A few weeks ago in Denver I had the opportunity for some up close and personal time with the Occupy movement, and what I saw was about what you would expect. These are marginal and marginally intelligent people who have grown up conditioned by public educators and the welfare state to believe that they’re something special and entitled to the good life just because they’re special and entitled to the good life. And they’ve also been brainwashed to believe that if America doesn’t acknowledge their specialness and if, indeed, they’re not enjoying the good life, the problem must be a corrupt America.

Occupy is all about greed, self-actualization, and narcissism. The fastest and easiest way to feel superior is to assume the role of a victim … because a victim is always superior to his or her oppressors.

Occupy is also an army the left and Alinksy-style community organizers like Barack Obama have been breeding for decades. The formula is simple: feed enough self-esteem to those who don’t deserve it and you create an entire generation of entitled crybabies desperate to direct the frustration of their unfulfilled lives at whomever.

The left thought they had found the right moment to launch their Army of the Frustrated. With Obama’s poll numbers in the tank and the crippled economy unable to leap on a white stallion to save him, the idea was to launch Occupy in the hopes it would change the 2012 election conversation and media narrative from Obama’s failed record to ground upon which he might be able to win reelection: income inequality and those evil one-percenters on Wall Street who destroyed the economy.

And so the filthy, frustrated, and brain-fried, under the direction of their Adbuster Masters (more about this below), took to the streets, and for a few weeks the plan went perfectly. High-profile Democrats, including President Obama, endorsed and encouraged them, while the corrupt MSM worked overtime to cover up the movement’s hundreds of subhuman misdeeds (literally) and held it up as an example of all that is pure and righteous in America.

But then something happened the left and their media allies didn’t expect. They had woefully underestimated the power of New Media to expose the truth, and expose the truth we did, until the Occupy dream all came crashing down in an overwhelming narrative (overwhelming because it was true) involving Occupy’s frightening tolerance for rape, violence, vandalism, and public masturbation and defecation.

Occupy Wall Street was a pretty important pre-season game leading up to the 2012 election, and Obama and his Media Palace Guards haven’t even started licking their wounds from the New Media ass kicking they took. And the bad news for Occupiers is that they’re now scampering off the field, tail tucked between their legs, and desperate to untie themselves from the political liability these Occupiers have become.

If you don’t believe me, Occupy, here are six undeniable signs that the same media and leftist elites who promised you air cover in the revolution that would finally fulfill your frustrated dreams have just left you swinging in the wind, fully exposed and more than a little humiliated with nowhere to go:

1. MSM Is No Longer Infatuated With Occupy: Other than the big stories surrounding Occupy evictions, the mainstream media’s all but stopped covering the Occupy movement. 12 to 14 hours a day the cable nets are on in my office, and even leftist CNN and far-left MSNBC have ceased trying to use the Occupiers as a way to jump-start Obama-friendly narratives about taxing the rich and how Wall Street is to blame for Obama’s failed economy.

No more on-the-street profiles of earnest young Occupy faces just looking to make the world a more fair and equal place.

And I can pinpoint the day this occurred. The day after GOP presidential front-runner Newt Gingrich suggested Occupy take a bath and get a job, both CNN and MSNBC went apoplectic in the hopes this “ugly”  statement would backfire on the Speaker. When just the opposite happened, that was pretty much all the proof the left-wing media needed that Occupy was hurting the left, not helping.

2. Jon Stewart Guts Occupy: On November 17, “The Daily Show” took the “cool” out of Occupy with a devastating report (see above) that exposed the movement for the Orwellian Animal Farm these kinds of movements always become (which of course was Orwell’s point). No one in media understood better how useful this movement could’ve been to Barack Obama than Jon Stewart, but he’s also smart enough to know when it’s time to fire off a flare warning Obama to stay away — and that’s exactly what this segment was meant to do, and did.

3. AP Pretends Democrats Never Supported Occupy: On November 18, the Associated Press laughably and transparently attempted to memory-hole the Democrats’ very public and energetic embrace of all things Occupy.

Gee, I wonder why?

4. Slate Freaks Over Ad Connecting High-Profile Democrat To Occupy: Slate’s Libby Copeland was so panicked over a political ad that truthfully and effectively laid out Elizabeth Warren’s once-proud connection to the Occupy movement that she made a public fool of herself labeling the ad as “sexist.”

