Hating the Sixties is, for some conservatives, a useful piece of cultural shorthand, telegraphing a disdain for a whole complex of social attitudes. In his new book The Permissive Society: America, 1941-1965, historian Alan Petigny argues that much of what the Sixties-haters deplore actually goes back to the Fifties. This is not exactly a new insight. (Watch the highly addictive TV show Mad Men, and you you will discern the following capsule summary of postwar history: In the Fifties, people loved sex, and everyone lied about it; in the Sixties, people loved sex, and some elites stopped lying about it; in the Seventies, people loved sex, and pretty much everyone stopped lying about it.) The book is nonetheless full of nuggets. For example, in 1957, Fr. Joseph McClinchey, a Catholic high-school principal in Lynn, Mass., opined that “going steady is a menace to the purity of our youth.” Looking backward from our time of media scare stories about “hooking up” (already a tired phrase, no?) in colleges and oral-sex clubs in high schools, I feel like finding this principal: “Father, I have good news and bad news. The good news is, we’ve solved the problem of too many young people going steady. . .”

One 1950s trend that has persisted and accelerated in the decades since is what Petigny calls “the valorization of youth.” On this, he quotes Diana West, in 2007: “More adults, ages 18 to 49, watch the Cartoon Network than watch CNN.” Allow me to unleash my inner Brent Bozell for a moment, and ask: Isn’t this a sign of intellectual maturity?