A really great and insightful, if strongly worded, first-hand account of the 1960s in American political culture, and how the resentment of a rising new liberal generation has fuelled the middle-class conservative backlash.

The G.I. Bill made college a normal option, for a huge chunk of families who weren’t particularly rich. And soon, like many perks that once marked the aristocracy, it became something desirable, then something almost required of those who were striving. My father’s family was one of those. They grew up, ten kids, in a house about the size of your garage in the slums of Jersey City. The war freed them from that claustrophobic Irish-Catholic ghetto and they strove successfully—most of them, anyway. Our failed outpost in the California suburbs was the exception. It wasn’t easy for educated white people to fail completely in California in the post-war years, but we managed it. And still we gave our allegiance to Reagan’s counterrevolution, his long war to destroy the government initiatives that had given all our successful uncles their chance. In fact, our poverty contributed to the virulence of our resentment of those students, those lucky swarms of Berkeley kids who mouthed off and didn’t have to work.

They hated the notion that kids no better than their own (or so they believed) were daring to ape the rich by getting respected university degrees—and worse still, they lacked the patronizing discretion of the truly privileged who’d preceded them. The people on my street never resented the really rich. What they hated was middle-class people having pleasure, having sex without punishment, ease without the grasshopper’s winter comeuppance.