Timothy Goeglein joins Brian Anderson to discuss his new book, Stumbling Toward Utopia: How The 1960s Turned Into A National Nightmare and How We Can Revive The American Dream, which chronicles the lasting impact of the sexual revolution and the Great Society programs of the 1960s.
Audio Transcript
Brian Anderson: Welcome back to the 10 Blocks Podcast, this is Brian Anderson, the editor of City Journal. Joining me on the show today is Timothy Goeglein. Tim is currently the Vice President of External and Government Relations for Focus on the Family in Washington D.C. He’s a longtime friend of City Journal and the Manhattan Institute.
Formerly served as a special assistant to President George W. Bush and as a deputy director of the White House Office of Public Liaison. He’s the author of several books on faith and politics in America and has a new one out. He’s going to join us today to talk about it. It’s called Stumbling Toward Utopia: How The 1960s Turned Into A National Nightmare and How We Can Revive The American Dream.
So Tim, great to talk with you and thanks for joining 10 Blocks.
Tim Goeglein: Brian, it is really great to be with you and City Journal and thanks so much for this time.
Brian Anderson: All right. Well, let’s start with the main overarching point your book is making. You describe the 1960s as a cultural earthquake and see its after-effects continuing into the present.
What do you see as the most damaging cultural or societal shifts that originated during that period and how are they manifesting themselves today? How did those changes influence in particular big themes for you and your work and your organization, faith, family and I guess what you could call respect for standards?
Tim Goeglein: I love that question because the cornucopia of potential nightmares, Brian, as a direct result of the social and moral revolution of the 60s in our own era is colossal. But if I had to pick one, I would pick the direct results of the sexual revolution. In fact, I would argue that the so-called American Revolution mostly was not a revolution.
In fact, people who supported what we now call the American Revolution in that period of time knew it as “The Cause” and did not call it a revolution. But America certainly had our equivalent of the French Revolution in the 60s and 70s. And Brian, I would pick the results of the sexual revolution.
There was just a lot going on in the 60s that brought us to the period of time we are currently in, which is that in all of a recorded American history, we have never had lower marriage and fertility rates than now.
And the answer is that it is a direct result of the revolution and the sexual revolution specifically that has now permeated virtually every institution in the United States. I quote in Stumbling Toward Utopia, a rather dramatic statistic, which is that in 1960, of those who were living in homes with parents ages 18 and under, about 73% of young Americans in 1960 lived in homes that were married and intact.
By 1980, that number was all the way down to 51%. And in 2016, that number was in the low 40s. Pat Moynihan in the 1960s, in 1965, said it was a crisis that 25% of all Black Americans, again in 1965 were born out of wedlock. That number in 2024, as a direct result of the sexual revolution, is now 73%, among Hispanic Americans 53%, and among native born whites about 33%.
And the majority of babies born in America to women who are 30 years of age and under, Brian, the majority of those babies are now born out of wedlock. So the sexual revolution, I would vote as the greatest nightmare resulting from that revolution up to and including our own time.
Brian Anderson: It certainly, you would have to say it has had an effect on human happiness and the social order more broadly, certainly. You note in the book that Alfred Kinsey’s research, which was developed in that era, played a significant role in reshaping American attitudes towards sexuality.
You just wonder, and maybe we can get back to this, whether some kind of counter reaction to that countering force is starting to take place at least in some sectors of the culture. One of the themes of your book is quite interesting from the standpoint of some of the work we’re doing at the Manhattan Institute and with City Journal and that’s education.
You have a chapter called “America’s Education Stumble,” one of a number of stumbles that you see as beginning during that period. And here, the major figure who really predates the 60s is the philosopher, the reformer education reformer, John Dewey, was quite a major presence in American intellectual life for a long time. He helped as transform the American education system so that it focused less on traditional learning and much more on adaptation to democratic society.
Socialization, as the lingo of the era had it. How do you see that as playing out? What role did that have in changing the way students reasoned or weakening their reasoning powers and their moral foundations?
