'Stumbling Toward Utopia': A terrifying book on horrors that produced today's America (book review)
Timothy S. Goeglein, vice president for External and Governmental Relations at Focus on the Family, has written a sobering book — really, a terrifying book. It is a catalog of the horrors that produced today’s America. If you lived through that production, you will be familiar with much of what he writes. But if you did live through that period, you are no longer young. And Stumbling toward Utopia (Fidelis Publishing, 2024) will be of most use — will be most revealing — to young people who inherited what their elders bequeathed to them. It is not a happy inheritance. We used to talk of Santa Claus bringing a lump of coal to naughty children. The 60s, the period Goeglein writes about mostly, brought hand grenades for all the little girls and boys of America, whether they had been bad or good.
Most of the problems Goeglein describes really began in the Lyndon Johnson administration, which should cause us to digress for just a moment to the 1960 presidential election. It was thought in many quarters — perhaps just shy of “widely thought” — that Vice President Richard Nixon had actually won the election against Senator John F. Kennedy but that the election had been stolen in Chicago, a rabidly Democrat stronghold. Nixon, ever the patriot, decided, for the good of the country, not to contest the result. Subsequently, Kennedy was shot, and Vice President Lyndon Johnson, as big a crook as has ever occupied the White House, became president and brought a boatload of hugely destructive ideas (“The Great Society”) with him. We are still living with the consequences of those policies, and much of Goeglein’s book is about those policies and the destruction they caused.
Goeglein titles his chapters “Stumbles,” — e.g., “The Moral Stumble,” “The Education Stumble,” etc., and proceeds to describe what went wrong in each area; though “what went wrong” is not quite accurate. Things didn’t just “go” wrong; people produced policies that made things go wrong and that destroyed the American fabric, and we are still living with the consequences of that destruction. As he writes, “It was in the 1960s that America discarded its fundamental underpinnings of faith, family, and respect, and our nation has never been the same since.” Exactly.
It’s important to understand that the discarding didn’t happen by chance: it wasn’t caused by the woolly bears or the anchovies. People were responsible — and those people knew what they were doing. But we didn’t. They sought to change America fundamentally. And they succeeded. As Goeglein writes, “In the 1960s, deviancy became exalted while normalcy became mocked.”
Item: “A 2023 Wall Street Journal/NORC poll found only 38 percent of respondents said patriotism was important to them, and only 39 percent said religion was very important. These numbers are sharply down from 70 percent and 62 percent respectively just twenty-five years ago.” That is not the country your parents or grandparents grew up in. And — if you’re reading this review — it is probably not the country you want your children to grow up in.
Goeglein’s book lists many (though surely not all) of the bad guys who foisted what—for lack of a better term — we can call “The Sixties’” culture on America: Roger Baldwin, Planned Parenthood’s Margaret Sanger, Tom Hyden, Jane Fonda, Gloria Steinem, Abbie Hoffman, Saul Alinsky, Alfred Kinsey (funded by the Rockefeller Foundation), Hugh Hefner, Masters & Johnson, John Dewey, Norman Lear, and Stanley Kubrick, among other miscreants.
And Goeglein tells us how bad Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society” really was. As President Reagan said about Johnson’s Great Society War on Poverty, “We fought a war on poverty, and poverty won.” The Heritage Foundation wrote a report on the 50th anniversary of President Johnson’s speech declaring war on poverty, “In fact, a significant portion of the population is now less capable of self-sufficiency than it was when the War on Poverty began.” Sobering words. Scratch a liberal today and the odds are he will say the problem was we didn’t spend enough money.
But who could be surprised (except a liberal Democrat)? As the Heritage Foundation put it, “Welfare promoted the decline in marriage, which generated the need for more welfare.”
There were other problems too, of course: No-fault divorce, an unmitigated disaster. And here’s a final gem (for this review), in the unlikely event you have been unmoved by the preceding: a recent Gallup poll found that only 18% of 18 to 34-year-olds say they are proud to be Americans.
How does such a country survive and prosper? We don’t know.
But we may not have to find out. The election of Donald Trump may change everything.
And everything needs changing, as Goeglein’s book shows.
And there is always hope. As William F. Buckley Jr., said, “Despair is a mortal sin,” and “The wells of regeneration are infinitely deep.”
Get Our Latest News for FREE
Daniel Oliver is Chairman Emeritus of the Board of the Education and Research Institute and a Director of Pacific Research Institute for Public Policy in San Francisco. In addition to serving as Chairman of the Federal Trade Commission under President Reagan, he was Executive Editor and subsequently Chairman of the Board of William F. Buckley Jr.’s National Review. Email Daniel Oliver at Daniel.Oliver@TheCandidAmerican.com.
