by Randall Smith

There's an old saying, "Choose your enemies wisely; you become like them."

As the years have passed, I have seen more and more illustrations of it - children, for example, who hated their parents but then became like them. Indeed, there was a whole generation of Boomers who made "the older generation" into their enemies. They resented them for standing in the way of "counter-cultural" new things that the younger generation wanted, insisting instead that they stay on the paths their elders had laid out for them. The older generation controlled many of America's institutions, especially colleges and universities, and the younger generation resented that control and strove to break through the stifling hold their elders had on power.

Now, many of those Boomers are themselves part of the older generation that refuses to get out of the way to allow counter-cultural "conservative" youth to stray from the liberal, progressive path the Boomers laid out for them. Boomers who now control most of America's institutions, especially colleges and universities, no longer have a philosophy of "Let a hundred flowers bloom." When they see a little sprig of doctrinal orthodoxy or conservatism starting to shoot up, they stomp it out, much the way their elders did to youth groups they didn't like in the Sixties and Seventies.

So too, in the Church, the counter-cultural Boomers who thought the Church needed to be "updated" and insisted that the oldsters "get out of their way" are now the ones who still act as though it's 1972 and the "spirit of Vatican II" (but not the letter) reigns in the Church, thus everything must go forward the way they envisioned in those heady days when they were overthrowing "the man." But when the younger generation shows any evidence of "counter-cultural" Catholicism - interest in a serious study of the Christian intellectual life and Church doctrine, more reverent worship, and traditional forms of Christian art and architecture - these are treated like weeds that must be starved or ripped out. The Boomer motto seems to be: "You will pry power from our cold, dead hands."

Perhaps the saddest example of this refusal to bow to new, more conservative realities can be found in religious orders that have insisted on closing their doors and turning out the lights on their order rather than allow the members of the younger, more orthodox generation to fill their depleted ranks. So convinced are they of the rightness of their cause and of the path they see themselves as having pioneered, some have gone so far as to claim that more vocations just isn't the will of the Holy Spirit. This is to make the grave error of mistaking their own will and what they took to be "the spirit of the age" for the will of the Holy Spirit.

You might rightly ask me: "You seem to have made these people your enemies. Shouldn't you be careful about doing that?" Absolutely. It is easy to see the speck in someone else's liberal eye, especially when the vision is so blurry because of the plank in one's own.

There seems to be a resurgence of a conservatism of a certain sort. But something one notices is that it sometimes resembles the progressive liberalism it sought to overthrow. It insists that it is devoted to free speech while shutting down or shouting down those who disagree with "the party line." Try, now, among a group of "party" conservatives to defend Zelensky and Ukraine. "There's corruption there!" (And there isn't in Russia?) "They caused the war!" (Yeah, just the way Poland caused World War II.)

But it's not just Ukraine. A host of issues are now out of bounds if they are perceived as contrary to "what Trump wants." And here I thought something we didn't like about liberal progressivism was that it had become a cult of personality around "stars" like AOC and "the squad." I thought we disliked that Nancy Pelosi had so cowed the Democrats in Congress that there was no more "voting one's conscience"; instead, Democrats always v...