That’s desperate. And more than a little funny.

5. New Yorker Bares Occupy’s Astro-turf For the World To See: Even though Big Government exposed all of this over a month ago, the fact that the New Yorker would, in a major feature piece, finally put to bed the lie that Occupy was just some sort of organic, grassroots organization like the Tea Party, is the final nail in the movement’s coffin.

After all, someone has to take the blame for this.

6. Liberal Cities Evict Occupy: Mayors of some of the most liberal cities in America (Oakland, Los Angeles, Chicago, New York, Philadelphia) are playing Bull Connor to all those wonderful little hippies who only want “social justice.” Furthermore, in their latest reports, the MSM has even stopped trying to make the cops look bad during these evictions. The coverage can best be described as obligatory.

Democratic mayors of big, urban liberal cities don’t evict popular movements, do they? They wouldn’t even evict a movement popular with the Obama’s base.

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Don’t get me wrong; this doesn’t mean I’m going to stop ridiculing them, but as you look over the lay of the land, it’s hard not to feel a little sorry for Occupy Wall Street. They’re really just useful idiots and aggrieved Frankenstein monsters raised on promises their statist creators never intended to keep. And now that they’ve raped, pooped, and vandalized themselves into a political liability for their creators, they might actually have to take a bath and get a job.

The horror, the horror.

In its preamble, Agenda 21, Chapter 1 states “Humanity stands at a defining moment in history. We are confronted with a perpetuation of disparities between and within nations, a worsening of poverty, hunger, ill health and illiteracy, and the continuing deterioration of the ecosystems on which we depend for our well-being.  However, integration of environment and development concerns and greater attention to them will lead to the fulfilment of basic needs, improved living standards for all, better protected and managed ecosystems and a safer, more prosperous future. No nation can achieve this on its own; but together we can – in a global partnership for sustainable development.”

In other words, the goal of the United Nations is social and economic justice through a redistribution of wealth scheme using the threat of anthropogenic (man-made) global warming or climate change to implement the market based solution of carbon emissions trading. The International Monetary Fund has proposed a plan for a Green Fund to achieve this goal.

Following this Earth Summit President George H. W. Bush declared:

“Effective execution of Agenda 21 will require a profound reorientation of all human society, unlike anything the world has ever experienced –a major shift in the priorities of both governments and individuals and an unprecedented redeployment of human and financial resources. This shift will demand that a concern for the environmental consequences of every human action be integrated into individual and collective decision-making at every level.”

–signed by G.H. Bush, 1992

Despite pressure from the United Nations partners, U.S. delegates did not sign on to the convention.

On June 29, 1993 President Clinton issued Executive Order 12852 establishing the President’s Council on Sustainable Development as a result of the Rio Earth Summit in an effort to cooperate and implement the goals of Agenda 21.  That EO was revoked by Executive Order 13138 on September 30 1999.

During George W. Bush’s two terms as President he continued to further the goals of this UN agenda, following his father’s lead.

Why is all of this important?  This ties in directly with the push for cap and trade legislation that had been floating around the House and Senate the past few years.  When Congress failed to pass a cap and trade bill, on May 14, 2010 the E.P.A. unveiled their rules to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from the largest industrial facilities, with a phased in approach that began on January 1, 2011.  As a result we are hearing about the many coal plants that will be forced to shut down in the next few years, because they cannot meet these emissions reduction numbers, and it will be too expensive to retrofit their plants.  President Obama announced new CAFÉ standards for automobiles that will require them to achieve 36.5 miles to the gallon by 2016 and 54.5 miles per gallon by the year 2025. The talking points are that this will help us achieve energy security and reduce our use of foreign oil.  But the truth is that the United States has committed to the United Nations and its partners to reduce carbon dioxide emissions and these CAFÉ standards will have to be met in order to achieve this goal.

When the cap and trade legislation failed to pass, Senator John Kerry (D-MA) said “The Obama administration has again reminded Washington that if Congress won’t legislate, the EPA will regulate.  Those who have spent years stalling need to understand: killing a Senate bill is no longer success.   And if Congress won’t legislate a solution, the EPA will regulate one, and it will come without the help to America’s business and consumers contained in the American Power Act.”   It is apparent in his statement that this administration is intent on pursuing this agenda with or without Congressional approval.