Tim Goeglein: Well, I’m really glad you asked me about John Dewey because as I point out, Brian, in Stumbling Toward Utopia, if you really want to understand the radicalization and gigantic transformation in America today, you have to go back to essentially a handful of very influential and some powerful people at the turn of the 20th century who really were very uncomfortable with American life and frankly uncomfortable with most of our institutions.
And one of those is John Dewey, and I’m glad you raised him because he plays a very big part in Stumbling Toward Utopia. And what I learned about John Dewey and I read he was remarkably prolific, so I read a lot of Dewey, learned a lot about him, was that he had become very uncomfortable with the historic definition of what was the purpose of education.
This idea of objective standards of reading, writing, arithmetic, science, virtue as the centerpiece of the formation of good American citizens, Dewey saw a very different role, which was that not just the transformation of America but the transformation of America through the social engineering of students, many of them very young students.
He wanted to create what we might call a new citizen. And may I say, he was well-funded and was very successful. And as we wake up in 21st century America asking ourselves what happened to education in America, much of the answer to that question comes to John Dewey. In fact, I was just speaking to a rather large group in the American West, and the most recurring question is “how did we get into this mess?”
And to be more specific, Brian, the question is, and what specifically about American higher education? And I feel quite comfortable in concluding that the colossally radical changes of the 60s and 70s when it comes to education in many ways goes directly to the front doorstep of John Dewey and certainly in many of the things that I outline in the book regarding standards and purpose of education.
Brian Anderson: You emphasize how progressives have used public schools in particular to promote a kind of broad political and transformative culturally transformative agenda. This began in the 60s, but I’d say it’s more aggressively being imposed today than ever before.
Again, we can get back to what you see as steps that can be taken to counter this, but I’d like to cover a couple of the other themes of your book. One of the striking things that began in the 60s is our fiscal challenges started. We started spending more money than we were making, basically.
You chart how this really got underway in earnest with LBJ’s Great Society programs, which significantly expanded government spending. There was the Vietnam War, of course. We started borrowing money to fund that. All of this began this long-term debt challenge, which we’re now starting to see really become a problem.
How do you believe modern policymakers should address this kind of national debt crisis and how does this link up with your broader argument about what was going on in the 60s?
Tim Goeglein: I was born in the very last year of the baby boom, 1964. And part of the motivation for my writing Stumbling Towards Utopia was to understand better the era in which I was so blessed to be born as an American. And I began reading as preparation for Stumbling Toward Utopia, almost all of the early, I’ll say speeches and pronouncements of President Lyndon Baines Johnson.
And Brian, I don’t mind saying, it is breathtaking and sweeping and cascading the promises that he is making for the Great Society. In fact, it takes a person’s breath away. I went back to one of the earliest speeches at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and the rhetoric of LBJ and the promises in that inaugural speech for the Great Society are really overwhelming.
Government is going to solve poverty, government is going to solve the civil rights challenges, government is going to solve the problems in education, government is going to solve problems in the family. It really goes on and on. And then attendant to these promises on otherwise social and domestic policy comes the geysers of money that the federal government is preparing to spend in the essentially immediate post-World War II period where the confidence among Americans of both political parties was very high.
And what we find very quickly in the Great Society is a rapid reality of what those promises would mean. And we knew very early on, and I do mean very early on after the relative rapid passage of the Great Society, Brian, we knew that the domestic promises were way overblown and we knew that the expenses were now locked in.
And the locked in expenses mean that in 2024, we wake up as Americans and realize that our national debt, not the deficit, the national debt, is now easily at 34, 35 trillion and over. We look at the sheer amount of money that has been spent on the so-called War on Poverty, which is one of the centerpieces of the Great Society, $22 trillion at least. And the problem is worse.
So this attendant, progressive utopian social engineering view that the perfectibility of man will happen if we can just get the right formula is the thing that we ought to be very skeptical of. And if we’ve not learned that from the utopian dreams of the social engineers of the 60s and 70s, I’m afraid that we’ve not learned anything.
And the good news, in my view, is that we have learned a lot. I’m an inveterate optimist. I think great days are ahead for the United States, but it’s going to mean confronting the domestic and fiscal questions that we’re discussing.
