DR. THOMAS FLEMING: The 1960s set in motion the destruction of the American middle class.

Dr. Thomas Fleming. 

Dr. Thomas Fleming: The 1960s set in motion the destruction of the American middle class. pic.twitter.com/yDn4H63yM9

— Pol Atreides (@Aliathewhite) February 21, 2026

Yeah, it kind of gives a whole new meaning to the lyrics by Kris Kristofferson in the 1970 song, "Me and Bobby McGee," released posthumously in 1971, of "Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose."

     

00:00  I think that what we did in the '60s and '70s was largely to make war on all the little communities in America, to make war on local government, to make war on state government, to make war on the churches, to make war on the family, and the name of this game is "Personal Liberation."  So, for example, we had easy, "No fault" divorce, 1969 [in American; 1917 in Soviet Union].  That was the big revolution in the 60s and 70s.  And, of course, it turns out that women . . . this has been disastrous for women, because the man goes on with his high status income and women and their dependent children are left with nothing.  And I think that's a metaphor for a lot of what is, in fact, going on, and we have created a greater dependency of families and communities and individuals upon the national government, and I think all of that has been very bad.  I think it's not just that the 1980s are more liberal and accepting of things like drugs and social pathology, it's also that all of the places, where wholeness is created, where health and vitality are created, things like the family, things like local County governments, these have been eroded and torn apart and, in some cases, destroyed, including black community participation.  One of the things the Civil Rights Movement did unintentionally was to destroy the old black communal leadership in the United States and we see the price of that in the Inner City in Chicago and Detroit.

1:43.  You know there was no real conservative opposition in the 1960s.  The conservatives I knew then were obsessed with economics and getting out the vote and they didn't understand that the impulses behind the '60s revolution were as much reactionary impulses as they were leftist impulses.  The desire to restore Community, concern for the environment, a return to the isolationism, for example, of the pre-World War II period.  These were all hallmarks of American conservatism. Even something like folk music, which was so big in the 60s.  What could be more, ah, more reactionary, more conservative than a desire to resurrect the music of Appalachia, the music of our forefathers? People started wearing what they thought were old fashioned clothes.  They wanted to recapture they said they wanted to recapture the sense of frontier life and rural life.  And these are all very conservative impulses, but then you meet atypical conservative and all he wants is a house in the suburbs and two cars.  And they were the enemy.  So by not being conservative, by being nothing but cold, free-market Cold Warriors, they missed a great chance, and it's not going to come again.

3:05.  The labels Liberal and Conservative used to mean something fairly clear.  A liberal used to mean somebody who believed in the individual, who believed in the free market, who believed that you should break down all the barriers toward individual self-expression . . . this meant destroying the church or weakening the power of parents within their family, destroying social classes, all sorts of conventions, this is what liberals were in favor of.  

3:30.  What conservatives were interested in doing we're preserving a kind of cultural order, preserving a tradition, preserving a sense of sacredness; even if they weren't particularly religious themselves, they had to preserve that sense of the sacred.  And what happened in the 1940s and 50s was that conservatism got defined as . . . well, as what used to be called Liberal.  In other words, the free market is everything, the individual is everything, forget family, forget everything essentially but the marketplace and the defense of the nation, you know, because the old liberals were also great colonialists. And the people who called themselves liberals were, in fact, socialists, or worse.  What was somebody with something like a conservative worldview going to do?  There was no place.  There was no label.  There was no party.  There was no movement.  And it's like conservative environmentalist today.  The greatest environmental thinker, the most powerful philosopher of conservation today is Wendell Berry who is a conservative.  He lives off in his little farm in rural Kentucky.  He writes these books about how about managing his own little family farm.  He's a Christian. He's a traditionalist, but he's on the board of the Sierra Club.  Why?. Because there's no conservative organization that would welcome Wendell Berry. They think he's the devil incarnate, and that in a nutshell is the failure of American conservatism.  Not to make a place for the real social and cultural and moral conservatives who have surfaced from time to time.  Jack Kerouac was a conservative, and nobody knew that.

Why?

Why was he a conservative?  He thought of himself as a man of the right.  He was a patriot.  He was a rugged old-fashioned individualist, but he loved America.  He hated all this rise of America bashing of the '60s, and he's quite an interesting person. Obviously he was a moral anarchist in some sense, but way down deep he had these kind of impulses of a Baudelaire, who is also a conservative . . . .