In April of 2010 Jon Stewart, of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, interviewed Lisa P. Jackson, the Administrator of the E.P.A.  During their discussion she stated that they were waiting for the price of carbon to be established so that we could meet our obligations to the country and the entire world.  At the time I did not understand what she was talking about, but it is apparent now what she meant.

The United States made commitments to the global community that it would implement emissions reductions, and even though this country never ratified this treaty it is intent on complying with its dictates.

Click below to see the Daily Show interview with Lisa P. Jackson

The danger of Stewart’s shedding his Daily Show mask of irony and becoming a full-fledged, Obama-style community-organizing activist is that in officially adopting the views of one political party over another, he devalues the only currency of the satirist—impartiality. Because human folly is an equal opportunity character flaw, the successful satirist must not take sides. He must be able to sling arrows in all directions, else the only thing he has to peddle—the precious honesty of his criticism—is called into question. A satirist who exposes the foibles of one political party and excuses those of the other is as useful as a bus that only goes in one direction. The bus company itself would soon also only go in one direction—out of business.

Those (I suspect Mr. Stewart is among them) who claim that the “Restoring Rally” was apolitical—just  a modern-day Woodstock with shorter hair and fewer hallucinogens, a Peace Train plea for reason and temperance—are either dupes or practitioners of a cunning form of political artifice.

For if the event was indeed apolitical, then why didn’t Arianna Huffington (of eponymous Post fame) spend nearly a quarter of a million dollars bussing attendees to the Glenn Beck “Restoring Honor” rally–as she did to Stewart’s rally? And where was Annabel Park and her Coffee Party on August 28^th?

No, apart from the sophomoric opportunity to show up Mr. Beck at his own game (as if that were worth anything), the clear intent of the “Restoring Sanity” rally was to perpetuate the liberal side of the aisle’s beloved myth du jour, du mois, de l’époque: that it—the Left—is the voice of Sanity with a capital S and that the Right is an aggregation of amorphous Anger with a capital A. Because anger can be dismissed as irrational.

The obvious implication of Stewart’s “Restoring Sanity” appellation is that the attendees of, and surely the speakers at, Beck’s rally are the voice of Insanity. These are the same people of whom Obama so flatteringly (and ungrammatically) said at a recent Massachussetts fundraiser

Part of the reason that our politics seems so tough right now and facts and science and argument does not seem to be winning the day all the time is because we’re hardwired not to always think clearly when we’re scared.

This is a theme, possibly the only one, upon which Obama is never at a loss for a new variation. During the 2008 campaign the Right was clinging to its Bibles and guns.  The Cambridge police department in 2009 “acted stupidly,” the Arizona police will soon be locking up ice-cream cone purchasers, and, well, now, it seems we’re all just genetically hardwired to cower in ignorance because our 401Ks are down.

Fortunately, we have liberals like Obama and Huffington and Stewart to lead us out of our folly and restore our sanity. These sole proprietors of Reason—a blessing bestowed on them alone, the same way Zeus gave the power of prophecy to blind Tiresias—will enlighten us. No hubris in that line of thinking.

The real purpose of the “Restoring Sanity” rally—not so much to taunt Beck, though it was indisputably that—was just one more, 11^th-hour, tired attempt to delegitimize the Tea Party’s very legitimate anger and marginalize the movement as irrational. Hence the involvement of Annabel Park’s Coffee Party, a group whose seeming purposelessness (other than not to be the Tea Party) I addressed in my previous Big Government “Who Put the Prozac…” column.

Striving mightily for grandiloquence, Stewart admonished “we can have animus without being enemies.” As if this self-evident truism were ever in dispute.

The fundamental flaw in Stewart’s, Park’s and their ilk’s logic is the belief that angry rhetoric is per se “insane.” They have confused sanity with civility. These people badly need to see a production of the Peter Stone-Sherman Edwards triple-Tony-Award-winning musical “1776.”

Being etymologically “civil”—from the Latin word “civis” or “citizen”—ironically does not entail behaving “sanely” at all. Impassioned angry rhetoric—even the Olbermann/Behar  name-calling kind— is far from insane. It is an important safety-valve that prevents most people from inflicting physical violence on each other. The disadvantage of it, of course, is that it seldom persuades. Insanity, on the other hand, is loading PETN explosive into a toner cartridge and detonating airplanes with it.

