dotty Lynch laments the lack of anti-Iraq sentiment among kids today:

As the war in Iraq rages on I keep asking myself: Where are the young people this time around? Where are the campuses? Where are the new Tom Haydens and Sam Browns and where are the Noam Chomskys, William Sloane Coffins and Daniel Berrigans?

For the past four months, I was at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, surrounded by idealistic young people and their liberal professors. There was virtually no support for the war (except for the offspring of a few famous neo-cons) but neither was there serious organized activity to try to stop it.

Large groups of students traveled to New Orleans to help rebuild it and another group went to Washington to protest the genocide in Darfur. But why so quiet about Iraq?

Lynch, who says that as a lass during the Vietnam era she “was passionately against the war,” then considers various theories to explain why Iraq is not another Vietnam. It’s pretty trite stuff, but what’s interesting is the underlying premise: that Vietnam is the norm—that in the usual course of things, as we put it a while back, “a war is supposed to become a quagmire, which provokes opposition and leads to American withdrawal.”

America’s defeat in Vietnam was a triumph for Americans of a certain ideological and generational profile. Arthur Sulzberger Jr., publisher of the New York Times, made this clear earlier this month in a commencement address at the State University of New York’s New Paltz campus:

When I graduated from college in 1974, my fellow students and I had just ended the war in Vietnam and ousted President Nixon. OK, that’s not quite true. Yes, the war did end and yes, Nixon did resign in disgrace—but maybe there were larger forces at play.

Either way, we entered the real world committed to making it a better, safer, cleaner, more equal place. We were determined not to repeat the mistakes of our predecessors. We had seen the horrors and futility of war and smelled the stench of corruption in government.

Our children, we vowed, would never know that.

So, well, sorry. It wasn’t supposed to be this way.

This wonderfully encapsulates several elements of the liberal baby-boomer mindset. First, the self-congratulation: “My fellow students and I had just ended the war in Vietnam and ousted President Nixon.” Even Sulzberger, however, is self-aware enough to present this with some irony: “OK, that’s not quite true. . . . Maybe there were larger forces at play.”

Then, the perversity of reveling in tragedy. To most Americans, the retreat from Vietnam and the resignation of Nixon were at best necessary evils; but to the liberal baby boomer they were, and at least to Sulzberger they remain, points of pride. The baleful consequences of Vietnam and Watergate—boat people, the Khmer Rouge’s massacres, the presidency of Jimmy Carter, the impeachment of Bill Clinton—go unmentioned in Sulzberger’s speech.

But Sulzberger also makes clear that his generation’s celebration of Vietnam and Watergate was not solely, perhaps not even primarily, malicious in nature. It was motivated by a kind of misguided adolescent idealism: “We had seen the horrors and futility of war and smelled the stench of corruption in government,” Sulzberger proclaims. “Our children, we vowed, would never know that.”

As a newly minted college grad back in the 1970s, Sulzberger imagined that Vietnam and Watergate spelled the end of war and corruption. He still hasn’t outgrown his disappointment that this turned out not to be the case. He knows his intentions were pure and is still wrestling with whether the world let him down or he let the world down.

In his new book, “White Guilt: How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era” (available from the OpinionJournal bookstore), Shelby Steele reflects on the origins and endurance of this attitude:

One purpose of youthful rebellion is to put one’s self at odds with adult authority not so much to defeat it as to be defeated by it. . . . But if the young win their rebellion against the old, their rite of passage to maturity is cut short and they are falsely inflated rather than humbled. Uninitiated, they devalue history rather than find direction in it, and feel entitled to break sharply and even recklessly from the past.

The sixties generation of youth is very likely the first generation in American history to have actually won its adolescent rebellion against its elders. One of the reasons for this, if not the primary reason, is that this generation came of age during the age of white guilt, which meant that its rebellion ran into an increasingly uncertain adult authority. . . . It doesn’t matter, for example, that there was honor in America’s acknowledgment of moral wrong in the area of race. An acknowledgment of wrong was an acknowledgment of wrong, and it brought a loss of moral authority—and thus, adult authority—despite the good it achieved.

In fact, the baby boomers were too young to be implicated one way or another in the civil rights struggle: The oldest of them turned 18 in 1964, the year Congress passed the Civil Rights Act. All of the credit for the triumph of civil rights, as well as the blame for what it had to overcome, belongs to earlier generations.

But the success of the civil rights movement might have fed the baby boomers’ political delusions in another way. When Sulzberger was born in 1951, Jim Crow still prevailed. He was 2 when the U.S. Supreme Court decided Brown v. Board of Education and 12 when the Civil Rights Act became law. By the time he finished college at 22, American racism was history (though of course some of its aftereffects linger to this day).

The triumph of civil rights was the culmination of a struggle that began before the Civil War, but to a boy growing up in the 1960s and coming of age in the early 1970s, it must have seemed to have happened very suddenly. If this is so, then there was a certain logic to Sulzberger’s triumphalism circa 1974: If America could so quickly abolish racism, why shouldn’t it be able to vanquish war and corruption with equal ease—or, indeed, with greater ease, given how enlightened Sulzberger and his cohorts imagined themselves to be?

Baby-boomer liberalism, with its smug sense of moral superiority and its impatience with America’s imperfections, is today the prevailing worldview among many of our elite institutions, not least the so-called mainstream media. This explains why Dotty Lynch is puzzled that Iraq hasn’t become another Vietnam.

The answer to her question is that Iraq isn’t Vietnam because “Vietnam” was the product of a peculiar set of conditions at an unusual moment in history—a moment that has long since passed.