My whole life has had a broader Democratic party (electeds, magazine writers, think tankers, etc.) stuffed with people (not just! but them too!) whose primary purpose seemed to be relitgating the 1972 Democratic primary over and over again and making sure the fucking hippies (and women and gays and minorities) who voted for McGovern (and before that, RUINED EVERYTHING INCLUDING THEIR LOVELY LITTLE WAR IN VIETNAM) never worked in This Town Again.
That's exaggeration, of course, but The Discourse of the 90s and the aughts didn't make any sense to me until I understood that bit.
It is not an exaggeration to say that DC is filled with people who will back a genocide to the end, and put Donald Trump in power, rather than admit the hippies are right about anything. Yelling at hippies, and blaming them for their own mistakes, is why they are in politics.
Yes the hippies are almost dead, but the people in power will burn the world down before letting "generational shift" happen.
Young (then) nerds like Jon Chait would write glowingly about Scoop Jackson (contrasting what could have been to "when the Democratic Party's foreign policy remained in the grip of McGovernism") in the aughts to please the editors who signed their checks.
The death and destruction caucus among professional Democrats remains powerful, and their second favorite hobby is yelling at hippies.