Fear and anger are the smoke alarms of the soul. You still need a pail of water to put out the fire, but if the smoke alarm doesn’t go off, you can forget about the pail.

The country’s been ablaze for nearly two years now. Ironically, Colbert’s half of the rally—”Restoring Fear”—actually hit the nail on the head. Too bad the goofball was only kidding.

Reason.tv was on hand for the Rally to Restore Sanity And/Or Fear hosted by Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert at the National Mall in Washington on Saturday, October 30.

The crowd was huge, the weather fine, the signs memorable, and the people…well, let’s just say they were there too. Some were apolitical and just out for a fun day, some were big fans of Comedy Central’s best-known personalities, some were inadvertent dadaists, and more than a few defined sanity strictly in terms of heartily agreeing with themselves.

Approximately 6 minutes long. Shot and edited by Jim Epstein and Meredith Bragg, with assistance from Josh Swain. Interviews by Michael C. Moynihan and Nick Gillespie. With help from June Arunga.

For Reason.tv coverage of other recent DC rallies (inlcuding Glenn Beck’s Restoring Honor Rally, the 9/12 Freedom Works Rally, and One Nation Working Together Rally), go here.

Subscribe to Reason.tv’s YouTube channel and receive automatic notification when new material goes live.

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Suggested topics of discussion:

1. Was Jon Stewart telling the truth when he told the news media “Restore Sanity and/or Fear” wasn’t a response to Glenn Beck’s wildly successful and apolitical “Restore Honor” event?

2. Why is Sheryl Crow a star?

3. How many parents are using the rally as a rare opportunity to air out the basement where their slacker/loser thirtysomething child dwells?

4. Are the guys in raincoats from Media Matters?

5. Isn’t it marvelous to see all this left-wing energy being spent here as opposed to, say, getting out the vote?

Taken on its own terms, this observation gives progressives a very narrow window of time in which to operate – something the Daily Kos appears to have recognized, in a rare moment of lucidity:

“Of course, we can’t make such a simplistic argument.  We don’t think that more government is always best.  In fact, even arguing over the size of the government is folding to a conservative narrative.  But how can we begin to discuss politics in the political world of today without tripping over conservative buzz words?  The honest truth is, we can’t.”

But there is hope for the progressive movement, according to our anonymous writer, in the following:

“1.) The blogosphere more-or-less is ours.  The right-wing attempts to match the left’s web presence has largely looked like our attempt to match their radio work.  The web belongs to the young, and the young, at least for now, are with us.

2.) Satire is ours.  Jon Stewart likes to deny his real-world impact, calling his show comedy.  And it is.  But it has great impact none-the-less.  Stewart and Colbert have made a huge difference by exposing fraud and corruption.  And most of this has been on the right.  Even when they come at us, they come from the left.  That kind of work, over time, builds values in the viewers that move them toward the left, like Limbaugh’s daily listeners eventually become Republicans.  And the right has fallen prey to attempting their version of political satire.  And, as you probably know, those attempts have been incredible failures.

3.) Academia remains reality-based, and that is good for us.  Although I think the accusations of campus “liberal bias” are greatly exaggerated, issues like human rights, equality, and environmentalism are clear values of the liberal arts community.  And these values are more than just issues for progressives.  They go a long way in pointing toward a framework for thinking progressively.”

Now, obviously, there are a few things that strike me as a bit foolish about this. For one thing, calling Academia reality-based strikes me as similar to calling Marvin the Martian carbon-based.

However, there is definitely truth to some of this, and if the reaction to conservative articles about youth politics are any guide, the Left is especially defensive about the first point. Moreover, also judging by the comments left on those same articles, a lot of conservatives are in no hurry to reach out to youth voters, because they think young people are just a bunch of hedonistic little brats who are too dumb/inexperienced to understand anything (which didn’t seem to stop Ronald Reagan from winning a majority of the youth vote in 1984). Small wonder the Left is so confident.

