Stumbling Toward Utopia: How the 1960s Turned Into a National Nightmare and How We Can Revive the American Dream

“In this short but important book, Goeglein identifies the progressive culprits whose ideas led to the radical transformation of America’s culture.”

Tim Goeglein, who served as a special assistant to President George W. Bush and now works for the global Christian ministry Focus on the Family, has written a new book entitled Stumbling Toward Utopia that diagnoses the source of contemporary America’s societal ills but shies away from advocating the counterrevolutionary activities that are required to remedy those ills.

Goeglein is not the first conservative writer to blame the 1960s for the decline of morality, education malfeasance, the normalizing of deviance, the rise of fiscal indiscipline, the undermining of the family unit, the impotence of traditional religion, and the intensity of political division that plague our society. And he traces the source of the 1960s social revolution to the progressive movement of the early 20th century.

In this short but important book, Goeglein identifies the progressive culprits whose ideas led to the radical transformation of America’s culture. These include thinkers like Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Herbert Marcuse, and Friedrich Nietzsche, who denied the existence of God and promoted their versions of Utopia on earth. Their ideas influenced the activities of early American progressives like John Dewey who reshaped public education in America, Roger Baldwin who founded the American Civil Liberties Union, and Margaret Sanger who founded Planned Parenthood.

Perhaps the most consequential of the early progressives was Woodrow Wilson, an academic who became President of the United States where he began the process of institutionalizing the federal government as the “nanny” for Americans, viewing the Constitution as a “‘living document’ designed to adapt and conform to [changing] societal norms.” Wilson, Goeglein writes, “laid the groundwork for . . . blurring the clearly defined roles between the executive, legislative, and judicial branches” of the federal government.

Wilson’s progressivism led to the rise of what Goeglein called a “politically elite class” who exercised greater and more invasive power over the American citizenry. This was not just an American phenomenon. European sociologists like Vilfredo Pareto, Robert Michels, and Gaetano Mosca wrote persuasively about the ubiquity of “ruling classes” throughout the world. The American political philosopher James Burnham in The Managerial Revolution and The Machiavellians expanded on their writings and applied them to America’s own “ruling class.”

Goeglein notes that the progressive world view gradually gained influence in the United States, but that prior to the 1960s it was often held at bay by the perseverance among America’s middle class of a culture that highly prized traditional moral values, the traditional family unit, fiscal discipline and personal responsibility, a biblical worldview, and a patriotic nationalism.

America’s 1960s cultural revolution emerged in the midst of opposition to the Vietnam War and promotion of the Civil Rights movement. Progressives took over both movements and used them to begin a process of infiltrating America’s social, educational, entertainment, media, religious, and political institutions to enable their radical transformation into vehicles for leftist indoctrination and public policies.

The key progressives of the 1960s, Goeglein writes, include Hugh Hefner who normalized pornography and deviant lifestyles, and exploited women; Tom Hayden and the Students for a Democratic Society who promoted leftist control of academic institutions and who demonstrated and popularized contempt for American ideals; Saul Alinsky whose Rules for Radicals served as a playbook for so-called “community activists” (including future First Lady, Senator and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and future U.S. President Barack Obama) to gain institutional power; and Lyndon Johnson who as president launched a “war on poverty” that greatly expanded federal power and control over American lives but did more harm than good to the very people it was supposed to help.

The cultural revolution of the 1960s, Goeglein writes, resulted in the decline of two-parent families, a rise in crime, a dramatic rise in the use of illegal drugs, a decline in educational outcomes, an ever-growing national debt, the increased sexualization of children, more than 60 million legally aborted babies, an entertainment industry marred by violence, deviancy, and perversion, the decline of traditional religious values, demographic decline, the ubiquity of “wokeness,” and intense political division.

Goegelin’s solution to America’s contemporary ills is for conservatives to embrace their cultural values, show up at school board meetings, produce entertainment programs that promote conservative values, be “positive lights in our communities,” and “work to build consensus, rather than seek to bludgeon others into submission.”

What Goeglein misses is that those “others” are seeking to bludgeon conservatives into submission. What is needed is not working to build consensus,” but rather a cultural and political counter-revolution that regains control of those institutions by conservatives. Such a counter-revolution is accomplished at the voting booths, inside the faculties and administrations of schools, on corporate boards, in religious seminaries, and in media boardrooms, anchor desks, publishing houses, and editorial rooms.

The current far left ruling class will continue to pursue the progressive agenda until it is replaced by a conservative ruling class.