In 1976, the year I turned 15, the Bicentennial of the United States of America was commemorated. I was in 10th grade at a New York City private school where my best teachers had either been red-diaper babies (that is, children of Stalinists) or men who had stayed in graduate school for 10 years to avoid the draft and hadn’t gotten their doctorates—or a combination of the two. The thing was, they were excellent at what they did. They were well-read and literate—and even though they made us plough through ideologically driven works like the Marxist scholar E.P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class, they were fun to listen to and engage with.

In the spring of 1976, classes were cancelled as the school brought both students and parents together for a kind of conference on the Bicentennial. That conference had a theme. The theme was: “The American Dream: Has It Turned Into a Nightmare?”

And what, do you suppose, the answer to the question was? You know what the answer was. America had just fought a monstrously unjust war. Racist parents opposed busing kids in public school. Capitalists were polluting our air and our water. Watergate had just ripped the fabric of our government in two. Our prisons were too full, our drug laws too draconian, our system unjust, our nation poisonous.

Parents (well, not my parents, but the parents of everybody else) nodded appreciatively—these stockbrokers and lawyers and magazine editors and psychiatrists, most of them a single generation removed from Jewish-immigrant poverty, many of whom had borne children, my classmates, who would end up, 20 years after being handed their Ivy degrees, richer than Croesus from the Wall Street boom and the M&A boom and the beginning of the tech boom and every other boom that America just keeps booming for them and for us.

This was a moment frozen in time, in which the people who had been given the most by America believed the only honest intellectual approach to understanding this country was, basically, to spit on it. Tom Wolfe offered the peerless portrait of the type in a 1977 essay called “Mauve Gloves and Madmen, Clutter and Vine,” about a writer facing the horror of the bills on his Upper West Side apartment and his Martha’s Vineyard house and his bespoke London boots before rolling a piece of paper into his typewriter and banging out the words “RECESSION AND REPRESSION POLICE STATE: AMERICA AND THE SPIRIT OF ’76.”

Wolfe’s conception of “radical chic” was once almost exclusively the purview of the comfortable American left, and indeed, its ludicrous prevalence was part of the secret sauce that led to the Reagan Revolution just four years later. Well, here we are, 50 years after “The American Dream: Has It Turned Into a Nightmare?” And now it’s time for us to commemorate the 250th anniversary of the United States. Only now the mauve-gloved madmen are not the exclusive province of the left. Now they include the multimillion-dollar-earning podcasters in their flannel checkered shirts who lick the undersides of Vladimir Putin’s feet the way Tom Wolfe’s writer would have licked the underside of Fidel Castro’s. They are the think tank presidents who lick the undersides of the feet of the podcasters who lick the undersides of Putin’s feet.

Watch them carefully as July 4 approaches. Watch them spit on America the way my red-diaper baby teachers did. They, too, are clever and able and well-spoken. And they, too, are purveyors of nonsense and evil for profit.

Photo: Tom Brenner/Getty Images

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