However, they shouldn’t be. Much as progressives like to cite a recent Pew Poll showing that the younger generation inclines naturally towards social liberalism and government activism, two things stand out about that poll: Firstly, at the time it was taken, most of the massive failures in the Obama administration hadn’t happened yet. Secondly, the poll itself acknowledged that while the ideologies of young voters seemingly favored Democrats, those voters were increasingly becoming disenchanted with Democrats, and Republican registration was rising, even if active self-identification was not (according to the poll, youth voter registration currently stands at 54% Democrat, 40% Republican, up from 62%-30% after the 2008 election). Moreover, as I have noted elsewhere, the youth vote is not a homogenous group, and treating it as one is fundamentally mistaken. As such, I am not going to try to make broad statements about “the youth vote” here, but will rather confine my observations to what is seemingly the most problematic group of young people for the Right, IE college students.

It is undeniable that the Left has is much better at communicating with this group, and enjoys more institutional advantages than the Right has. That doesn’t necessarily translate to all youth voters – Scott Brown did fairly well among the youth in the aggregate – but the trickle-down effect of collegiate elitism is still something to be concerned about. So let me address the reasons why communication with college-age millennials, especially the kind that watch the Dailiy Show, has been so much easier for the Left.

This success at communication comes primarily from the second point cited by the Kos author above – this is a generation whose educated members, perhaps more than any other, have gotten their political views from intentionally ironic, biting and superfluously intellectual commentary. Moreover, because this generation is one of the more secular in recent memory, it lacks a moral compass rooted in rigid, religiously-based rules, though it hardly lacks a moral compass generally, and this is especially true among the collegiate lot.

This leads to an attitude that I have often observed in fellow young voters of this type, an attitude which believes that intellectual correctness and moral intuition are frequently (if not necessarily) at odds, and that the truth should win. To put it bluntly, this is a generation that would prefer to elect someone who is (by conventional standards) evil but brilliant than someone who is morally good hearted but stupid. This is at the root of the GOP’s communications problem, for the GOP has, especially in recent years, hitched its flag to the notion of being intellectually populist while at the same time being morally absolutist. Of course, this need not be the only strategy the GOP or the conservative movement use – Bill Buckley is an instructive exception – but its existence is a challenge.

I’m not going to sugarcoat this – to the extent that it is homogenous, my generation’s intellectual class is extremely different from previous ones at the cultural level, and some in ways that are worthy of criticism. I’m going to deal with two ways in which this difference manifests – firstly, the differences in culture, and secondly, the differences in demographics.

First, the cultural element. In his book The Battle, Arthur Brooks talks about how “earned success” makes people happier than just getting lots of unearned cash/goodies. But this is a generation that – as a recent article in the Wall Street Journal points out – has come to expect cash/goodies, unearned or otherwise, because of its systematic rearing under the concept of “self-esteem,” a concept with which the intellectual class is especially saturated, given that they excelled under an education system based around it. At any rate, everyone is a winner in this generation, or at least everyone thinks they are. What is more, as many exasperated conservative commentators continually point out, this is a generation that feels entitled, that refuses to make the usual tradeoffs, and that views itself as irrefutably superior to others, for no reason that these commentators can understand. “How,” these baby boomer conservatives ask, “can you ask us to make common cause with people like that?!”

Easily. For one thing, note these passages in the article cited above:

“Some research studies indicate that the millennial generation’s great expectations stem from feelings of superiority. Michigan State University’s Collegiate Employment Research Institute and MonsterTrak, an online careers site, conducted a research study of 18- to 28-year-olds and found that nearly half had moderate to high superiority beliefs about themselves.”

“Millennials also want things spelled out clearly. Many flounder without precise guidelines but thrive in structured situations that provide clearly defined rules and the order that they crave. Managers will need to give step-by-step directions for handling everything from projects to voice-mail messages to client meetings.”

“Justin Pfister, the founder of Open Yard, an online retailer of sports equipment, believes he and his fellow millennials will resist having their expectations deflated. If employers fail to provide the opportunities and rewards millennials seek, he says, they’re likely to drop out of the corporate world as he did and become entrepreneurs.”

Now, to avoid seeming like the pushy millennial I am, I’m not going to pretend that these passages aren’t problematic. They are. However, I humbly submit that politically, they are less problematic than they first appear. Firstly, like all idiotic Leftist schemes, the “self-esteem” education appears to have had an unintended consequence, ie fostering a sense of superiority (as opposed to equality). Leaving aside the issue whether such a feeling is warranted, let me invite the reader to consider how any successful millennial with a feeling like this will react to progressive taxation, capital gains taxes, or any other redistribution of wealth. My guess is that the response will be apopleptic: “How dare that inferior bunch of bureaucrats tell me how to spend my money!”