Brian Anderson: Yeah, the discussion of the Great Society, you mentioned the War on Poverty, which was part of the Great society. It didn’t just have a fiscal impact. Of course, as you note, and as the former editor of City Journal, Myron Magnet often discussed it really had a perverse effect on the work ethic and family structures. What’s your take on that? You do discuss this in the book at some length. The Great Society really did have this twin effect. It wasn’t just saddling future generations with debt because of all of these locked-in spending programs, but it also undermined the work ethic and family structures that the money was designed to support and help.
Tim Goeglein: Yes, I was very honored having worked in this United States Senate for 10 years to have gotten to know the late Senator, Daniel Patrick Moynihan. I have benefited exponentially from much of his scholarship about the Great Society both during and just after.
And you mentioned Myron Magnet, whose I think rather extraordinary book, The Dream and the Nightmare is probably the best single book I’ve ever been honored to read about the 1960s. So chops to both Myron and to Senator Moynihan.
I believe categorically, as you have said, that it’s now impossible to say, well, in this space of policy, the Great Society seems to have been a great success or a great failure. And in this space, a fiscal policy that we can have even a macro discussion and somehow seek to disaggregate that conversation or discussion from the direct result of the Great Society.
In other words, I think that as we go forward, left, right, and center in a discussion of what constitutes policy that works and is worthy, we will categorically need to discuss the Great Society in one breath, both sides of the same, in my view, very catastrophic result.
And I think we also are now honor bound to have a brand new national discussion about entitlement reform, Medicare, Medicaid, social security, the impact of these programs on the annual budget. Now we come down every year as a result of the so-called omnibus spending here in Washington where we’re really doing budgeting in a very mysterious way.
I think it’s all ultimately attributable to the remarkably Irresponsible spending that dates from the 1960s. And I want to say something else, Brian, which I pray is a very fair statement in which I discuss at length in Stumbling Toward Utopia, that somehow anyone who thinks that this is just a Democratic Party problem are really sadly mistaken in real-time, major powerful, influential Republicans who had a great say in this, in both the legislative and in the executive branches were equally irresponsible.
And I discuss the acceptance by and large of the welfare state of the Nixon AG New Years and the Nixon Ford years and what that actually meant in aggregate spending in the national budget. It’s really very important chapter that we have to address as conservatives.
Brian Anderson: A final question, Tim, and that’s addressing the task ahead as you see it, you discuss in your conclusion the need for a third revolution. What do you mean by that and how would that materialize in terms of concrete actions that people could take?
Tim Goeglein: Well, as a conservative, it’s the Burkean view that in order to preserve it, you have to reform. And I think that we are duty bound culturally and ultimately in public policy. We are duty bound to relook at the direct result of the 60s and 70s revolution on our institutions.
And the great news is that the underlying institutions are more than worthy of our preservation. The progressives may have wanted to remove or change the Constitution. They may have wanted to fundamentally change the Supreme Court and the judiciary. And of course, that’s an ongoing 21st century major debate.
But I think as conservatives, we have to honestly look and ask ourselves as a direct result of this revolution in American history, what are we going to do to strengthen, reform and preserve the underlying institutions as we head in to the rest of the 21st century?
This is an extraordinary and remarkable country, and I believe very strongly, Brian, that restoration and renewal and regeneration is possible. And I think we will actually have an American restoration. I think great days are ahead for the United States of America.
And what I’m particularly heartened by is that we’re already seeing grace notes of reform in the United States. I think it’s cultural, it’s public policy, but I think of a moment, even many former progressives are relooking at what has happened to the underlying institutions in America and are saying, we need to do something better and something different. And I think that we’re going to do that.
Brian Anderson: Well, thanks very much, Tim. It’s great to talk with you. We appreciate you coming on 10 Blocks. You can read more of Tim Goeglein’s work in his new book, which we’ve been talking about here called Stumbling Toward Utopia. It’s available through Amazon and other booksellers. We’ll have a link to the book in the description.
You can find City Journal on X @CityJournal and on Instagram @CityJournal_MI. If you like what you’ve heard on today’s podcast, please give us a nice rating on iTunes. Tim Goeglein, great to talk with you as always, and thank you for the illuminating discussion.
Tim Goeglein: Brian, thank you so much and hats off to City Journal and all you do with such excellence.
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