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Contrary to prancing hippies and yippies at the time in 1972 (I was there at 15), today the nation is probably more liberal than ever before culturally.

Change takes a while to spread across space and through different layers of society, but when it does, people come to take it for granted.

The first time avowed homosexuals or transvestites appeared on television to talk about their lives it looked like the whole world was crumbling. Now people take it for granted. Maybe that makes us more liberal and maybe people are wrong in being so blase, but it also means that society may have found a way to cope with something that looked like the end of the world (maybe it will be the end of the world, but people aren't as worried about it any more).

You'll find a lot more illegitimacy in the US than there was thirty years ago, but are attitudes towards adultery or abortion really more liberal than they were in some parts of the upper middle class thirty years ago? The median age in the country's gotten higher since the 60s and 70s, so there's less thinking one ought to live the way college kids do.

Morals in the country as a whole are looser and more lax, but people who say that we need more abortion or more divorce or more indiscriminate copulation or more drug-usage aren't likely to get much of an audience now. Those changes came and most people don't want to go further in that direction.

Obama does go too far into "lifestyle liberalism" for most people. But the election may be closer than it looks now. If it starts to look like a blowout for McCain, a lot of people might figure that they can stick it to Bush one last time (by voting for Obama) without it really mattering.

Since McGovern's massive defeat, millions of foreign legal immigrants have been admitted to our country. Many have not assimilated in the same way as earlier waves of immigrants. They have no particular loyalty or love for this country, a trait they share with left wing home grown democrats. They believe government's role is to be a sugar daddy, like many home grown democrats. Many of them adhere to anti-democratic belief systems—there were almost no Muslims here in the early seventies. But Muslim votes gave a US Senate seat to surrender-to-Al-Quaeda advocate Webb in Virginia. The liberal professoriate has had another 30 years to twist the minds of our naive and ignorant undergrads, and the disloyal scum in Hollywood and the TV industry another 30 years to preach that America is the Source of All Evil.This is not the same country it was 30 years ago. Let's not be overconfident.