What about the “precise guidelines” and “structured situations” element? Maybe I’m being too clever by half, but this sounds more like the sort of thing Russell Kirk praised, or like Friedrich von Hayek’s rule of law. Millennials want predictability and order, and it only takes one look at the federal tax code to know how bad the institutional Left is at providing that, and barely half a glance at any Leftist doctrine of permanent revolution to know how much worse the intellectual Left is. This is a view fundamentally at odds with an economy dominated by favors, irrational dealmaking and cronyism of the type you see in Venezuela, Bolivia and Chicago.

Finally, what about that last quote? While the heightened expectations may be unrealistic, is there anything wrong with trying to create an environment where those expectations can be met through entrepreneurship? Absolutely not. Moreover, do you think an entrepreneurial generation that sets out to meet these high expectations will be able to tolerate half the inefficiency that the government and organized labor foists on businesses to prevent them from meeting high expectations? I don’t think so.

Having dealt with the cultural differences, then, this brings me to the most substantial obstacle the conservative movement faces with respect to the millennial generation – its demographics, a problem which afflicts more than just the college-age population. There’s no two ways about it – this generation is demographically diverse. As the Center for American Progress (for once) aptly notes:

“The diversity of this generation is as impressive as its size. Right now, Millennial adults are 60 percent white and 40 percent minority (18 percent Hispanic, 14 percent black, 5 percent Asian, and 3 percent other). And the proportion of minority Millennial adults will rise to 41 percent in 2012, 43 percent in 2016, and 44 percent in 2020 (21 percent Hispanic, 14 percent black, 6 percent Asian, and 3 percent other). This shift should make the Millennial generation even more firmly progressive as it fully enters the electorate, since minorities are the most strongly progressive segment among Millennials.”

The last sentence will be especially ominous if it remains true through the foreseeable future, though I remain unconvinced that it will simply because it strikes me yet another oversimplification, and one that undermines the Leftist narrative of youthful enthusiasm more than it helps it. If it is true that minorities are more progressive than whites (and according to most demographic measures, they are), and if it is also true that minority Millennials are more progressive than white Millennials (which they apparently are), then the progressive advantage among young people can surely be chalked up more to old-fashioned racial politics than to any unique ability to speak to the young. Thus, if we view the younger generation as nothing but a collection of immutable racial groups, then the question of how to appeal to them as young people becomes completely irrelevant, since the demographic argument implicitly assumes that their racial identity takes precedence over their generational culture.

But it doesn’t. Why? Because, according to the same article, white millennials are significantly more progressive than their wider racial group traditionally would be. Logically, this indicates that there is a generation gap, and I would argue that we must first learn to speak to millennials generally before we can tailor our message to specific demographic subgroups. It is important to bridge racial gaps on the Right, but the question of how to do that is distinct from the question of how to bridge the generation gap, and should be treated as such. Moreover, the fact that there is a generation gap may give the Right some hope. After all, if white millennials can be persuaded to buck previous trends by swinging further to the Left, then there is every reason to believe it is possible for minority millennials to buck previous trends in the future by swinging further to the Right.

Whether this is likely, and how it might be done is another story. I wish I had an easy answer for it, but in the absence of a holy grail of youth outreach, such an answer is unlikely to be forthcoming. I will say that I think that treating them with respect rather than tokenism will prove to be successful, given how contemptuous millennials are of artificial differences (ie differences not based on their presumptively superior merit), and for that reason I suspect that the effectiveness of classically liberal language about color blindness will only increase in the coming years. Another area that may prove to be effective is the sort of locality-based campaigning that made the New Right of the 70’s and the 80’s such an effective force. A minority voter in Scarsdale is not the same person as a minority voter in Harlem, though both may vote Democratic, and if we are to sway their votes, we must familiarize ourselves with the issues that compel them to vote Democratic as Scarsdale and Harlem residents, which could very well be different issues. Under such a system, crafting a nationally applicable outreach strategy for minorities would not only be unnecessary, but impossible at best, and insulting and stereotypical at worst. Still, the problem of conservative outreach with young and minority voters isn’t going to solve itself. And make no mistake; I am not of the school that says we should compromise our principles to do it. Those principles may need restatement, but not revision. Whether that restatement is carried off successfully will be the enduring question when it comes time to woo my generation.