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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 7, 2025

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a few years ago, I read through Michael Knox Beran's "WASPS: The Splendors and Miseries of an American Aristocracy"

Thanks for the rec! I've been thirsty for something exactly like this but didn't know where to begin looking. Serendipitous.

You might also be interested in George Marsden's "The Twilight of the American Enlightenment: The 1950s and the Crisis of Liberal Belief", Thomas Leonard's "Illiberal Reformers", and Helena Rosenblatt's "The Lost History of Liberalism: From Ancient Rome to the Twenty-First Century", all of which also cover this same era and dig into some overlapping topics and themes.

I've been trying to understand the shift from the worldview of the progressive era (where a lot of our inherited institutions were built and cemented) to... well, whatever emerged in the 60s and 70s, and all of these books were really useful for me in that regard. Leonard's book was a bit dry, but lots of great information. The other two read pretty easily, IIRC.